British Transport Secretary Philip Hammond confirmed this week that the government is revisiting a pay-as-you-drive revenue producing scheme that would track vehicles on trunk roads, reports the The Times. The Department of Transport has for almost two years been testing "black boxes" that transmit drivers' movement and speed data from cars to a central computer, the report states. Hammond says the program is currently only being considered for lorries and will not, during the lifetime of the current parliament, include cars, but some privacy advocates aren't convinced. "Creating large databases, filling them with (information on) the entire population and using them to track their daily lives is simply unacceptable," said Michael Parker, a spokesman for privacy rights organisation NO2ID. "It is about the principle of separating government and the rights of the individual."
Full Story