Road user charging
Civil liberties
Summary
Any new monitoring or recording system, no matter how beneficial, understandably arouses worries about personal privacy. Unlike the 'tracking' of personal activity and transactions that feature when we use credit cards or mobile telephones, the prospect of all our cars being equipped with a device to monitor them wherever they go has generated civil liberties concerns. Perhaps the reason that mobile phones and credit cards are widely accepted is that, in the main, they make life easier. Attitudes among drivers may change once the benefits of congestion charging are clear.
At a practical level, the congestion charging system will keep people's records for only a short period, in case a bill is challenged. Invoices need show only how many miles were travelled at different charging rates rather than where people actually travelled.
Contrast this with credit card statements that record where you are and what you're buying, and mobile phones that record roughly where you are at a given time and who you are talking to.
With the development of GPS technology mobile phones will be providing even more accurate data on the time and place of use. "Assisted GPS" technology will be able to locate the phone's exact position and will allow retailers, for example, to call potential customers as they pass their doors. In the USA, it is expected that all new mobile phones will have this facility by 2005.
The introduction of GPS tracking technology involves a trade off between the benefits it provides and the inevitable increase in personal data that will be held about citizens.
How GPS tracking works
- Despite widespread perceptions, GPS has no channel for tracking vehicles - a GPS receiver in the vehicle simply listens to the signal received from a number of satellites and, through complex maths, generates latitude and longitude. An in-vehicle processing unit processing unit is required to then decide how much to charge, based on this position by matching the vehicle to a road, an area or a time of day
- A centralised system, however, will need to know and receive a vehicle's position through some communications channel, either in real time or, most likely, in historic batches of data. It will then need to process this and send a bill to the owner at some interval
- Records for billing purposes need to be kept only as long as the billing period, unless the bill is not paid
- It is only when fees have not been paid that it may become necessary to pay attention to actual locations that the vehicle has visited
Key issues
- Who has access to this data beyond the billing company? (police, bailiffs, the driver, the owner of the vehicle (eg, hire company, Inland Revenue, spouse of driver etc). Drivers will have to be able to see the data themselves to query bills
- How long is the data held for - to facilitate customer queries but also, perhaps, for criminal enquiries
- How is the bill presented? Simply by the number of miles travelled or by details of each trip? Shouldn't users choose, just like they do for telephone bills?
- How is the payment made - deducted automatically or paid in arrears on presentation of a bill?
- Centralised and 'anonymous' systems can live in parallel - just like mobile telephones can be centralised or 'pay as you go'. The vehicle owner would make the choice. This option to choose is a key tool for overcoming some of the civil liberty fears