I had to make a car trip last Friday to pick up my 93yr old Aunt from near Ashbourne in Derbyshire who is going to stay with me for a few weeks. I made a stop at the M40 Warwick services to get a coffee to go.
As I was leaving the services area to get back on to the M40, I saw a sign saying “Thank your visiting Warwick Services, your registration number has been recorded”. with a ‘Warwick Police‘ symbol on the sign. Unfortunately I did not have my digital camera with me so could not take a picture of the sign, but it looked fairly official.
Now, I understand that petrol stations have introduced number plate recording cameras at the petrol stations due to the high number of ‘drive-offs” as they call them, however as all I needed was a coffee why do I have to have my registration number recorded.
This raises a bigger question of where is my stored and for how long and is the date and time of my visit being used to track what I am doing? All bigger questions which I think should be answered. I will be writing to the Warwick police to find about some background information on this.
The UK population are already one of the most recorded [2] [3] nations in the world and while I understand that we need to do some of this for safety/crime/anti-terrorist reasons, it begins to worry me when I get tracked just for buying a coffee! More on this in another post I am sure.
Tags: Police, CCTV, Data Protection, Privacy
Powered by Qumana
Beasley's Place 
<>“This raises a bigger question of where is my stored and for how long and is the date and time of my visit being used to track what I am doing?”<>< HREF="http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/2006/01/anpr_database_retention_rules.html" REL="nofollow">ANPR database retention rules – Parliamentary Answer claims 2 years when it is actually 6 years or longer<>According to the current thinking of the Association of Chief Police Officers policemen in charge of ANPR strategy, criminals tend to travel in convoys, so any stolen or suspect vehicle which the Automatic Number Plate Recognition system flags up as “suspicious” via the Police National Computer and other Criminal Intelligence databases, also means that the <>innocent<> motorists who happen to be travelling past the cameras a few seconds before and after the “suspects”, will also have their details logged and stored, and flagged as “potential criminals or terrorists” etc., and. according to the policy guidelines above have this movement tracking data retained for 2 to 6 years or longer.Nobody knows for sure for how long your data will be retained on the National ANPR Database (which started up this April), if the local Police systems pass it to Hendon, as these guidelines do not necessarily apply to the National scheme (especially if the magic words “national security” are invoked)See the < HREF="http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/automatic_number_plate_recognition/" REL="nofollow">Spy Blog ANPR category archive<>
LikeLike
Interesting comment, I will look into the Spy Blog ANPR archive and follow up some more myself and post again.
LikeLike