Vocal Voices

The motorway network, and many towns and cities have, automatic number plate recognition cameras (Anpr) all over the place. There is a suggestion that all cars are fitted with trackers to automate charging once road tolls once they come in.

We also have smart appliances in our homes, contactable through apps on our dumbphones, and they can be pinpointed to within metres.

We can now buy appliances to help us organise our lives by talking to them in the kitchen, bedroom, bogroom. "Hey Siri, Cortana, Alexa, what's the news?" "OK Google, enough of Fox sh1t, I am in the UK."

And now we are about to get till-less shopping. You go to the store. Pick the things you want and put them in your bag and just walk out. The store, with its scanners, knows what you have in your bag and automatically deducts the cost from your account.

In the name of 'convenience' we humans are losing control to those who wish to control us, and we are doing it voluntarily.

With the Internet of Everything we are slowly becoming part of Skynet.

There are two aspects here, the tracking of our lives, and the Internet of Things.

I don't like either development, but I guess the argument is that both these are "all right" as long as they remain passive. The problem is when they don't, and in that connection, the Internet of Things is very worrying. The propensity for something to go wrong, and on a huge scale, whether through hacking or sheer incompetence, is enormous. I would not want my life to depend on it.

ANPR is the network and the storage. PNPR is the system they use to surf the data and track and monitor. The first is easy to find. The second is invisible. I've known about the second for a while.

I read the wiki page on ANPR in the UK and they try to baffle you with big numbers. But let's analyse that.

35 million a day.

Let's say 13 bytes for each vehicle. 8 for the number plate, two for the year and three for the location. That's all you need, the rest is held in other databases and can be looked up. Unless you want the pictures but ANPR only grabs the numberplate, not the entire vehicle. Other systems hold the vehicle and I doubt it's for two years due to image size issues. So let's ignore the picture.

That's 155gb a year.

Or, in short, I could hold the entire ANPR data for the UK on my home storage for 350 years before I ran out.

Or course if you want to store the picture at each camera too, you'd need to store about 1mbyte (1024000 bytes instead of 13). Even then you'd only need 33 of these, populated with the latest 10TB drives, per year, to record it all. The total cost? Around £700,000 for each year of storage to store the numberplate, date, time, location and a picture of the car with the driver and passengers.

Who thinks the Government doesn't want to spend that much to monitor us all??? It's peanuts. They spend more money on hospitality.

If they were to use a lower quality picture (~1MB is quite high quality), they could do it for half the price...

20 years ago it was, essentially, impossible to store these data. Today it's peanuts yet our government want's more and more powers to record and track. It does beg the question as to how much is "need" and how much is "want".

The huge issue for me is that if "want" saves my life, do I really call it "need"?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

A slightly different subject: Today I saw in the paper that the latest motoring gadget on sale is a gadget for your car
which will hold your mobile phone for you so you can use it when driving. I think firms that devise gadgets like that
should be prosecuted for perverting the course of justice. How daft can you get ???

The ANPR was only one thing....

It is the interconnect of everything else that is a big worry. Insurances sharing details, DVLA 'selling' details, store loyalty cards, social media sites probably sharing info, tracking by mobile phone, targeted advertising as you browse, and the list goes on. Then we have the governments new 'snooper's charter' to contend with.

It is getting to the point where anybody and everybody can know all our details at any given time. They can certainly know our history, and more points of entry appear every day.

We have become our own electronic beacons, able to be followed wherever we go; and we know not what the guards, or anybody else, is doing with that information.

AliasAggers wrote:A slightly different subject: Today I saw in the paper that the latest motoring gadget on sale is a gadget for your car which will hold your mobile phone for you so you can use it when driving.

I do not know how this differs from older devices, but hands-free cradles have been around for years.

I am not overly concerned about people having a hands-free phone conversation any more than I am about them talking to a passenger. My fairly simple phone can use voice activation so I can do that without even picking it up, not that I do. What really bugs me is when I see drivers with their phones to their ears or, even worse, texting or scrolling through messages etc. Another distraction, and one that annoys me as much as phones, is the satnav. I have been in cars where drivers have their eyes on the satnav more than on the road. "Take the next road on the left" says satnav, the driver then looks at the screen to "see" where the road is rather than looking down the 'real' road for the next 'real' road on the left.

The whole phone in the car thing drives me mad. It is a case of Blairite law making. Can't prove the person was doing something wrong? Just make the act illegal, problem solved. One day they might make driving illegal, only a computer would be competent. After all every single accident with a totally autonomous car has been the fault of the human driver. Even the one where the law said the bus should have given way. The Google car knew the law, so did the bus driver, but the Google car wasn't programmed to know that bus drivers rarely, if ever, give way. Regardless the law.

So, simples, no more trying to find fault, just make it illegal for humans to drive.

As for cradles? It's actually safer if it's in a cradle. See a call and you can know whether to pull over and call back or to keep on driving. It is a much greater distraction when the phone is sitting on the seat beside you or even sliding around the dash or the floor. People are tempted to just look.

Mobile phones are also Satnavs, they have Bluetooth capability for handsfree calling (still legal), new cars integrate with them and some new Hyundai models will even read your facebook posts to you like listening to the radio.

Back before the entry of the iPhone I had a Nokia phone which sat in a cradle on my dash, connected to my stereo via a cassette adaptor and played my music. When a call came in I pressed the answer button and got the call through my speakers. Long before even mid range cars were fitted with it. It also had a GPS and connected to my 17" laptop sitting on the seat beside me running AutoRoute. I would look at it from time to time, perhaps every 200 miles.

It was not distracting for me on the phone as I just talked. In fact Mrs S used to get really mad because when I had to focus on the road my conversation became stilted and filled with erm and er and ah and not a lot of content. Road concentration came first. But now, apparently, we can't take calls on the road because some people can't concentrate on driving when they're talking to a phone....

Personal responsibility is out of the window. Now it's all rules and laws and monitoring. I'm glad I won't see to many more decades of it.

Just about every main route into most UK cities is covered by ANPR cameras; have been for years. There is massive scope for them to be misused by those in authorityand I have no doubt that they will be. You are right to be worried about 1984 WM, I certainly am.