The Oxford city council has ruled that every taxi must be outfitted with a CCTV for the express purpose of recording passenger conversations that are to be held for 28 days in case the police wanted to conduct an investigation in which the footage might prove useful. The idea that peoples' words should be recorded when they are in public places "just in case," is really troubling, as it's hard to see why, if it's justifiable to record taxi passengers in case they're criminals, you wouldn't also record restaurant patrons, park-goers, bus-riders — why you wouldn't, in short, record every word uttered in public just in case someone committed a crime.
And, of course, this is a natural progression from the existing CCTV doctrine that says you should record every person's movements (though not their words), for the same reason.
A council spokeswoman said the "video and audio would run all the time within the vehicle".
She said police would only locate footage, stored on a CCTV hard drive for 28 days, if it was needed for a police investigation.
She added: "The risk of intrusion into private conversations has to be balanced against the interests of public safety, both of passengers and drivers."
Big Brother Watch director Nick Pickles said: "Given that one rail route to Witney [David Cameron's constituency] is through Oxford, we'll be letting the prime minister know that his staff might want to avoid using Oxford cabs."
Oxford taxi conversations to be recorded, council rules
(via /.)
(Image: Traffic in sidestreet of Oxford Street, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from cristiano_betta's photostream)
