www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25016515
This is yet another turn of the wheel past the ratchet of no return when more and more of our private information will be available to those who have and those who have not a legitimate interest in the small details of our lives.
I've said it before, probably on here too, but nobody (particularly the younger folk) really seems bothered by it.
It is not at all far fetched to extend this data capture to the future compulsory shopping "loyalty" (tracking !) card.
Imagine the scenario where an insurer turns you down because in their opinion you have been buying too many bottles of booze in SainsCo. Or maybe, you might go the bottom of the NHS waiting list because your gym membership card shows insufficient exercise or that the food you buy doesn't include enough fruit and veg.
Be afraid - be very afraid.
Last edited by: Dulwich Estate on Thu 21 Nov 13 at 15:21
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>> www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25016515
Its not an unreasonable thing for insurance companies to be aware of your driving record.
>> This is yet another turn of the wheel past the ratchet of no return when
>> more and more of our private information will be available to those who have and
>> those who have not a legitimate interest in the small details of our lives.
>>
>> I've said it before, probably on here too, but nobody (particularly the younger folk) really
>> seems bothered by it.
>>
>> It is not at all far fetched to extend this data capture to the future
>> compulsory shopping "loyalty" (tracking !) card.
Yes it is. Its so far fetched my mother would call it rubbish from china. You are deliberately being alarmist.
Last edited by: VxFan on Thu 21 Nov 13 at 21:41
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I'm amazed they haven't had that before.
If it results in all the liars being re-rated upwards in premium, will those for honest drivers go down?
For most of my motoring life I have been amazed by how little some people paid for insurance, and always suspected they were omitting some facts.
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What is so private about your motoring convictions? Can't see why it shouldn't it be freely available on demand to everyone who wants to know. Why should details of law breaking be kept secret anyway.
As for the stuff about loyalty cards I think you might be letting your imagination run a little wild. Best sit down with a nice cup of tea (or coffee).
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Its probably the Norfolk coffee thats sent him gaga.
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I think I'd feel somewhat re-assured if insurers were able to check the data most vital to them. After submitting my details, I always wonder if I might have made some sort of error that might come to light in the event of a claim and therefore nullify my cover.
If they did find something, though, I'd want to know before they took any money from me.
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Given the Guardian reports today about the Americans taking lots of personal data about the British, with or without our Government's knowledge and say so, I think the whole concept of anything much at all about you being in the slightest bit private for much longer has gone out of the window. That ship has sailed.
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Its not going to work very well for those of us with multiple addresses.
The licence has MY main address on it.
The car is registered and insured at the address THAT CAR spends most of its time.
This is the correct way of doing it too I am assured.
They wouldnt be able to tie my licence and car together at the moment.
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Most cars spend most time parked in the road, probably outside someone else's house.
Last edited by: Cliff Pope on Thu 21 Nov 13 at 19:43
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OK, OK I give up.
It's a gradual erosion of personal liberty which even the knowledgeable souls of this forum seem to have given up on.
I'll keep fighting on my own.
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Not on your own!
I abhor the idea of a national identity card: I resent ANPR cameras snapping you every few miles: I dispute the fallacious argument that if you have nothing to hide, you need not worry.
Every Englishman's home is his castle.
Magna Carta.
So there!
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>>Magna Carta.
Did she die in vain?!
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Some kinda ice-cream right?
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>> Some kinda ice-cream right?
Volcanic map I think.
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>> Magna Carta.
>> So there!
>>
+1
Ted
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>> Not on your own!
>> I abhor the idea of a national identity card: I resent ANPR cameras snapping you
>> every few miles: I dispute the fallacious argument that if you have nothing to hide,
>> you need not worry.
>> Every Englishman's home is his castle.
>> Magna Carta.
>> So there!
>>
What a load of irrelevant old tosh. Can you explain exactly how the ability of an Insurer to be able to check the driving offence record of someone who wants to buy insurance from them constitutes some sort of loss of freedom for the individual? The only freedom lost that I can see is the freedom to be able to lie to your insurer. Is that what you believe in and if so why.
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When I'm at home in either Chile or Brazil then I have to carry an ID card.
Paranoia to one side it makes life sooo much easier.
e.g. I don't have to find a utility bill to get a Blockbuster membership card.
I'd have one in a second in the UK - In truth I used my US driving licence as ID for years until the UK went photo licence.
I've listened to the objections, and I understand the point of view, I just think its short-sighted and wrong.
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With the obvious and potentially large caveat that DVLA data is accurate what's the issue?
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That they sell on your details to anyone with any half backed excuse of pretending to be an enforcement agency - private car parks?????
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>> That they sell on your details to anyone with any half backed excuse of pretending
>> to be an enforcement agency - private car parks?????
When you as a driver, park your car on private land, surely the owner has a legitimate interest in obtaining your identity? Isn't that why cars have unique identifying numbers?
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Not when they start dishing out enforcement charges disguised as fixed penalty tickets when legally they are only entitled to civil damages.
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>> Not when they start dishing out enforcement charges disguised as fixed penalty tickets when legally
>> they are only entitled to civil damages.
And to pursue civil damages you need to know the owner of the car. Its still legitimate information.
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The answer is to ride a bike! No registration required (yet).
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"What a load of irrelevant old tosh. Can you explain exactly how the ability of an Insurer to be able to check the driving offence record of someone who wants to buy insurance from them constitutes some sort of loss of freedom for the individual? The only freedom lost that I can see is the freedom to be able to lie to your insurer. Is that what you believe in and if so why"
I'll tell you why as you don't understand the concept of the thin end of the wedge. I'm not talking specifically about this one point of insurers getting access to DVLA records. I wrote of one more notch, one more click on the ratchet.
It's the worrying trend where more and more information is being held about us. Already you guys are quite content to give away so much information about yourselves on a drip, drip basis. Some are happy to reveal all to Facebook, others will contentedly give their date of birth, mother's maiden name and NI number to.... a Water Company ! What the hell for ?
It's 20 / 30 years on that bothers me. In the 1930's Jews in Germany were compelled to wear yellow stars so they could be easily identified. There's little need to bother with such crude systems now as it's getting more and more sophisticated as time moves on.
Of course current IT systems are often unable to link things up - look at the NHS or Border Control or even Inland Revenue today. Cookies on your PC are a tiny example of tracking. Zero is right - it can't happen today. But it won't be long, probably not in my lifetime, when people will have little choice but to have no privacy at all.
Hitler, Stalin and that guy in North Korea would just love it.
Are we happy to have unelected people in Brussels telling a Sovereign nation who they can and who they can't allow in ? No, but we're just letting it happen.
I repeat we are walking into it like lambs to the slaughter - even you intelligent guys.
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>> I repeat we are walking into it like lambs to the slaughter
I thought John Laurie died 30 years ago.
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Oh wow. There is a real old rant of the old style. The rather reasonable step of DVLA data being made available to insurers (even tho you have a duty to disclose it to them) to Hitler, extermination of Jews, Stalin, North Korea, and the EU in one easy swoop.
I would applaud except you missed out Pol Pot.
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Yes, if you can't handle it, just laugh it off.
We are so fortunate, especially in the UK, with its own sort of reasonable democracy and apparent sense of fair-play that you don't want to look beyond the end of your noses.
I'm flogging a dead horse here, so it's time to finish.
In the meantime I'll leave you with 3 quotes from that other raving loony, Tim Berners Lee:
“I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured I'm looking at those books.”
“The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing.”
“Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.”
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>> Yes, if you can't handle it, just laugh it off.
Cant handle it? Oh right I see - because we are not raving paranoid loonies, we can't handle it.
I don't think we are the ones "who can't handle it"
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Dulwich has a point.
Unfortunately the horse has bolted, the genie is out of the bottle, and the toothpaste is out of the tube as far as the data is concerned.
Our best hope is to keep the government honest, because we've already passed the point where a dictatorship could use what's already there to monitor us. Mobile phones, credit cards, Oyster cards, ANPR, just think what the Stasi could have done with that lot.
To say that data should not be used to prevent fraud or lawbreaking is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The issue is the laws. That's why I don't like the constant restriction of freedom as the answer to everything, and among other things why Brake's campaign to ban hands-free phones got up my nose the other day. You just end up with the proscription of all individual freedom, and now the means exist to enforce it.
This article makes the distinction between dictatorship and democracy goo.gl/TGypb1
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>> Our best hope is to keep the government honest, because we've already passed the point
>> where a dictatorship could use what's already there to monitor us. Mobile phones, credit cards,
>> Oyster cards, ANPR, just think what the Stasi could have done with that lot.
Because thats what we wanted and thats what progress dictates. We don't want to queue at tube ticket offices for ages to get a ticket, we don't want to queue for ages at a post office window to get our paper docs stamped by some surly clark, we want to go on the net and buy stuff cheap from amazon, we want to converse with our friends on Facebook.
None of this has been foisted on us by Big Brother or even the EU against our will, as some huge monitoring and gathering process designed to restrict our freedoms and track us, this is technology at work, the march of progress, because we have embraced it.
To start whining about it, over a perfectly logical and harmless connection of data, is hysteria.
Last edited by: Zero on Fri 22 Nov 13 at 17:20
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It is far better to participate in the system than it is to whine when the system generates something you don't like.
e.g. BRAKE would fail if all participants were equally vocal and committed but there were more anti-BRAKEs.
And if someone who researches cancer is [say] 50% more likely to die of it than someone who does not research it, why should the group of "non-researchers" subsidise them, and why should the "researchers" regards that subsidy as a right?
There can be *NO* issue with gathering data, surely? If it is true, it is true. How that data is used is the risk.
So rather than refusing to take part, refusing to have your data gathered, and eventually ending up marginalised and even more innefectual, why not join in and address the *important* bit?
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DVLA Driver Data to be open to Insurers - Zero
