UK Government Tracks Millions of Phones to Identify Electric-Car Drivers

Britain’s Department for Transport secretly monitored smartphone movements with the help of network operators to identify potential electric-car drivers. After two years the programme was abandoned when the data proved useless.

Illustrative photo. Photo: Getty Images/AI

Over a period of two years the British government tracked around 25 million mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets and smartwatches, in an attempt to determine who might be driving an electric vehicle. The operation did not target suspected criminals but people whose browsing history suggested they might be travelling electrically.

The Department for Transport paid the telecommunications company O2 £600,000 (about $809,000) to carry out the operation. According to the Telegraph, the provider examined the browser histories and app data of its customers and flagged anyone who visited a website related to electric cars at least once a month. Anyone who did so for two or more months was placed on a list.

O2 did not rely solely on its own customers. The company also used data from users of other providers whose services operate on O2’s infrastructure. Those affected were unaware that their information had been passed on to a government department. Once a person had been marked as a potential electric-car owner, their real-world movements were tracked across the country. Particular attention was paid to London, north-west England and the east of England. Techniques of that kind are normally used in investigations into serious organised crime. In this case, the Department for Transport applied them to people who might simply be considering buying or driving an electric vehicle.

Pointless Surveillance

The monitoring continued for two years before officials realised that analysing the data produced no reliable information about driving or charging times. In April 2024 the Department for Transport quietly acknowledged failure and ended the programme. The episode raises a further question: the practice was not halted because anyone doubted the proportionality of mass tracking of innocent citizens, but because the data proved useless for the stated purpose.

The label ‘anonymised’ offers only limited reassurance. Even anonymised datasets can in some circumstances be traced back to individuals. Those monitored had done nothing unusual. On the contrary, they were behaving in ways actively encouraged by government policy.

The government is facing declining revenues from fuel duty as electric vehicles become more widespread. Officials at the Department for Transport and the Treasury were therefore also examining new taxes on electric cars to compensate for the loss of fuel-duty revenue.

Andy Palmer, former chief executive of Nissan and Aston Martin, summarised the dilemma: ‘I’m told it’s anonymised and aggregated and that may well satisfy legal thresholds. But legality and legitimacy are not the same thing. If you erode public trust in how that data is gathered, you undermine the very transition you are trying to accelerate.’

No Unrestricted State Access to Citizens’ Data

Conservative MP Sir David Davis drew a broader conclusion: ‘It’s an object lesson in why you can’t trust the state with unfettered access to people’s information, because they’ve obviously taken this information without people’s permission with the objective of disadvantaging them, either by tax or other policy matters. If they’ll do it on this, with people who are doing what the government wants in policy terms – namely, pursuing green policies – what on Earth will they do elsewhere?’

Surveillance After Vaccination

The electric-car monitoring programme was not an isolated case in Britain. In the early phase of the coronavirus vaccination campaign, the government conducted a similar operation. At the time, individuals who had recently been vaccinated were monitored. Researchers funded through the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours used mobile-phone location data, again without the knowledge or consent of those affected, to analyse possible behavioural changes after vaccination.

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From the available dataset they selected more than 4,200 vaccinated individuals and tracked their movements using call-data records. The researchers analysed how far those people travelled on the day of vaccination and whether they returned home afterwards. The government was therefore able to monitor where citizens went after undergoing a medical procedure organised by the state. The public was not informed about the practice afterwards either.

The question arises whether the cause lies in insufficient legal protections for citizens’ data or whether existing loopholes are deliberately preserved so that the state can examine individuals more closely when it sees fit. In any case, it becomes a problem when citizens’ use of technology generates data held by private companies that governments can access without consent.