taxis to record your conversations

[frankthring]

I see that Oxford City Council has approved a scheme to record all
conversations in its licensed taxi cabs on video. They claim these will
be kept for 1 month only ! So the Age of Big Brother draws a step
closer. The State slowly but inexorably is watching you, my friend, more
and more and more ! Oh, and the good citizens of Oxford might like to
know this scheme is costing a cool ?400 of taxpayer`s money to install
a camera in each of the city`s several hundred cabs.

[andy at handiwork]

A spokesperson for the council said they have to balance passenger privacy against public safety, but was unable to explain how a few occasions of trouble amongst tens of thousands of incident-free journeys was any sort of balance. I would suggest a boycott of taxis in Oxford until the scheme is abandoned, though that might be a bit harsh on the drivers.

[David Johnson]

Wouldn't like to be the poor bastard who had to wade through that lot.

"Hey you wouldn't believe who I had in my cab 10 minutes ago, Simon Cowell. Ever such a nice fella. Had a good day have ya? Things are going from bad to worse for us taxi drivers..only had two pickups in the last hour and arf. This used to be a good job. Not now. Gone to the dogs like the rest of the country. Do you know......"

Etc etc

D

[Arginald Valleywater]

And no doubt passed straight to the NSA....

[andy at handiwork]

Probably not.

[RoddersUK]

I know several cabbies in Brighton and I can tell you that video recorders will be a safety measure for them. Brighton won't pay, the cab owners themselves will have to pay, but, from some of the horror stories I hear from them it can only be for the good. Not all passengers are straight up people. Many a cabbie is beaten and robbed by arseholes who they have to pick up. They cannot refuse a legitimate fare and they never know how it is going to end especially in the early hours when most attacks take place. My friends son in law was attacked by a fare and he was injured enough to require a hospital visit. Luckily this attack took place opposite a parked police car with two coppers inside. So the bastard was infront of the beak in the morning after a night in Brighton cop shops cells and got weighed off with a custodial sentence.
No one should be afraid of being filmed during their journey if they are bona fide. I am all for this. It would also help to cut out the fleecing of customers by some of the disreputable cabbies who charge higher rates than they should be doing, and Brighton has a high number of them, and they are usually not locally raised cabbies. Be careful when you get in a strange taxi and keep a good eye on the meter, it is a goldmine to unscrupulous cabbies.