How closely we're being watched...

An apparently happy-ending story on the BBC web site tells how a 72-year old had been found in Oxfordshire after driving around lost for three days, between 23rd and 25th December 2010.

The article says:

"Police in Oxfordshire eventually flagged down the 72-year-old after his car triggered a camera in Oxford. [...] Analysis from number-plate recognition systems showed he had driven around various towns in Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire and on the M4."

But the story also neatly illustrates an increasing privacy issue.

• He didn't "happen" to be captured on one number-plate recognition system on the M4, but various of them covering towns three counties


• "Analysis" means that these systems aren't just reading number-plates and looking them up... they are storing every single number-plate and keeping them on file - demonstrably for days, and very possibly for ever.

Doesn't this worry you? Are you sufficiently deeply buried in the "nothing-to-hide, nothing-to-fear" mentality that you can't see how easily and severely this technology could be mobilised against any innocent civilian?