Yesterday morning I had the opportunity to watch a morning show on Dutch TV. A lot has been going on about ‘rekeningrijden’, which can probably be best interpreted as ‘pay as you drive’. The basic idea is that we are not going to pay any taxes for owning a car anymore (at least that’s how it was presented initially), but we are going to be taxed by the distance we drive, the time of day we drive it and the location. Basically it’s nation wide toll system.
I could write pages about the possible privacy implications, and the slippery slope that is logging everywhere every car goes etc.: To start with we just look at your mileage, time and location, but i bet that in some drawers of the justice department plans are already sitting that enable police to retroactively slap you with speeding tickets, parking tickets, and the lot based on the data your car stores.
However that is not the point here… a member of parliament (Ger Koopmans – CDA) was on this morning show talking about the negative public opinion about the rekeningrijden-plan. A number of surveys indicate that most people simply don’t want it. Cost of ownership (adapting the car, administrative costs), lack of confidence in the benefits of the system and privacy concerns are the main reasons.
Her is this MP who boldly states that A. ‘everyone who looks at the proposed system for more than 2 seconds will be convinced that there are no privacy issues’, and B. that there is no pulling back; if the public opinion is bad, then the traffic minister will have to ‘explain the system better’.
The two minute interview goes to prove 2 points. First, any idiot can be an MP here. If data is stored on such a large scale it is going to leak at some point. So there is a privacy concern even if there is no other application than just logging miles and locations and times: these data are going to be out there for a fraction of the population at least. There’s no two ways about it: data-bases leak eventually. It is just that we weigh the benefits of having them against the probability and the impact of the leakage. (Besides a lot of intelligent people looked at it for more than 2 seconds and aren’t convinced.)
The other point is more serious: these politicians are so high up in their ivory tower that they can’t believe that a majority of the population can disagree with the plans they cook up, if the citizens fully understand the plans they make. ‘The plan is good and beneficial, and everyone would see that if they only understood it.’ So the politician’s solution in this case is ‘we have to explain it better’. Basically he is saying: we haven’t made it simple enough for these hicks, so we have to dumb it up and explain it better. Either that, or we have to get into conspiracy theories, and I am not willing to do that.
It’s not the first time of course… the European constitution was the first time I can remember where we had a referendum that turned out badly for the politicians… the response was: ‘we have to explain it better’, they never did, and signed the Lisbon treaty anyway.
If history can be a benchmark, rekeningrijden is not gonna be explained any better, it is gonna cost us shit loads of money in the short run, and a lot of privacy in the long run.
