UK petrol station CCTVs will check insurance/tax status before you ...

By Cory Doctorow at 12:17 am Saturday, Mar 17 ?

Under a pending proposal, the license-plate cameras at UK filling stations will soon begin to trigger automatic lookups of every motorist's insurance and tax records. Drivers whose insurance and tax records can't be located or verified will not be allowed to fill their tanks. This requires that the existing cameras, which are there to document drivers who don't pay for their gas, be connected to sensitive government databases filled with identifying personal information. Forensic cameras -- whose records are used after the fact to catch crooks -- don't need to be 100 percent accurate, since almost every plate they capture will not be involved in a crime, and ambiguous results can be resolved by a human backstop. But cameras that prevent you from getting something you need, like petrol, need to be 100 percent accurate, since it wouldn't do to let the person operating the cash-register override the judgment of the automated system.

CCTV at petrol stations will automatically stop uninsured cars being filled with fuel

(Thanks, VoxAudi!)

Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.

Source: http://boingboing.net/2012/03/17/uk-petrol-station-cctvs-will-c.html

pacific standard time northern mariana islands summer time coolio daylight savings time 2012 ricky rubio day light savings time