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Comment by johansch | Hacker News Reader

Having a state run public transport utility track everyone's mobile devices' unique IDs. Huh. You're seriously asking why this might be sensitive?

Wow, I guess you guys in the UK are seriously desensitized to data invasions like that.

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All this stuff is tracked all the time anyway through cell towers, it's way past where the regularization point is for "state intrusion" in the UK.

That might seem weird to an outsider but that's just a culture difference. We're just as weirded out that anyone can own even a handgun in the US, let alone walk down the street with one.

I'm personally far more weirded out by the idea that a private company can track and use this data than the fact the state can.

My two major turnoffs for living in the London area (which otherwise, based on my multiple visits so far, seems lovely) are:

a) the pervasive surveillance (i don't think it's by chance that "black mirror" is written by someone - charlie brooker- living there)

b) the stupidly high housing costs

(in that order, actually)

While London does have a lot more surveillance than the rest of the UK, anywhere in the UK has a lot more surveillance than most other comparable countries.

It was 13 years ago that the UK's then information commissioner warned we were sleep-walking into a surveillance state: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/aug/16/britishidentity.f...

The worries seem positively quaint now in comparison to the data that Facebook, Google and the state now collect.

Except they’re not storing any device IDs at all, they’re hashing the IDs with a salt that they rotate and dispose of daily. They can only infer movement of a device through the system, they can’t tie that back to any device after the fact, and can’t even tie the same device’s movements together over the course of more than one day.

The people who choose to spend their lives on cctv? Yep...

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