Two-year mass surveillance project commissioned by UK Department for Transport under Tories

Customers of O2, as well as other British operators including Tesco and Sky Mobile, had their mobile internet history and app records passed to the Government if they visited a site related to electric vehicles (EVs) once a month on at least two occasions. Photo / 123rf

Millions of electric car drivers in Britain were spied on by the previous government through their mobile phones as part of a “bizarre nanny state” plan, it can be revealed.

Customers of O2, as well as other operators including Tesco and Sky Mobile, had their mobile internet history and app records passed to the Government if they visited a site related to electric vehicles (EVs) once a month on at least two occasions.

Department for Transport officials commissioned O2 to spy on 25 million devices as part of a £600,000 study intended to produce a “comprehensive evaluation and understanding of the uptake and usage of electric vehicles”.

At the DfT’s request, O2 trawled people’s web browsing habits, including those of children, to identify “EV users”. This included passengers as well as drivers.

It then tracked those people’s physical movements around the country and sent “anonymised and aggregated” data to the Government.

‘Nanny state for motorists’

Details of the project – described as “a surveillance state by stealth” – were revealed last week in a DfT report. The work was conducted by the department under the previous Conservative government and ended before Labour won the 2024 general election.

A Labour source distanced the current Government from the Conservative-era scheme, which it described as a “bizarre attempt to create a nanny state for motorists”.

The mass surveillance went on for two years, ending in April 2024 after DfT conceded that “mobile data cannot directly be used to provide information around charging behaviour or travel time”.

Around the same time, civil servants from DfT and the Treasury were looking at ways of introducing new taxes on EVs to replace falling fuel duty receipts.

Last year the current Government announced a pay-per-mile scheme for taxing EVs, enforced by reporting mileages recorded annually.

David Davis, a Conservative MP, said: “It’s an object lesson in why you can’t trust the state with unfettered access to people’s information, because they’ve obviously taken this information without people’s permission with the objective of disadvantaging them, either by tax or other policy matters.

“If they’ll do it on this, with people who are doing what the Government wants in policy terms – namely, pursuing green policies – what on Earth will they do elsewhere?”

Civil servants from DfT’s Advanced Analytics Division and Social and Behavioural Research secured the £600,000 in public funding in 2023 “to support evaluation of initiatives targeting electric vehicle uptake and usage”.

O2 trawled through the web browsing history of its own customers, and those of other networks that “piggyback” on its infrastructure, to identify EV owners. These other networks included Sky Mobile, Tesco Mobile, GiffGaff and Virgin Mobile.

It is not known whether these operators were informed of the mass surveillance exercise, which O2 offers as a paid service under the brand name O2 Motion.

A spokesman for the mobile network insisted the work was “entirely lawful” and that its staff did not know the identities of the individuals.

DfT’s report explaining how the study worked said: “Users interacting with websites and apps that are identified as EV-related at least once per month in two or more months over the three years prior to each selected month are marked as potential EV owners.”

Those people’s locations were then traced through the O2 network, with DfT expressing particular interest in London as well as the North-West and the east of England.

Such internet browsing and location-tracking techniques are normally used by policing workers trying to identify connections between drug dealers and other serious criminals involved in organised crime.

A number of sources expressed incredulity when shown copies of the full research report.

Andy Palmer, a former Nissan and Aston Martin executive who now runs his own energy technology business, said: “I’m told it’s anonymised and aggregated and that may well satisfy legal thresholds. But legality and legitimacy are not the same thing.

“If you erode public trust in how that data is gathered, you undermine the very transition you are trying to accelerate.”

‘The Tories wasted taxpayer money’

Jake Hurfurt, the head of research and investigations at Big Brother Watch, a campaign group, said the revelation was “shocking”.

“None of us would expect our mobile phone data to be packaged up and passed on to the Government simply to conduct a study on how people use certain kinds of cars,” he said.

A Government source said: “The Tories wasted taxpayers’ money on a bizarre attempt to create a nanny state for motorists. This Labour Government won’t play Big Brother with Britain’s motorists – instead we’re investing record funds to end the pothole plague and keep more money in people’s pockets.”

An O2 Daisy spokesman said the exercise complied with the Data Protection Act 2018 and UK GDPR rules.

“The fully anonymised and aggregated data used by the Department for Transport showed crowd movement patterns and mode of transportation – at no point can individuals be identified, mapped or tracked at any level, and all information shared is compliant with data protection laws,” he said.

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