MILLIONS of electric car drivers had their mobile phone usage details shared with the UK government — including their search history.
Customers of O2, Tesco and Sky Mobile, among other operators, had their app records secretly passed on if they visited a site related to EVs as part of a “bizarre nanny state” plan, it has been revealed.
Drivers only had to scroll through a certain website once a month on at least two occasions to be spied on, according to a Department for Transport (DfT) report.
The DfT commissioned O2 to act as part of a £600,000 study which is believed to have targeted 25 million devices.
It was intended to get a “comprehensive evaluation and understanding of the uptake and usage” of electric vehicles.
At the DfT’s request, O2 trawled people’s browsing habits — passengers as well as drivers.
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Children’s phone usage was also used in the study.
The work was conducted under the Tories before the 2024 election.
Five networks were mentioned in the DfT report on the scheme which came out this week.
They were O2, Sky Mobile, Tesco Mobile, GiffGaff and Virgin Mobile.
The two-year surveillance project, which was “anonymised and aggregated” before ending in April 2024, was revealed today and has sparked fury across Westminster.
A Labour source described the move as a “bizarre attempt to create a nanny state for motorists”.
“This Labour Government won’t play Big Brother with Britain’s motorists,” another added.
Tory MP Sir David Davis spoke on the back of the report saying: “It’s an object lesson in why you can’t trust the state with unfettered access to people’s information.
“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?”
As Jake Hurfurt, of the Big Brother Watch campaign group, added: “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.”
An O2 spokesman insisted the work was “entirely lawful” and complied with the Data Protection Act 2018 and UK GDPR rules.
They confirmed: “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.”
Civil servants from DfT’s Advanced Analytics Division and Social and Behavioural Research secured the £600,000 in public funding in 2023.
At the time it was given out “to support evaluation of initiatives targeting electric vehicle uptake and usage”.