Somewhere in the past two years, a version of you was being identified, tagged and tracked by the British government based on whether you visited an EV-related website twice in a month.
Not a suspected criminal. Not a person of interest to law enforcement. A driver who looked at a car charging app or browsed an EV comparison site on their phone, and was consequently flagged by a government-commissioned surveillance programme that tracked their movements across Britain using mobile network data. Children were included. Passengers were included. No individual consented to any of it. Nobody was told it was happening.
A report published this week by the Department for Transport has laid bare the details of a project commissioned in 2023 under the Conservative government, run through mobile network operator O2 and concluded in April 2024 just before Labour came to power. The study cost £602,000 of public money, drawn from the government's Evaluation Accelerator Fund. Its stated purpose was to produce a "comprehensive evaluation and understanding of the uptake and usage of electric vehicles."
The methods it used to achieve that purpose are the story.
What O2 Actually Did
O2 runs the mobile infrastructure used not only by its own direct customers but by Sky Mobile, Tesco Mobile, GiffGaff and Virgin Mobile. The study swept up all of them.
The identification method was blunt: anyone who visited EV-related websites or used EV-related apps at least once a month across two separate months was flagged as a probable electric vehicle owner. That criterion does not describe a car owner. It describes someone who was curious about electric vehicles, was researching one, was a passenger in one, or happened to click a link. Browsing habits were trawled, per The Telegraph's original reporting. Web history and app records were processed. Children over the age of 12 were not excluded.
Once individuals were flagged, O2 began tracking their physical movements using mobile network location data, the same infrastructure used to triangulate position from which mobile signals are transmitted and received. That data was then supplied to the Department for Transport in what both O2 and the DfT describe as "anonymised and aggregated" form. Neither party released the specific technical details of what anonymisation meant in practice.
O2's spokesman said the project was "entirely lawful" and that the company complied fully with the Data Protection Act 2018 and UK GDPR. The DfT said the project was lawful and that all data transferred to officials was stripped of individual identities and locations. Civil servants in the DfT's Advanced Analytics Division and Social and Behavioural Research unit managed the project.
The Technical Limitations the Government Did Not Advertise
The most revealing section of the DfT's own published report is also the least quoted in the political coverage.
After two years and £602,000, the department concluded that mobile data could not directly be used to provide information about charging behaviour or travel times. The specific questions the study was designed to answer, where EVs are kept overnight, trip frequency, origin-destination patterns, charging locations, were not answerable from the data collected. The report notes that mobile data may be useful for monitoring overarching trends, but the granular operational intelligence the study sought was beyond what the technology could deliver.
The government spent two years tracking 25 million devices, including children, without consent, using methods described by critics as equivalent to law enforcement surveillance techniques, and concluded that the data was too imprecise to answer the questions it was designed to address.
Why the Timing Matters
The project was commissioned in 2023 when the government was actively exploring how to replace falling fuel duty revenues as EV adoption grew. Petrol and diesel duty currently generates around £25 billion a year for the Treasury. As more drivers switch to electric vehicles, that revenue declines. The political and fiscal pressure to find a replacement was real, bipartisan, and is still ongoing.
The tracking methods used in the O2 study mirror techniques law enforcement agencies typically deploy to investigate organised crime and drug trafficking, as GB News noted. What distinguished this deployment was its target: not criminal suspects but millions of ordinary drivers whose only qualifying behaviour was looking at an EV website.
Conservative MP Sir David Davis condemned the operation in direct terms. "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," he said. "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?"
Shadow transport secretary Richard Holden MP framed it differently, blaming Labour despite the programme having been commissioned under the Conservatives: "Labour have been trawling through drivers' mobile phone data because they are desperate to make pay-per-mile charging workable." A Labour government source pushed back, describing the study as a "bizarre attempt to create a nanny state for motorists" committed by the previous administration, and stating that the current government would not engage in invasive surveillance of motorists.
Both claims require the same qualifier: the project was commissioned, funded, and executed under the Conservative government that left office in July 2024. The DfT published the report under the current Labour administration. The political football over ownership of the story does not change what was done, or who knew about it.
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The Wider Data Context
The O2 study does not sit in isolation. It arrived the same week as widespread coverage of the UK government's Acusensus speed camera programme, the same week as new data on AI camera expansion across UK motorways, and in the context of a Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 that received Royal Assent in June 2025, introducing enhanced powers for the renamed Information Commission to penalise organisations that share consumer data without transparent consent.
MotorBuzz has covered the surveillance infrastructure being built around British drivers across multiple investigations, from Acusensus's AI camera network to the AI road monitoring expansion. The O2 study represents a different dimension of the same question: not what is recorded on the road, but what is tracked through the devices people carry while travelling on it.
The tracking methods used in the study identify people not by their vehicle registration but by their internet activity, then follow their physical movements. The specific safeguard relied upon by both O2 and the DfT, that the data was anonymised and aggregated before being handed over, is the same assurance that researchers across multiple countries have demonstrated can be reversed under certain conditions. A 2019 study published in Nature Communications found that 99.98 percent of individuals in an anonymised dataset of mobile movement records could be correctly re-identified using just four spatiotemporal data points. The DfT did not publish its anonymisation methodology.
The Pay-Per-Mile Connection
The government has since confirmed that electric vehicle excise duty will be introduced from April 2028, charged at a standard rate verified through annual MOT mileage readings rather than real-time tracking. The decision to use MOT checks rather than phone-based tracking is, according to reporting in the Daily Telegraph and elsewhere, a direct consequence of the O2 study's conclusion that mobile data was too imprecise for individual billing purposes.
In other words, the surveillance programme that tracked 25 million devices served as a feasibility test for a road pricing mechanism. It concluded the technology did not work well enough for that purpose. The government then chose a different mechanism for the same policy. The tracking of 25 million people without consent was the research phase of a revenue collection project, not a standalone exercise in transport analysis.
Whether that changes the legal or ethical picture is a question the Information Commission has not yet publicly addressed. No regulatory investigation has been announced. No individual has been notified that their data was collected. The DfT published the report. The story broke. The political parties argued about whose fault it was. The 25 million people whose browsing habits and physical movements were recorded by a government study they never consented to have not been told anything directly.
Sources: The Telegraph, 27 February 2026, GB News, Electrifying.com, EVSHIFT, DfT published report via Evaluation Accelerator Fund. Exact contract value of £602,000 confirmed via EAF published records. Nature Communications anonymisation study: Luc Rocher et al., "Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models," Nature Communications, July 2019. All analysis and editorial commentary is original.