Is Your Rubbish Bin Spying on You?

It would seem that you cannot go anywhere these days without being captured on film. From shopping malls to your journey into work, you are invariably being caught on a camera as you go about your daily business.

And now, as incredulous as it sounds, it would appear that even your humble rubbish bin could start spying on you soon as well.

According to the UK’s Mail on Sunday, 500,000 electronic bugs have already been secretly fitted to homeowners’ wheelie bins in the UK and it is expected that the number of bins to be “upgraded” with this facility is set to rise sharply within the next two years. What is particularly alarming is that, in a great majority of cases, these bugs have been fitted to people’s bins without either their knowledge or consent. Indeed, local councils appear to have been remarkably silent about the use of these devices.

The bugs in question, which are no bigger than a one pence coin, are fitted under the front lip of wheelie bins and act to uniquely identify each bin so that, as the bins are emptied, the disposal truck can log the weight of the bin - via a specially fitted antenna - and thus track a householder’s volume of non-recycled rubbish. These trucks will then upload the collected data on returning to the depot which will enable the councils in question to keep an up-to-date log as to the overall volume of waste each household generates. This in turn could be used to introduce quotas and levy charges at a later stage.

Whilst it is stressed that these devices will only be used to track non-recycled rubbish, and so could be defended as being a means of introducing more environmentally friendly habits in our disposal of domestic waste, one cannot help but feel that this is yet another backdoor method of introducing a further means of taxation on the general populous – though it would be overly sceptical of me to venture that it is the pursuit of further revenue that is the prime motivation behind this scheme.