He says there should be reasonable suspicion of fraud before a customer's information is surrendered. It is only laws such as the 1984 and 1998 Data Protection Acts that stop this infrastructure being used to its full invasive capacity. The government said it had no plans to implement this scheme. First, he or she should use cash. Credit or debit cards leave a detailed electronic trail, mostly fed to central systems in real time.
Police think that phone theft is one of the main contributors to the recent rise in violent crime.
Travelling south by road could be tricky. Several police forces en-route, such as Cumbria, West Midlands and the London Met, use automatic number plate recognition cameras, to check vehicles against central databases. Surveillance cameras are used at stations, but the British Transport Police, who monitor the output, says it does not employ face recognition software, and Virgin Trains says its trains do not have cameras, although new ones will. Of course, using the West Coast mainline exposes our fugitive to other risks - such as lengthy delays just outside Preston.