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Croydon’s new parking app is victim of worldwide data hack

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Barely had the news from Croydon Council trickled out that they are to impose a smartphone app system on people parking their cars in New Addington, Addiscombe and Purley from next week than their chosen provider, the operators of RingGo, were turning themselves into the authorities for a potentially massive data fail after their system was hacked.

Doomed: Croydon Council wants to remove its parking meters. What could possibly go wrong..?

Croydon Council has an unhappy record when it comes to commissioning tech schemes.

Such as its highly expensive Crap App for street cleaning and bin collections (which still has no category to report a missed bin collection, Doh!), when better software was freely available. And then there were the “smart” bus shelters, promised by a fly-by-night start-up company that, would you believe it, failed to deliver on its exaggerated promises of millions of pounds of revenue for the cash-strapped council.

So RingGo getting hacked just before Christmas is just the kind of news that is sure to make residents even more reluctant to accept the impositions of a new way of paying for their parking.

Inside Croydon reported yesterday how Croydon Council wants to impose RingGo on all residents who drive and need to park their vehicles in council-run car parks and bays, and will be running a “trial” in three district centres, starting on January 2.

Then trials and changeover to RingGo will also allow the council to halve the free parking periods, from one hour to 30 minutes, making it twice as difficult for residents to conduct their necessary errands without paying any parking fee. But making huge extra revenues for Croydon Mayor Jason Perry’s council.

It was reported yesterday that EasyPark Group (oh, the irony!), the owner of brands including RingGo and ParkMobile, had admitted that customer names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses and parts of credit card numbers had been taken.

The company said parking data had not been compromised in the cyber-attack. EasyPark, who are Europe’s largest parking app operator, has reported itself to information regulators in the EU and Britain.

EasyPark said that 950 RingGo users in Britain were involved – from a total of 19million.

According to the Grauniad, “the majority of users affected are users in Europe on the EasyPark brand”.

EasyPark is owned by the private equity investors Vitruvian Partners and Verdane, which bought it from BMW and Daimler in 2021. Its EasyPark, ParkMobile, RingGo and Park-line apps operate in more than 4,000 cities across 23 countries, including the US, Australia, New Zealand and most western European states such as Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Britain.

Users of RingGo had been affected because some of its services were integrated with the EasyPark technology, the company said, maintaining that the RingGo platform was not breached.

The company said it was not yet aware of instances of the data being used or published, and had not received a ransom demand.

Councils such as Croydon are switching to this third-party system of collecting parking fees to save money used to operate and maintain its old parking meters. But meters have the advantage of not requiring personal data to make payments and they can be used by people who rely on cash, such as many older and poorer drivers.

“The central collection of location data is particularly sensitive because it could be used to physically track people,” The Guardian noted in yesterday’s report of the hack.

As one of iC’s loyal readers noted today: “What does RingGo do with your personal details? How safe is the information of your phone in their hands?

“It just looks like more mining of personal information, which of course, is what all apps do.”


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