Tracking devices hidden in London's recycling bins are stalking your smartphone
qz.com
qz.com
Renew London is not registered with the ICO, nor is any company with a similar name at their postcode [1].
So either they believe that they're exempt, or that it's under a different name.
The ICO has a self-assessment tool [2] to work out whether an organisation is required to register. I'd suggest that the big question is: "Are you processing personal information?". The definition is:
‘Processing’ means doing any of the following with the information:
obtaining it
recording it
storing it
updating it
sharing it
So based on that, they're processing personal information and are legally required to register and comply. The ICO is not seen as an overly strong regulator, but they might be convinced to investigate after the inevitable headlines in the papers.
[1] http://www.ico.org.uk/esdwebpages/search. Postcode is E1 6DY from their website in the press release [2] http://www.ico.org.uk/for_organisations/data_protection/regi...
[1] http://www.ico.org.uk/upload/documents/library/data_protecti...
The video makes a comparison between their bins and cookies, describing this as "cookies in real life".
It seems difficult to compare their tech to cookies (which have EU wide regulation) and to show information collected about an individual and to then claim exemption from UK data protection laws.
It is possible to harvest this information covertly. Up until iOS 7, it's possible for any iphone app to get your mac address. So if you also provide your personal information, an app could covertly associate them.
You listed a lot of dimensions, whereas to make the correlation between mac address and customer info, you only have 1 dimension (visits/location) to do the correlation with.
In practice, I find that I've needed a lot fewer dimensions than I'd expect to find people; when I was in grade school one time I cross-referenced the attendance list (for a last name), the reverse phone lookup in the white pages, and a map of the school district boundaries to figure out where a classmate lived.
I think that repeated visits to a grocery store like a Safeway would be a really good proxy for home ZIP code. Every Safeway I've visited in the SF bay area has a wifi access point, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was logging the MAC addresses of phones that pass by. Maybe some hackers will try to optimize their route home and pick a grocery store that's half way between work and home, but I hypothesize that a large enough number of people choose to run to the nearest grocery store for that "one item they forgot to buy for dinner" or for dedicated weekly shopping trips that you could draw reasonable conclusions about aggregate behaviour.
[0] I like buying stuff online; it's kind of unavoidable there.
[1] I always get this weird sense of power when I buy peaches at the Safeway at full price during off-peak and then the next week they go on sale for "Safeway Club" cardholders at the store I usually shop at.
For example, imagine they have cameras that can image your license plate. You go there twice -- they have one MAC and two sets of possible plates. The odds that you and another person were both shopping at those times is pretty low. Now they have license plate, make/model of the car, can probably triangulate the wi-fi to know what you bought each time with reasonable fidelity...
Share "anonymous" data with vendors who provide wifi access, and suddenly Sephora knows where you live and where you work and can remind you that you're almost out of La Prairie Crème Cellulaire Platine Rare when you bin your cup of coffee outside the office.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194160 (arstechnica.com)
In addition, here are some other sources for the same story:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6181893 (qz.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183485 (qz.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6184423 (theatlanticcities.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6187750 (vice.com)
They're also using the MAC address to identify the device, and I suspect from that to estimate the demographic: http://new.pitchengine.com/pitches/60f7865a-f3ac-4167-920c-5...
This seems to be echoed by some legal people: http://www.huntonprivacyblog.com/2011/05/articles/article-29...
> Unique identifiers (such as MAC addresses) should only be stored for a maximum period of 24 hours, and should subsequently be deleted or anonymized.
And they have an opt-out page: http://www.presenceorb.com/optout.aspx
But how many people would opt-out of something they didn't know was tracking them?
Anyone with a credit/debit card has been tracked since the day they got it, but it doesn't mean that every subsequent intrusion should blithely accepted.
Anyhow, I agree. My reply was in response to another comment which seemed to imply that this program was the difference between being tracked or not, which is a silly sentiment in London.
I agree in principle that this kind of tracking isn't okay. I'm just not sure that the implications are worse than the status quo in this case.
These bins are quite strategically placed (1) in the heart of the square mile - the prime financial district and tourist hub of London city (2) especially around bus stops and city squares in this area - which have some form or other of free city wide wifi networks - where one would be waiting for enough time (consuming lunch, waiting for bus, meeting a friend, shopping...) to be an ideal consumer for targeted advertisement.
They also have an extremely amusing design which makes them look slick - but extremely unlike waste bins - infact you have to look at them closely to find where you need to dispose off your waste. This was one thing that amused me extremely when I first saw them - the strange inconspicuous design - but things make much more sense in the light of this article.
As someone who's targeted more than once a day by these things, I see this as a breach of privacy and expect to be informed that data about me is being collected and stored and maybe used for commercial purposes in the future (irrespective of the ICO technicalities and loop holes).
As a human, its a fundamental breach of trust and I would personally not see these things with the same inconspicuousness they have been designed with to deceptively integrate and blend into our daily environment.
He adds, "as some of the technology we will be testing will be on the boundaries of what is regulated and discussed it is our intention to discuss it publicly and especially collaborate with privacy groups like EFF to make sure we lead the charge on [adding necessary protections] as we are with the implementation of the technology"
When a couple have gone up, it will no longer be cost effective.
I really don't like the idea of tracking such things. It's bad enough in the internet but being stalked outside is not acceptable.
Of course firebombing the cans is probably very more illegal than just dumping a can of lighter fluid into it and throwing in a match... I mean, even that is arson, nothing to sneeze at. You would have to balance the possibility of being caught with the punishment if you are caught.
You'd do better to steal the entire bin.
Want the privacy the sane way? Go make vendors to introduce security features (like short-lived euphemeral MACs), so communicating party names won't be meaningful to others.
If laws can and are (ab)used by governments and their TLAs to legally force equipment vendors and service providers to create various surveillance features and misfeatures (backdoors, security strength limitations), it's only reasonable that they must be used to create privacy-enhancing features for the public good, too.
I'd suggest taking some bits from a discarded microwave oven, assembling said bits into a directed microwave transmitter and blasting the business end of the bin with a few hundred watts of microwave energy. For extra brownie points you could modulate the signal so it looks like an 802.11 transceiver on steroids.
Now you only need to 3D-print a box for it/connect it in some way to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and you'll be lauded on hackaday.com!
While I doubt it's legal to get your ham license and pump 1500 watts into your least favorite Wifi network, I'd certainly enjoy reading about the resulting court cases. Federal jurisdiction, local jurisdiction... always entertaining.
If microwaves are not your thing you could try your hand at an EMP projector, even though it might be harder to make sure only the targeted device kicks the bucket.
The mobile network already locates you well enough for the spooks to find out who you're meeting. I live in Melbourne; half our mobile network is owned by Singapore, and god knows how much was made in China. The spooks are scary, but the network has become essential.
No doubt computers accelerate threats to life and freedom, as they do to everything else. It got that way a long time ago, when IBM tabulating machines powered the holocaust. The problems are Singapore and China, which are being solved, and Australia, where parts of the solution are failing. Those solutions are human instead of technical.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196981
I tend to disagree, I don't think tracking my habits to more effectively manipulate and target me is an enhanced experience.
So I never was much of a network analyst, forgive me - is there any way to guard against this while still leaving your wifi on, without something like cycling MACs? I wasn't aware that when you scan for Networks, that you're actually exchanging some packets with those networks - I thought you were just picking up on a broadcast one way. Shouldn't there be some sort of "stealth mode" where you're not leaking packets everywhere?
It actually seems like if this was the case, I'm surprised it hasn't been used in other ways. Say a burglar breaks into my house with his iPhone in his pocket. Could I later prove it was him by pulling up some log on my router that was picking up MAC addresses going by? And why isn't there some software (to my knowledge) that does the same thing for surveillance - logging all the MAC addresses and creating alerts if a new one comes into the area?
No -- the adaptor's MAC is an essential part of the transaction, while cycling MACs would be a dead giveaway and would increase attention paid to that system and its travels.
Turning off the adaptor is the only meaningful way to avoid tracking.
> Say a burglar breaks into my house with his iPhone in his pocket. Could I later prove it was him by pulling up some log on my router that was picking up MAC addresses going by?
Yes, but only in a society that would allow this kind of tracking of people, each of whom is presumed to be innocent. Usually a person is first identified as a suspect, after which a technical track can be made. But a person who is not already regarded as a suspect can't be (legally) subjected to this kind of surveillance.
> And why isn't there some software (to my knowledge) that does the same thing for surveillance - logging all the MAC addresses and creating alerts if a new one comes into the area?
Because this is privileged information having to do with privacy, and violating it would confront certain well-established civil rights that vary from country to country.
And just because an app like that may violate privacy rights, I mean, you still see things like Firesheep, packet sniffing, network surveillance tools, all published with the caveat to just use for "testing".
It seems to me that the laws are somewhat murky, as evidenced by this article, and I would be surprised if there was any law in the US against me keeping track of MACs that came into the range of my router. With your argument I couldn't set up a surveillance camera outside my house either.
It's one thing to monitor MACs flying around a network, it's quite another to defend the monitoring in a court of law or use the results in a legal action.
In the U.S., for a member of law enforcement to search a person, a house, or monitor someone's communications, he must have reasonable cause to suspect that a crime is being or has been committed by that person. Absent "reasonable cause", the law can't monitor our communications. And as I type this, I realize these ideas are probably out of date, inconsistent with current events and rulings.
> It seems to me that the laws are somewhat murky ...
Not really, they're just not enforced until someone complains that his rights have been violated. But it's also true that privacy is being eroded in a major way right now, and the law hasn't really kept up -- there are laws on the books that, once tested in court, will probably be cast out. If that's the sense in which you mean "murky," then you're right.
> I mean, you still see things like Firesheep, packet sniffing, network surveillance tools, all published with the caveat to just use for "testing".
Strictly speaking, there's no problem until and unless it's a third party that's being monitored -- that person can complain that his right to privacy has been violated, even if no use is made of the monitored communications.
In principle. :)
An interesting question is whether the MAC address alone could be used to trace the perp. The first 24 bits of the 48-bit MAC address identify the company that manufactured the adapter. Then the question would be, did the company that put the adapter into the phone cross-reference its MAC with the phone's serial number and the serial number with the owner.
A smart thief would turn his phone off during a job. Routers logging MAC addresses are probably a much less serious problem than cell carriers keeping logs of which phones were where when.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.gpo.greenp...
Make a deal with JC Decaux, or some similar out-of-home advertising company to place cameras (strategically) around the City of London.
Nominally to provide personally tailored advertising, the significant secondary purpose is to use face recognition to identify individuals-of-interest: specific traders, fund managers and so on.
This enables us to analyse facial expression, gait, maybe body temperature to determine mood, then look for correlations in the stocks and markets that these individuals trade.
I think that this will be legal, since all the information that you are using is (nominally, at least) legal, and gained in a public place.
After all, if it is OK for the authorities to place the whole population under close surveillance, they cannot possibly object if we turn around and do the same thing to their paymasters, can they?
However, might be a good idea to write a mobile app that changes your MAC address periodically (not sure how hard it is)
It's a shame the recent NSA fiasco will scare people away now and set this back another 5 years.
There are some phenomenal experiences possible.
I find it is about bullshitting people as much as you can, change my view please.
Closing in on a million free apps available at both Apple and Android marketplaces. Brought to you free by advertising.
Skype. How many poor families scattered across the world has Skype helped?
Those are significant, life changing experiences - not bullshit.
Those are experiences.
Free to the world, paid for by advertising.
They changed the font colour of the word "Mac", but not the actual address. Plus, Mac should be MAC.
McFail.
EDIT: That may not have been my own picture in that tweet. But still ISTR having snapped a similar one.
Nordstrom stores in the US were caught tracking shoppers via their phones' MAC addresses earlier this year. All the more reason to turn off WiFi if you're not actively using it.
Adding technology to the observation makes it so much stronger that I think there should be a new discussion about it by our various governments.