City of London calls halt to smartphone tracking bins | Hacker News Reader

City of London calls halt to smartphone tracking bins

bbc.co.uk

100 pointsevilstreak38 comments

For those unaware, this is not "London" that's stopping the tracking bins, it's the City of London. This is the historical center and current financial district. It is ~1 square mile out of ~600 for the. There are all sorts of curiosities around the City - it is not governed like the other boroughs and is extremely wealthy in its own right. Conspiracy theorists have found much fodder in the City government and control.

The current set of bins are claimed to all be in the City , but this move is not the end of of the tracking of people in London via their phones.

Indeed, the same City of London that is surrounded by the "Ring of Steel"[1] - described as a "surveillance cordon" with almost half a million CCTV cameras. At the checkpoints police had near-carte-blanche to search any vehicle they liked.

From a different era, granted, but a strange entity to be kicking up a fuss about privacy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_steel_(London)

Wealthy people like to protect their personal privacy.

Makes me wonder what will happen when clothes, hats, glasses and etc start emitting electromagnetic interference that inhibits this vast system.

There's gotta be money in that, eh?

Think of all the fun you can have too. You could potentially fake a person's electronic signature and then visit strange places.

Kind of reminds me of Ghost in the Shell philosophy[0]:

What good is electronic surveillance when people who can run scripts and programs to imitate other people to the point that it will be indistinguishable from the real thing?

Thinking about this stuff gets me excited about the future. I'm deff going to be involved making stuff like this happen, haha.

Edit: Already getting myself involved with it now…

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Ghost_in_the_She...

I JUST finished watching (for the nth time) episode 6 of SAC, and this is where the laughing man case takes form. I feel that if you're on Hacker News, it's a must watch because it blends philosophy and technology with a bit of ethics and possibility very very well.

Heck, I won't be surprised if someone's startup is inspired by that. I can already see usage of some tech that vaguely resembles the Oculus Rift (and yes, the Virtual boy of the past), ah you know what, just go watch it. You will not be disappointed.

CGPGrey's The (Secret) City of London (Part [1]: History, Part [2]: Government)

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1ROpIKZe-c

I've seen the video at link #1 before but not #2, still interesting to watch I watch #1 again and #2.

Am I the only one who finds that a bit silly? Perhaps the next step will be that we won't be allowed to look at other people on the street anymore, because we would gather too much information. What if I want to open a shop and count the pedestrians walking by at a potential location, will police swoop in to throw me in jail?

I wouldn't be surprised if every smartphone with WLAN also "tracks" other people on the street - if it keeps a list of WLANs it recently encountered.

Offering HotSpots would become troublesome, too.

And what about the mobile networks, they already track the location of every one of us? Should only big companies be allowed to collect data?

> And what about the mobile networks, they already track the location of every one of us?

Those companies are registered with the Data Protection people. They specify what data they are collecting, and why, and they are subject to regulations about what they can do with the data and how long they can keep the data.

> What if I want to open a shop and count the pedestrians walking by at a potential location, will police swoop in to throw me in jail?

You can count people. What you can't do is take an identifying piece of information about that person and store it.

"Those companies are registered with the Data Protection people."

And it's probably really easy for "the little man" to register with the Data Protection Agency? Or do you need lots of lawyers and lots of money?

Every business of any size has to do it. Costs about $100. It's not hard.

So for 100$ the recycling bins could be back on the street, if they credibly anonymize the data?

Well, what they were doing was probably never illegal. That doesn't mean the City of London are obliged to let them do it – they're their bins.

I thought it was the company responsible for the bins doing it. My bad.

It was the company who installed the bins. The City of London gave the company a contract for the bins, this tracking is something that has developed after the original contract was signed.

And apparently the City of London only found out about the tracking from the news[1]. Powerful people don't like surprises like that.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/12/spy_bins_scrapped_fr...

What's the Data Protection Agency?

Data protection is a law, it applies to anyone. There's no such thing as the data protection agency, just the information commissioner.

There's no money and no lawyers fees, do you care to explain yourself?

Is the Information Commissioners Office, which used to be the Data Protection Registrar, which deals with the Register of Data Controllers. Registration requires a fee which funds the Information Commissioners Office, however this fee is only £35, or £500 if you have a turnover of more than £25 million.

I was replying to DanBC who mentioned the Data Protection People. I have no idea how this stuff works in Britain.

There is a difference between capturing data passively (which this is), and actively trying to extract it. That's the difference between a paparazzi and Google Streetview. Of course the average person has no idea what they are broadcasting.

The reality is that modern gadgets always leek unique data that could be identifiable; and trying to lock down every path is impossible.

Perhaps every app, browser page or network connection should get its own GUID that it always included, un-encrypted in every request by default. Then give users the ability to change it easily on a per app basis. Make laws that require companies to only collect the GUID and no other passively collected information without explicit permission.

Your brain can't track millions of people and remember them all forever without breaking a sweat like computers can.

The difference is the scale and the permanence of the data.

And yes, the mobile companies shouldn't be collecting that data even though they are.

When I visit my dominatrix, 15 illicit children or go for my ballet lessons, I want it to stay private from my 3 girlfriends.

There are numerous organisations that could take advantage of that information to blackmail me into doing something I didn't want to, like support pay rises for all the head police officers.

I'm being silly, but what the hell does anyone need this information for, the only possible thing it can be used for is for nefarious purposes. It doesn't really stop crimes, it rarely catches criminals and it doesn't make our lives better. It's expensive, degrading to individual humans to constantly spy on them and is an enabler for horrific crimes against humanity.

Just say no.

> what the hell does anyone need this information for

Advertising. This isn't the first company to try this, and it sure as hell won't be the last. They want to know where people move, where they look, what stores they visit, and ideally what they googled for last night, and then send targeted ads to smart devices and electronic billboards.

Note that it's the 'City of London Corporation' [1] that's called for a halt. The title at the moment implies that the authorities of London as a whole have gotten involved.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation

Yes. When most people say London they mean Greater London, not The City.

Well we mean "The City known as London". Most people outside of those that live there wouldn't understand the difference between the history of Londinium and its founding all the way back to Roman times. And the "suburbs" if you will that most people would identify to be the city itself. It is much like most people don't always distinguish the boroughs of New York from the City of New York until they need to have a reason to.

TLDR: I agree, and disagree simultaneously and think that the whole rats nest of London and who controls what with things like the "Mayor" to be... stereo-typically British for lack of a better term. :)

I keep seeing these Renew people dance around this whole "identifying information" thing.

Maybe they clarified it somewhere along the line, but I read the quartz article and the one before.

I can't think of anything more identifying that I carry than my MAC address(es). So say my MAC is 01:23:45:67:89:ab and Renew anonymizes this to "0001", clearly that's just as identifiable.

I genuinely can't think of a reason to gather MAC addresses other than to use them for profiling.

The human footfall/bean counter thing is great [1], but not worth any money to anyone. Seems more like a PoC...

I don't know a lot about AI recognition but I'd have thought you could have a camera counting people fairly easily.

I actually don't personally mind, I think it's fair game unless the government says it isn't - and then I can go back to just the worry of blackhats.

So unless I'm very mistaken this Reveal/Orb company are either building profiles, plan to, or have a business plan [1] that is going nowhere big.

[1] http://www.littlesheep-learning.co.uk/images/Tally_Counter.j...

It seems pretty clear from the way they talk about it that they're tracking who sees each ad on each bin in exactly the same way google tracks who sees each ad on each web page. The obvious next step for such a technology is to show specific ads only when people who might care about them are nearby. It's pretty genius really - it would put them miles ahead of other physical ad companies, at least until the rest started doing it too.

But yes, the obvious downside is that instead of worrying about google knowing everywhere you go on the internet, you now have companies that know everywhere you go physically as well.

1) Good.

2) who the hell wrote this article?

"The UK and the EU have strict laws about mining personal data using cookies, which involves effectively installing a small monitoring device on people's phones or computers, but the process of tracking MAC codes leaves no trace on individuals' handsets."

I'm sorry, what now? a small data file is not a "device." (answer: Joe Miller, apparently.)

Actually, a cookie could be considered a device, it would just be an unusual use of the word.

I figured it to be a publicity stunt, the bins are selling advertising, this gets their description and capabilities into the press.

But it twigged an interesting idea (probably impractical) of a personal version of this device. It could give just watch for mac addresses (or bluetooth addresses) that got into range or stayed in range. If someone was following you in a car it might show up as continued presence of an unrecognized cell phone MAC address.

If done right you could do "recognition" with Glass using cellphone MAC rather than facial. Not sure if that counts in the rules, but people do inadvertently carry around an ID tag with them that is broadcasting their identity to anything that knows how to ask for it.

Those cost $57.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/bits/2013/08/02/a-cheap-spyi...

Yup pretty much, although for mobility reasons you'd want it to be battery powered. I was thinking more like re-purposing a late model Android handset. Root it, put a kernel on it which was designed for surveillance rather than telephony, have it spool to it's microSD drive and get analyzed each evening.

How hypocritical. Governments love to limit companies from tracking data and talk about citizen privacy. Meanwhile, they're tracking everyone, everywhere they can.

Powerful bankers and lawyers do not like to be tracked, that is only good for the rest of us.

Do as I say, not as I do.

(though not to say I approve of phone tracking).

Sounds kind of like someone walking down the street repeatedly shouting out their name, and then getting offended that you write it down.

Maybe you should just stop shouting your name.

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