
City of London calls halt to smartphone tracking bins - evilstreak
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23665490
======
casca
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.

~~~
jwilliams
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)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_steel_\(London\))

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Wealthy people like to protect their personal privacy.

~~~
cinquemb
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?

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

~~~
cinquemb
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Ghost_in_the_Shell)

~~~
sigkill
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.

------
Tichy
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?

~~~
DanBC
> 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.

~~~
Tichy
"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?

~~~
eterm
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?

~~~
moocowduckquack
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.

------
amirmc
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation)

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

~~~
mitchty
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. :)

------
will118
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...](http://www.littlesheep-
learning.co.uk/images/Tally_Counter.jpg)

~~~
ryusage
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.

------
tehwalrus
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.)

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

------
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
x0x0
Those cost $57.

[http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/bits/2013/08/02/a-cheap-
spyi...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/bits/2013/08/02/a-cheap-spying-tool-
with-a-high-creepy-factor/?from=global.home)

~~~
ChuckMcM
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.

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

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

------
da_n
Do as I say, not as I do.

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

------
bittercynic
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.

