A company in London was logging and tracking passers-by smart phone's WiFi via recycle bins
Yesterday, a thread appeared on Slashdot talking that a private company's recycle bins, a dozen all over London, were electronically sniffing you as you walked by. If you had a smart phone, it grabbed your WiFi's MAC address and logged your movement relative to the can. The long-term purpose was targeted advertising since it is difficult, if not impossible, to change this number.
In two test runs, four days in May and eight in June, "...over four million events were captured, with over 530,000 unique devices captured. Further testing is taking place at sites including Liverpool Street Station." The 'event' would be four million people walking by one of their bins, the 'unique devices captured' would be the 8% of those people with smart phones in their pocket. The company, Recycle Now, has around a hundred such recycling bins all over London that also incorporate digital ad boards. They were working towards a Minority Report advertising ecosystem.
According to the firm's CEO, "...As long as we don't add a name and home address, it's legal." He also told Wired UK that "We collect anonymised and aggregated MAC data -- we don't track individuals or individual MACs. The ORBs aggregate all footfall around a pod for three minutes and send back one annonymised aggregated report from each site so the idea that we are tracking individuals again is more style than substance," says Memari in an email. "There are applications in the future which Quartz focused on but during the trial period we are only looking at anonymised and aggregated MAC data."
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."
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/09/recycling-bins-are-watching-you
The company has a web site that allows you to enter the MAC address of your phone to opt-out of the tracking, which I would think the site would just take and aggregate the data for future use since in the initial version the bins aggregate the data before sending it back to the mother server, which means the individual MAC addresses are not there. They might push an ignore list out to the bins, but I doubt that.
Well, the City of London Corporation has told Renew Now to stop running the program.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/recycling-bin-firm-denies-tracking-london-phones-with-wi-fi-124461
FYI, a MAC address is a unique identifier built-in to the networking part of your equipment. Your smart phone or tablet has one if it can access the internet, any network card or a computer with a built-in network card has one, which is pretty much all computers made today. So does your DVR, your networked printer, your BluRay player, etc. It's a two-part number consisting of six hexadecimal digits, normally each digit is represented with a colon separator, like this: 01:23:45:67:89:ab. The first three digits identify the manufacturer, the last three are unique to the card. This gives a total number of unique values of 247 x 10 to the 14th. A unique MAC address is essential to network routing, that is, getting the packets that your computer sends to a specific web site returned back to you and not to someone else. In Windows and Mac PCs, you cannot change this number. In Linux machines, even though the number is burned in to a read-only memory chip, it can be changed if you want to tinker at that level. I don't know if you can change it on an Android smart phones whose operating system is based on Linux.
In this case, Renew Now claimed that they were just gathering the manufacturer code of the MAC address, so it wasn't tracking you, it was tracking who made your smart phone. Marketers like to make assumptions about people based on branding, for example, some web sites look to see if you're accessing them from a Mac, and if so, they charge you a higher price because they know you'll pay more money for some types of computer hardware. It's a very broad brush that they're painting with, and I think it's fallacious when it comes to smart phones. If someone drives a Ferrari, yes, you can assume they're wealthy. Smart phones, not so much. I was making less than $30k annually when my wife bought me my iPhone, that ain't wealthy.
The only way to truly block tracking like this is to either turn off the WiFi on your phone when you're out in public, or turn off your phone altogether. How many people could or would actually do that? It's funny to think about 20 years ago when almost no one owned a cell phone.
In two test runs, four days in May and eight in June, "...over four million events were captured, with over 530,000 unique devices captured. Further testing is taking place at sites including Liverpool Street Station." The 'event' would be four million people walking by one of their bins, the 'unique devices captured' would be the 8% of those people with smart phones in their pocket. The company, Recycle Now, has around a hundred such recycling bins all over London that also incorporate digital ad boards. They were working towards a Minority Report advertising ecosystem.
According to the firm's CEO, "...As long as we don't add a name and home address, it's legal." He also told Wired UK that "We collect anonymised and aggregated MAC data -- we don't track individuals or individual MACs. The ORBs aggregate all footfall around a pod for three minutes and send back one annonymised aggregated report from each site so the idea that we are tracking individuals again is more style than substance," says Memari in an email. "There are applications in the future which Quartz focused on but during the trial period we are only looking at anonymised and aggregated MAC data."
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."
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/09/recycling-bins-are-watching-you
The company has a web site that allows you to enter the MAC address of your phone to opt-out of the tracking, which I would think the site would just take and aggregate the data for future use since in the initial version the bins aggregate the data before sending it back to the mother server, which means the individual MAC addresses are not there. They might push an ignore list out to the bins, but I doubt that.
Well, the City of London Corporation has told Renew Now to stop running the program.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/recycling-bin-firm-denies-tracking-london-phones-with-wi-fi-124461
FYI, a MAC address is a unique identifier built-in to the networking part of your equipment. Your smart phone or tablet has one if it can access the internet, any network card or a computer with a built-in network card has one, which is pretty much all computers made today. So does your DVR, your networked printer, your BluRay player, etc. It's a two-part number consisting of six hexadecimal digits, normally each digit is represented with a colon separator, like this: 01:23:45:67:89:ab. The first three digits identify the manufacturer, the last three are unique to the card. This gives a total number of unique values of 247 x 10 to the 14th. A unique MAC address is essential to network routing, that is, getting the packets that your computer sends to a specific web site returned back to you and not to someone else. In Windows and Mac PCs, you cannot change this number. In Linux machines, even though the number is burned in to a read-only memory chip, it can be changed if you want to tinker at that level. I don't know if you can change it on an Android smart phones whose operating system is based on Linux.
In this case, Renew Now claimed that they were just gathering the manufacturer code of the MAC address, so it wasn't tracking you, it was tracking who made your smart phone. Marketers like to make assumptions about people based on branding, for example, some web sites look to see if you're accessing them from a Mac, and if so, they charge you a higher price because they know you'll pay more money for some types of computer hardware. It's a very broad brush that they're painting with, and I think it's fallacious when it comes to smart phones. If someone drives a Ferrari, yes, you can assume they're wealthy. Smart phones, not so much. I was making less than $30k annually when my wife bought me my iPhone, that ain't wealthy.
The only way to truly block tracking like this is to either turn off the WiFi on your phone when you're out in public, or turn off your phone altogether. How many people could or would actually do that? It's funny to think about 20 years ago when almost no one owned a cell phone.