London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

This article more or less describes what a police state would look like if the Church of England designed it. A controlled, plasticised, corporate Little England, where fun is monitored and must be of an approved nature, freedom of expression is allowed as long as you don&#x27;t express anything disagreeable, and the public have no democratic rights at all.<p>Yet another small, sad indicator that control over the lives of Londoners and the spaces they live in is for sale to anyone with the money to buy it. “A private place operating as a public space” is not what I want to have on London&#x27;s limited real estate.

That&#x27;s why Richard Stallman correctly described mobile phones as tracking and surveillance devices:<p>&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallman.org&#x2F;rms-lifestyle.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallman.org&#x2F;rms-lifestyle.html</a><p>&quot;Cell phones are tracking and surveillance devices. They all enable the phone system to record where the user goes, and many (perhaps all) can be remotely converted into listening devices.&quot;

No flying kites? Isn&#x27;t that what we were saying you couldn&#x27;t do under Taliban control about 5 years ago and laughing at how ludicrous it was?<p>Nice to see tens of millions of public money going on vanity projects like this with ridiculous baggage attached to it.<p>The £20mm public loan over a 50 year period sounds interesting. I wonder what interest rate they are getting on that. I would LOVE to see it. Maybe I&#x27;ll do a FOI request. If I could bet on it, I&#x27;d bet they have a pretty swell deal.

I did a talk on privacy topics from a user&#x27;s perspective at a small &#x27;tech fair&#x27; this weekend and I was delighted to see this tweet showing a map of the venue showing everyone&#x27;s precise location: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;johnebridge&#x2F;status&#x2F;662984007370612736" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;johnebridge&#x2F;status&#x2F;662984007370612736</a><p>I was able to add it to the slide deck just in time and people were genuinely surprised by it. It&#x27;s a good thing that the company were transparent about it and shared the image but for many non-technical attendees it was a bit of a wake-up call.<p>&quot;Do you use the free WiFi at the local supermarkets?&quot; &quot;Did you buy a bunch of liquor and condoms, and then come back a few weeks later and buy pregnancy tests?&quot; &quot;Did you think you were pretty slick because you paid cash?&quot; The audience&#x27;s eyes getting bigger and bigger...

This does seem worrying, particularly the private citizens being given some limited subset of police power, to issue fines and confiscate items.<p>&gt; The Garden Bridge Trust said the planning documents detailed theoretical maximum powers that were extremely unlikely to be used<p>It might be intended that way, but realistially, it seems that the exercise of power is invariably pushed to the theoretical maximum (and often beyond).

The article title is a little misleading:<p>&gt; <i>people’s progress across the structure would be tracked by monitors detecting the Wi-Fi signals from their phones, which show up the device’s Mac address</i><p>...I think if you said &quot;mobile phone signal&quot; to someone round here they&#x27;d assume you were talking about the GSM radio. If you think shopping malls &#x2F; cities aren&#x27;t already using MAC addresses sniffed during WiFi discovery to track location you&#x27;re sadly mistaken (which is why iOS started randomizing them from iOS 8 onwards).

Note that there are plenty of shops doing this kind of thing already: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;datablog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;jan&#x2F;10&#x2F;how-tracking-customers-in-store-will-soon-be-the-norm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;datablog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;jan&#x2F;10&#x2F;h...</a><p>It seems this is the point people pick up on it and start pushing back a bit. The real point is halfway down: &quot;The planning document stresses that the security measures are aimed primarily at crime and antisocial behaviour, and notes that staff would be expected to make full use of their CSAS powers to respond to protests or demonstrations, which are banned on the bridge.&quot;<p>A protest-free &#x27;public&#x27; space. All part of the Singapore-isation of London. The garden bridge is a massive waste of partly-public money anyway; a conspicuous consumption vanity project like the (private) dangleway.

I would understand that in a private place such as Disneyland or in an ultra-orderly city such as Singapore. But for a so-called public park, this is an insult to democracy. Part of what makes public parks interesting is how impromptu activities take place.<p>Enforce existing law to keep people safe; no need for locking everything down.

Welcome to the future your cavalier &quot;It&#x27;s OK when I do it&quot; attitudes towards mass surveillance... er... I&#x27;m sorry... I mean &quot;telemetry&quot; are producing.

I guess this is another symptom of the UK&#x27;s rapid slide to totalitarianism. Recreational areas probably shouldn&#x27;t be strictly surveilled and regulated by quasi-cops at all times.<p>This isn&#x27;t public land, even though it&#x27;s built with public funds.

Brilliant quote:<p>The bridge trust said the proposed planning conditions would not amount to the structure becoming an overly controlled and regulated place, insisting the visitor hosts are “not police officers”. It said that while the visitor hosts would <i>theoretically</i> have the power to seize any banned items, in practice this would only happen with things such as alcohol.<p>Since when have any powers been granted on a theoretical basis?

The issue here is not so much the invasive tracking and such. That&#x27;s bad but it is private land.<p>The issue is that millions of dollars of taxpayers&#x27; money is being used to pay for things on private land as if it were public.

There is an obvious creeping issue regarding the privatisation of public space, which is the interesting part here and what we should be pushing back against.<p>I&#x27;m less bothered about using wifi MACs to measure traffic, so long as no data is retained – it can provide useful insight into the number of visitors. Randomisation is obviously in modern devices, but I&#x27;d be concerned that older devices won&#x27;t have the data regarding them deleted.

The article is bitter sweet to me. Bitter because it&#x27;s yet another little step in a huge march intended to erode freedom. Sweet, because they track WiFi signals.<p>In 2012 I started turning WiFi and location off on my phone as I left home. I remember the date because it&#x27;s when London got 4G, and as of that date I no longer really <i>needed</i> WiFi, but I did need my battery to last the day.<p>It&#x27;s become habit.

&quot;to have&quot; here is such a weasel phrase.<p>Properly phrased title: &quot;London Garden Bridge Trust will track mobile phone signals of bridge users&quot;