City of London calls halt to smartphone tracking bins

For those unaware, this is not &quot;London&quot; that&#x27;s stopping the tracking bins, it&#x27;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.<p>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.

Am I the only one who finds that a bit silly? Perhaps the next step will be that we won&#x27;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?<p>I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if every smartphone with WLAN also &quot;tracks&quot; other people on the street - if it keeps a list of WLANs it recently encountered.<p>Offering HotSpots would become troublesome, too.<p>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?

Note that it&#x27;s the &#x27;City of London Corporation&#x27; [1] that&#x27;s called for a halt. The title at the moment implies that the authorities of London as a whole have gotten involved.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;City_of_London_Corporation</a>

I keep seeing these Renew people dance around this whole &quot;identifying information&quot; thing.<p>Maybe they clarified it somewhere along the line, but I read the quartz article and the one before.<p>I can&#x27;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 &quot;0001&quot;, clearly that&#x27;s just as identifiable.<p>I genuinely can&#x27;t think of a reason to gather MAC addresses other than to use them for profiling.<p>The human footfall&#x2F;bean counter thing is great [1], but not worth any money to anyone. Seems more like a PoC...<p>I don&#x27;t know a lot about AI recognition but I&#x27;d have thought you could have a camera counting people fairly easily.<p>I actually don&#x27;t personally mind, I think it&#x27;s fair game unless the government says it isn&#x27;t - and then I can go back to just the worry of blackhats.<p>So unless I&#x27;m very mistaken this Reveal&#x2F;Orb company are either building profiles, plan to, or have a business plan [1] that is going nowhere big.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.littlesheep-learning.co.uk/images/Tally_Counter.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.littlesheep-learning.co.uk&#x2F;images&#x2F;Tally_Counter.j...</a>

1) Good.<p>2) who the hell wrote this article?<p><i>&quot;The UK and the EU have strict laws about mining personal data using cookies, which involves effectively installing a small monitoring device on people&#x27;s phones or computers, but the process of tracking MAC codes leaves no trace on individuals&#x27; handsets.&quot;</i><p>I&#x27;m sorry, what now? a small data file is <i>not</i> a &quot;device.&quot; (answer: Joe Miller, apparently.)

I figured it to be a publicity stunt, the bins are selling advertising, this gets their description and capabilities into the press.<p>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.<p>If done right you could do &quot;recognition&quot; 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.

How hypocritical. Governments love to limit companies from tracking data and talk about citizen privacy. Meanwhile, they&#x27;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.<p>(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.<p>Maybe you should just stop shouting your name.