London tosses out recycling bin technology that tracks people

LONDON — The testing of futuristic recycling bins that can track people walking through London’s financial district has been, well, trashed for now.

Pressed by local officials, the Renew advertising firm called off using technology embedded in a dozen glossy, black recycling “pods” to detect passersby and follow them down the street using the signals emitted from their smartphones. The company carries out advertising campaigns and beams public service information on recycling bins in the City, as the square-mile financial district of London is known.

“We have already asked the firm concerned to stop this data collection immediately, and we have also taken the issue to the information commissioner’s office,” a City of London Corp. spokesman said. “Irrespective of what’s technically possible, anything that happens like this on the streets needs to be done carefully, with the backing of an informed public.”

Kaveh Memari, chief executive of Renew, canceled the monitoring Monday night but said it was only a pilot project that involved counting passersby and had not collected specific data.

“A limited number of pods had been testing and collecting anonymized and aggregated MAC [media access control] addresses from the street and sending one report every three minutes concerning total footfall data from the sites,” he explained in a statement Monday describing the project, which has already tracked more than 4 million passing smartphones.

“The process is very much like a website,” he said. “You can tell how many hits you have had and evaluate repeat visitors, but we cannot tell anything personal about any of the visitors on the website.”

About 200 of the sci-fi looking pods dot the City. They transmit on-screen messages of public interest such as travel updates, market indexes, emergency messages and advertisements.

Concerns were raised after Renew announced the project in June as “an in-built hardware device that captures smartphone data in real time,” describing it as “a powerful tool for corporate clients and retailers” that counted passersby and targeted areas such as subway stations and stores.

“We will see all MACs that currently shop at the stores, and we will be able to measure any new MACs arriving into the venue and the route they take,” the announcement said.

Nick Pickles, leader of Big Brother Watch, a privacy campaign group, saw it as a “blatant attack on people’s privacy,” he said in a post on the group’s website.

“Systems like this highlight how technology has made tracking us much easier, and in the rush to generate data and revenue there is not enough of a deterrent for people to stop and ensure that people are asked to give their consent before any data is collected.”

But Memari’s explanation Tuesday was that future development of the program depended on discussions with technology companies and privacy groups. The project at present is “basically … a counter on the street.”

Smartphone data collection was “not about who [the owners] are.... We don’t really care what a MAC address is, whether we store it or scramble it; it’s just a count for us,” he said, emphasizing the importance of getting “on board with some of the concerns that the privacy groups have.”

“A lot of the technology we will test will be at the boundaries of what the law has caught up with,” so the aim is to combine cutting-edge technology with best practice, he added.

Renew started on-screen street advertising with public messages after the July 2005 terrorist attacks on London’s transit system, when emergency services suffered from a cellphone network breakdown and no information could get through to afflicted areas. The pods operate independent of mobile networks.

“The screens are an emergency broadcast channel, and a public information channel ... and the daily function of the pods is as a recycling unit,” Memari explained, saying the company is looking to expand its technology.

“The next question is as a media outlet how many people does this reach?” he said. “How many people walk past this site? Current technology doesn’t correlate to a person. It could be a car; a person could have three [mobile devices].”

However, the City of London Corp. was adamant in stating that data collection must stop while the project is reviewed.

Sanjay Odedra, of the City of London press office, confirmed that the City of London Corp. contracted for the bins but was unaware of the tracking experiment.

“We were not aware of the tracking device until we found out last week from media reports and we asked the company to stop using the tracking device,” Odedra said, adding that city officials did not read the company press release in June.

Stobart is a news assistant in The Times’ London bureau.