City Of London Halts Recycling Firm's Phone Tracking Test
Source: TechWeek Europe
The City of London Corporation has ordered a provider of recycling bins in London to stop a trial in which its bins monitored the phones of passers-by for targeted advertising purposes.
London startup Renew has been operating 100 recycling bins in the East of London since the London Olympics, which are funded by advertising delivered over the Internet to digital screens on the receptacles. Twelve have been fitted with “Renew ORB” technology, which sniffs out signals from nearby smartphones when their Wi-Fi is turned on, and uses that data to glean specific information about behaviour. According to Quartz, the trial is designed to help Renew target its adverts, gathering personal data without permission, but the firm denies it is breaching privacy.
After concerns over privacy emerged, the City of London asked Renew to halt the trial, and has referred the case to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). Despite earlier claiming its project was nothing to complain about, Renew’s CE£O Kaveh Memari says the company has “stopped all trials in the meantime.”
... GigaOm’s David Meyer quotes an opinion from the EU’s Article 29 working party, which provides advice to regulators, saying “the combination of the unique MAC address and the calculated location of a Wi-Fi access point should be treated as personal data”. This means that anyone gathering this data would be required to ask permission, just as they do for ‘cookies’.
Read more: http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/recycling-bin-firm-denies-tracking-london-phones-with-wi-fi-124461
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