You may want to think twice before switching your phone setting to WiFi the next time you are in Great Britain. London-based marketing firm Renew’s ORB technology allows trash cans (or seemingly anything for that matter) to spy on people’s habits through their smartphones, and it has now been released into the wild. For example, in a press release the company boasts:
It provides an unparalleled insight into the past behavior of unique devices—entry/exit points, dwell times, places of work, places of interest, and affinity to other devices.
Awesome. This basically looks like metadata for retailers, or the corporate side of the NSA spy story in many ways. Here’s a company video:
More from ArsTechnica:
Renew, the London-based marketing firm behind the smart trash cans, bills the Wi-Fi tracking as being “like Internet cookies in the real world.” In a press release, it boasts of the data-collection prowess of the cans’ embedded Renew “ORB” technology, which captures the unique media access control (MAC) address of smartphones that belong to passersby. During a one-week period in June, just 12 cans, or about 10 percent of the company’s fleet, tracked more than 4 million devices and allowed company marketers to map the “footfall” of their owners within a 4-minute walking distance to various stores.
“The consolidated data of the beta testing highlights the significance of the Renew ORB technology as a powerful tool for corporate clients and retailers,” the Renew press release states. “It provides an unparalleled insight into the past behavior of unique devices—entry/exit points, dwell times, places of work, places of interest, and affinity to other devices—and should provide a compelling reach database for predictive analytics (likely places to eat, drink, personal habits, etc.).”
This dystopic possibility of trash cans that can recognize passersby seems to be lost on Renew, which has hinted at the possibility of bringing smartphone-tracking bins to New York and Singapore as well.
There’s no indication that Renew is observing anything more than the MAC address of the phones that pass by. But there’s little stopping someone else—working for his own creepy motives or for a more nefarious company or government agency—from building a similar network that collects the same MAC address data and combines it with any unencrypted traffic that may leak out. At a minimum, that might include the names of wireless networks a particular phone regularly connects to, and in the event the phone is connected to an open Wi-Fi service while in range of the stalker boxes, the information could also include e-mail addresses, personal pictures, first and last names, and whether the person uses a dating website or other online services.
All of this technology is well and good, but my biggest issue is that it should not be the default setting. If people want to use it, they should be made to voluntarily sign up for it. They should not be indiscriminately subjected to it just because they carry a phone and utilize WiFi.
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Mike
Follow me on Twitter!
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G
Follow me on Twitter.
How long before the cops get ahold of this data.
There were 10 phones at the liquor robbery, 1 is the owner of the liquor store, 4 are customers who stayed and talked to the cops, 3 were customers who left.
Lets track down the other two phones and pick them up for questioning.