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.
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