Shopping Center Tracking System Condemned by Civil Rights Campaigners

hypnosec writes "Civil rights campaigners have spoken out against a technology used by several shopping centers in the UK to track consumers using their mobile signals. The shopping centers claim that the technology helps them provide better services to consumers and retailers without compromising privacy. The system, called the Footpath, allows them to know how people are spending time in a shopping center, which spots they visit the most and even the route they take while walking around. Several consumer and civil rights groups, including Big Brother Watch, say consumers must be given a choice on whether they want their movement tracked or not." We covered a similar tracking system here in the U.S. last month.

Conflicted Issue

[Xanny]

When you enter any private establishment, you forfeit any right to having your location at any time unknown or unrecorded. It becomes the individuals responsibility to inquire what information about them is being recorded and to chose to continue staying wherever they are or to leave, but when you enter you enter a contract with the owner of the establishment about your presence there.

In store cameras have never been complained about. It might be a breach of privacy to take advantage of radio signals from cell phones, since you never gave the store permission to use the signals your own device generates, but that is a matter of popular opinion - does the store have a right to record or use signals produced by their customers for their own purposes?

In general that is a no, so in that regard I side with the consumer. In the end, it is an argument of privacy in private - inside stores and other establishments you are not in public, so public law need not apply to you. The question is what can the owner of a private place you inhabit at any time do to you or involving you. I say monitoring location is not a problem - recording the radio waves generated by cell phones is kind of a problem.

Opt Out

[expo53d]

You can 'opt out' of this tracking service by turning off your mobile phone. But in this time and day, this solution seems akin to telling people to stop using email to 'opt out' from spam or to stop eating foods to 'opt out' of food poisoning. But even if the management wanted the costumers to be able to opt out, how would they do it? The only way is to tell the system to stop tracking the phones opted out, which means the system will need to start tracking the phones individually (to identify which phones are to be tracked and which are opted out), and by doing that, they enable the system to track *individual* users who have not opted out, making the issue worse for the average consumer who has no idea that these systems exist/how they work.

Re:There is another issue

[JasterBobaMereel]

Capturing and recording radio signals is fine, analysing them and extracting identifying information is another matter ...

that requires decryption, and could be considered hacking
and requires personal info to be stored which involves data protection

If they gain access to any personal information using this then they are almost certainly breaking data protection laws, this is why they keep stressing the "aggregated" but to track you need to identify individuals ....

No.

[Kupfernigk]

I suspect you will find that is a "radio broadcast signal". It may be legal to receive signals from the police, but I strongly suspect that if you were found to be recording those signals and then using them to predict police movements, you would be in breach of the law. I think you are deliberately confusing simple reception, which is unavoidable in many cases and therefore cannot be illegal, and the use that is made of intercepts.

If this tracking system stores no user information whatsoever, that would be one thing. But if it tracks phones by following MAC addresses or other information, and if there is CCTV, it can easily be argued that this could be used to store personal data by the simple route phone tracking -> cctv records -> facebook recognition (for instance). As the user does not know that s/he is being tracked, or even that this is possible, has not agreed to it, and does not know where to go to find the information, this appears to be in breach of Europen data protection legislation.

I note that you suddenly switch from intercepting signals to recording signals and then say "is wrong is absolute and totally fails". This is some Netherlands legal formulation with which I am not familiar. You also write "This should be obvious to anybody with a brain". I am afraid that these are not legal arguments; they are content free attempted sledgehammers to close down discussion. The fact that you feel the need to do this shows, frankly, that you know you are writing rubbish. If you believed your own argument, you would not feel the need to justify it by pre-emptively announcing that anyone who disagrees with you is stupid. You must be huge fun at management meetings.

Re:Incentives

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you hear the story where people visiting web shops on iPads paid higher prices for the same products? Why would a merchant do that? Because he has segmented the customer base into price-conscious people and people who have iPads.

The more information a merchant has about you, the closer he can get to the maximum price you're willing to pay. This is the reason why these systems are installed. If you're OK with paying more than you have to, these tracking systems should not worry you. In that case I suggest you never take up playing Poker.

There are other privacy issues when you can't control who else gets the information, but the intended consequences alone should be enough for customers to shun stores who track them.

Re:Incentives

[iter8]

IDK whats wrong if a database has a track of my monthly grocery purchases

It's MY information about ME. I don't collect information about how many cans of soup the market sells and I couldn't without the store's permission. Why should I want them to collect information about me to be sold to a 3rd party without asking me and paying me? If that information is valuable to a store, it's valuable to me. I want to know what clear benefit there is to me and I want to decide which transactions I engage in. I realize that is probably a vain hope since we long ago stopped being customers and became products.