Spying trash cans and Minority Report
It’s science-fiction time again: a British company is filling the center of London with sensors hidden in waste paper bins able to detect the MAC address of smartphones and other devices belonging to passers by. It stores their data and then sells it as “the cookie of the physical world”: an identifier capable of tracking a user on the move.
The comparison with cookies is spot on: the bins can identify a smartphone or other device associated with a particular user, providing information about them. In the case of smartphones, the risk of mistaken identity is virtually zero, given that we are rarely separated from them or lend them to other people, unlike a home computer, for example. The sensors cannot identify our name until we make a purchase, but it can build up a picture of our habits, tastes, movements, and many of our preferences.
The video and press release about ORB from Renew is worth a look. Over the course of a week, a dozen of these smartbins track more than four million devices, identifying half a million unique devices, hovering up data on traffic flow, the best-selling smartphones (one brand had a 67 percent share of the market), or their owners’ habits.
By now readers will be thinking, “isn’t this a scene from the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, the one where he goes into The Gap?” —although eye-scanning technology is still someway off being able to identify somebody on the move. I have used that scene in many of my classes, where it generates a strange mixture of anxiety and greed: anxiety among those who feel under surveillance, and greed on the part of those who see themselves using it to identify potential clients, imagining the increased sales it could generate.
Why bother scanning people’s eyes when it is so much easier to scan the smartphones that almost all of us now carry around with us at all times? The information environment we now live in is a cause for concern: it is no longer simply a case of feeling spied on by inanimate objects, but that we have no idea who has their hands on the information about us. Let’s not forget that this increased ability to harvest our data has not led to better service from companies; they are just better able to hassle us. We now know that we live in a world in which all reasonable controls over the use of information have been breached systematically, to the point where we are little more than laboratory hamsters in a maze, under observation by white-coated researchers.
And the conclusion to all this? The same as ever: technology is neither good nor bad; the question is what we choose to do with it. Carried out with discretion, with our approval, and subject to clear controls, there is nothing wrong with monitoring a potential customer’s arrival in a store, as long as the aim is to provide better service, make our lives easier, and of course sell us more stuff.
As things stand, in a London bristling with cameras and waste paper bins that monitor our movements, the chances of something like this being accepted as normal, instead of being seen as something of concern are minimal, and if we end up accepting it, it will be because we have no choice. As on so many other occasions, it is the misuse of technology by irresponsible organizations that do not take the long view as a key factor in its development that end up deciding its potential and development.
UPDATE (12/08/2013): The City of London demands the company to stop the collection of data given the strong public outcry about the issue. From their statement:
“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.”
