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London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked
11–20 of 114 posts
Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked
#12The article title is a little misleading: > people’s progress across the structure would be tracked by monitors detecting the Wi-Fi signals from their phones, which show up the device’s Mac address ...I think if you said "mobile phone signal" to someone round here they'd assume you were talking about the GSM radio. If you think shopping malls / cities aren't already using MAC addresses sniffed during WiFi discovery t…
randomizing helps, but they can still track you over the lifetime of the mac.
Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked
#13I would understand that in a private place such as Disneyland or in an ultra-orderly city such as Singapore. But for a so-called public park, this is an insult to democracy. Part of what makes public parks interesting is how impromptu activities take place.
Enforce existing law to keep people safe; no need for locking everything down.
Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked
#14There is an obvious creeping issue regarding the privatisation of public space, which is the interesting part here and what we should be pushing back against.
I'm less bothered about using wifi MACs to measure traffic, so long as no data is retained – it can provide useful insight into the number of visitors. Randomisation is obviously in modern devices, but I'd be concerned that older devices won't have the data regarding them deleted.
Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked
#15I would understand that in a private place such as Disneyland or in an ultra-orderly city such as Singapore. But for a so-called public park, this is an insult to democracy. Part of what makes public parks interesting is how impromptu activities take place. Enforce existing law to keep people safe; no need for locking everything down.
True, but it's not really a public park....
Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked
#16This article more or less describes what a police state would look like if the Church of England designed it. A controlled, plasticised, corporate Little England, where fun is monitored and must be of an approved nature, freedom of expression is allowed as long as you don't express anything disagreeable, and the public have no democratic rights at all. Yet another small, sad indicator that control over the lives of L…
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Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked
#17This does seem worrying, particularly the private citizens being given some limited subset of police power, to issue fines and confiscate items. > The Garden Bridge Trust said the planning documents detailed theoretical maximum powers that were extremely unlikely to be used It might be intended that way, but realistially, it seems that the exercise of power is invariably pushed to the theoretical maximum (and often b…
> particularly the private citizens being given some limited subset of police power
What is more worrying to me is when the police have more powers than the citizenry.
Recognising the right of free citizens to enforce the law is a-okay in my book, although of course that's not quite what England's doing.
Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked
#18The article is bitter sweet to me. Bitter because it's yet another little step in a huge march intended to erode freedom. Sweet, because they track WiFi signals.
In 2012 I started turning WiFi and location off on my phone as I left home. I remember the date because it's when London got 4G, and as of that date I no longer really needed WiFi, but I did need my battery to last the day.
It's become habit.
Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked
#19That's why Richard Stallman correctly described mobile phones as tracking and surveillance devices: > https://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html "Cell phones are tracking and surveillance devices. They all enable the phone system to record where the user goes, and many (perhaps all) can be remotely converted into listening devices."
The small educational centre where I teach has recently provided free wifi to users of the building. It is a good connection. You have to give a mobile phone number once to use the system.
This morning, I went in with my old Thinkpad on which I have replaced Xubuntu with Slackware/MLED including a complete reformat and encryption of the SSD. The wifi recognised the machine and greeted me by name. I can only assume that the server is recording the MAC addresses of devices that use the system. That is just about the only thing left that it could be reading.
Re: London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked
#20Note that there are plenty of shops doing this kind of thing already: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/datablog/2014/jan/10/h...
It seems this is the point people pick up on it and start pushing back a bit. The real point is halfway down: "The planning document stresses that the security measures are aimed primarily at crime and antisocial behaviour, and notes that staff would be expected to make full use of their CSAS powers to respond to protests or demonstrations, which are banned on the bridge."
A protest-free 'public' space. All part of the Singapore-isation of London. The garden bridge is a massive waste of partly-public money anyway; a conspicuous consumption vanity project like the (private) dangleway.