They've been collecting data for at least 3 years. It's only the detecting of attempted wifi connections but it's the best data source fro predicting overcrowding of stations. A lot of what they tried out to manage crowding during the Olympics is being refined and used to manage passenger flows so some passengers are sent on different routes.
Transport for London plans to collect data from passengers' mobiles
71–80 of 118 posts
Re: Transport for London plans to collect data from passengers' mobiles
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is just a convenient data grab and profiteering. I know people working on this project, and that is absolutely not their motivation. They want to better understand the movement of people within the system, so they can design better stations, trains, and services. The traditional way of understanding such passenger movements is by parking students with clipboards and people-counters all around stations, doing p…
Could you give more details of the kind of information they receive from wifi tracking that they don't already through oyster barriers and how this helps with service designs?
They want to detect overcrowding of stations which means before people have gone through any barriers
Re: Transport for London plans to collect data from passengers' mobiles
#73That is a pretty misleading headline - this isn't asking to see their text messages or something like that; It's just tracking when and where a MAC address is seen in order to work out traffic trends. In fact some of the data looks really interesting: https://imgur.com/Hx6mDSm.jpg (credit to bcraven for the link) Most large public WiFi deploys come with this capability already included (albeit normally with an additi…
Don't Android and iOS randomize the MAC addr these days? Are they investing in something that's going to have a very short life?
You need to login to the TFL WiFi using your Virgin Media or supported phone network's login, so they can identify you by that instead.
Re: Transport for London plans to collect data from passengers' mobiles
#74I used to work with a startup that did this data collection for British Rail at just these stations. It was used for fairly important things like "will this new bridge be sufficient for the passengers who currently walk all the way round to get to platform X. Will it be a crush risk / bottleneck". A railway station should be through of as a maze where the walls really do move in and out every few minutes. hundreds of…
The thing about slippery slope is that they are really awesome places to live, except for the constant risk of sliding where you don't want to be. The price of that awesomeness is vigilance, to remain precisely at the point on the slope you want to.
Re: Transport for London plans to collect data from passengers' mobiles
#75That is a pretty misleading headline - this isn't asking to see their text messages or something like that; It's just tracking when and where a MAC address is seen in order to work out traffic trends. In fact some of the data looks really interesting: https://imgur.com/Hx6mDSm.jpg (credit to bcraven for the link) Most large public WiFi deploys come with this capability already included (albeit normally with an additi…
The article does seem to be blowing up a relatively small issue.
However, if the intent is to work out traffic trends, it can be done much cleaner. For example, one can only track addresses within a single commute (it should not be difficult to guess from data). That is, use different hashes for the same MAC at different trips.
Also, IMO any general purpose data the government collects for the public benefit that it does not declare sensitive should be public. That is, quickly posted for public to see, use, check, etc. My 2c.
Re: Transport for London plans to collect data from passengers' mobiles
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is just a convenient data grab and profiteering. I know people working on this project, and that is absolutely not their motivation. They want to better understand the movement of people within the system, so they can design better stations, trains, and services. The traditional way of understanding such passenger movements is by parking students with clipboards and people-counters all around stations, doing p…
The point that this will be only used to improve services was denied in the article itself: "What they told people at the time was we're going to use this data to improve services. But now thanks to [Sky News] investigative reporting, we find out that it's partly to improve the services, but also it's to exploit people's data for revenue, doing advertising."
This just in, our reporter has learned that telling people "secrets" make them share articles with their friends. More to come in our next clickbait article.
Using the data to optimise advertising (and ad pricing) is pretty obvious. Nobody seems to be annoyed that there's advertising in the first place, this is a non-issue.
Re: Transport for London plans to collect data from passengers' mobiles
#77Re: Transport for London plans to collect data from passengers' mobiles
#78I'm actually happy about this. The data that has been collected is great ( http://content.tfl.gov.uk/review-tfl-wifi-pilot.pdf ) and not realistically available in any other way. The only data stored is (hashed) MAC and timestamp. It's taking place on a system where most users are already tracked semi-anonymously using contactless cards or Oyster cards, and is trivially avoidable by disabling wifi. This seems like a…
MAC do not contain enough entropy to be usefully one-way hashed.
MAC address is 48 bits of which 22 bits is vendor.
Re: Transport for London plans to collect data from passengers' mobiles
#79A more informative article was posted earlier last month (https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2017/09/08/tracking-smartph...), and there was more info on the data privacy elsewhere too (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/09/london_tube_trackin...) saying that TfL "depersonalized [MAC addresses] using a salt which [they] then discarded at the end of each day."
Re: Transport for London plans to collect data from passengers' mobiles
#80Even here in Germany of which most think that we have good privacy protection laws, mobile phone providers are collecting and selling anonymized movement profiles of their customers. Public transport companies use these to improve their service, as well as companies offering navigation systems. I would be surprised if tracking via the phone network was not common practice in other countries. In case of London, WiFi w…
For those who haven't seen it, here's a great illustration of what that data looked like for one person back in 2009: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention I can imagine that it's only gotten more granular and comprehensive since then.
That site makes me happier about being able to seldom carry my phone. I don't leave it home for privacy reasons, but that's a nice side benefit.