De Intelligentie van de weg - Phorm voor winkelende centra?
Spion Blog | Enkel voor het geval dat u dat dacht Phorm was de enige bedreiging voor uw privacy, is hier een voorbeeld van gelijkaardige „geen opt-out“ snooping technologie die in de infrastructuur van een openbare ruimte, een winkelend centrum wordt geïnstalleerdr, dat in het geheim snoops op individuen, zonder hun geïnformeerden voorafgaande toestemming, in de hoop dat reclame en verkoop de opbrengsten kunnen worden gemaximaliseerd.
Er is geen manier, kort van het uitschakelen van uw mobiele telefoon, van het uitstappen of het vermijden van deze snooping regeling.
The Times heeft een verhaal:
Van Tijden Online 16 Mei, 2008De winkels volgen in het geheim klanten via mobiele telefoon
De signalen die telefonisch worden verspreid staan winkelende centra toe om te controleren hoe lang het mensenverblijf en dat zij bezoekt opslaat
Jonathan Richards, San Francisco
De klanten in winkelende centra hebben hun elke beweging die door een nieuw type van toezicht wordt gevolgd dat binnen op het fluisteren van hun mobiele telefoons luistert.
De technologie kan vertellen wanneer de mensen een winkelend centrum ingaan, wat zij bezoekt opslaat, hoe lang zij daar blijven, en welke route die zij aangezien zij rondwandelden hebben genomen.
Alle zelfde kwesties over het gebrek aan geïnformeerdeo, voorafgaande toestemming van het publiek dat, is geweest of nu snooped in geheim, voor het commerciële voordeel van anderen geweest, zijn van toepassing op Path Intelligence Ltd. (technologieleverancier), de winkelende centra (openbare infrastructuurleveranciers), en detailhandelaars (winstmakers), enkel aangezien zij aan Phorm (technologieleverancier), de Dienstverleners Van Internet (openbare infrastructuurleveranciers) en Webadvertisers doen (winstmakers).
Als u bekijkt demonstratie (behoeftenFlits) van de interactieve het in kaart brengen en rapporteringssoftware die de Intelligentie van de Weg schijnt om voor deze snooping technologie ontwikkeld te hebben, zult u zien dat het ook gemakkelijk kon worden toegepast om input van andere „spion op het publiek zonder hun kennis of toestemmings“ technologieën te tonen en te analyseren die dingen exploiteren die de grote aantallen mensen hun personen, zoals BlueTooth zouden kunnen vervoeren of verbruiksgoederenRFID markeringen, of „Biometrische“ Paspoorten of de Kaarten van identiteitskaart unkilled.
Het zou vrij eenvoudig moeten zijn om zulk een systeem met de bestaande netwerken van de het toezichtcamera van kabeltelevisie te verbinden die de moderne winkelende centra allen aanwenden.
Sharon Biggar, the company’s chief operating officer, said that one of the stores which had already deployed the receivers did not want its name revealed for fear of alarming its customers.
Who is this snooping retailer ? Why should we not boycott them ?
The company that makes the dishes, which measure 30cm (12 inches) square and are placed on walls around the centre, said that they were useful to centres that wanted to learn more about the way their customers used the store.
A shopping mall could, for example, find out that 10,000 people were still in the store at 6pm, helping to make a case for longer opening hours, or that a majority of customers who visited Gap also went to Next, which could useful for marketing purposes.
10,000 people in a store sounds positively dangerous. Perhaps they mean within the shopping centre.
Why would large crowds of shoppers still milling around at closing time not be utterly obvious to human staff, without the need for this snooping technology ?
It has already been installed in two shopping centres, including Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, and three more centres will begin using it next month, Times Online has learnt.
The other shopping centre may well be newly refurbished The Cascades, also in Portsmouth - there appears to
In the case of Gunwharf Quays, managers were surprised to discover that an unusually high percentage of visitors were German - the receivers can tell in which country each phone is registered - which led to the management translating the instructions in the car park.
Why could none of the shopping centre staff or retail shop staff determine that there were lots of German speaking visitors ?
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) expressed cautious approval of the technology, which does not identify the owner of the phone but rather the handset’s IMEI code - a unique number given to every device so that the network can recognise it.
But an ICO spokesman said, “we would be very worried if this technology was used in connection with other systems that contain personal information, if the intention was to provide more detailed profiles about identifiable individuals and their shopping habits.”
Errr… it is a shopping centre stuffed full of CCTV cameras and private security guards - who seriously believes that this FootPath(tm) snooping will never be used in conjunction with CCTV ?
Only the phone network can match a handset’s IMEI number to the personal details of a customer.
Path Intelligence, the Portsmouth-based company which developed the technology, said its equipment was just a tool for market research. “There’s absolutely no way we can link the information we gather back to the individual,” a spokeswoman said. “There’s nothing personal in the data.”
Nonsense ! Path Intelligence lists a long list of possibly commercially useful benefits of their system to shopping centre operators and retailers, most of which can and should only be accomplished through the use of anonymous aggregated statistics.
However, if you read the last section of the list of claimed benefits for the FootPath(tm) product, they admit that it is capable of identifying individuals
Security:
* Identify unauthorized individuals in ‘no go’ areas of the centre
* Identify suspicious ‘left’ luggage
How is it possible to do this with truly anonymous data ? Either there is a “whitelist” of individual authorised staff phones or a “blacklist” of alleged individual “troublemaker” phones, or there is one watchlist database with different status flags.
This visualisation graphic screenshot clearly shows that shoppers can be tracked individually. The apparent “walking through walls” effect is an artifact of the path that the software uses to join the periodic data points, which are probably about 5 to 10 minutes apart, i.e. when your mobile phone makes a handshake with the network, to check signal strength with the neighbouring mobile phone cell tower base stations.
See the original screenshot here.
The description of the features of the PI Explorer software which analyses the data from the snooping antennas includes:
Security alerts that send an SMS message should a security situation be identified
Just as with Phorm, it is up to Path Intelligence to prove and reassure the general public that it is impossible for their system to be abused. We will not simply take it on trust, from people with commercial or other motives for extending the surveillance capabilities of a system, which does not have any way for people to opt out of being snooped on.
Can you spot the IMEI snooping antennas ?
The Times article says that the first secret trials of this technology on the unsuspecting public are being conducted by this Portsmouth based company seem to be at the local Gunwharf Quay shopping centre, although we suspect that it may have also been tested, or is still in use, at the Cascades shopping centre, also in Portsmouth (there seems to be a Cascades demo on the Path Intelligence website, as well as a West Quay one)
We would welcome any photos and location reports from any Spy Blog readers who can spot the locations of the mobile phone signal snooping antennas - “30cm (12 inches) square “.
(original image from The Times article)
See the Gunwharf Quay shopping centre maps.
What is the density of the snooping antennas required in order to achieve a location accuracy of 1 to 2 metres indoors ?
The receivers together cost about £20,000 to rent per month. About 20 of the units, which are unobtrusive, cream-coloured boxes about the size of a satellite dish, would be needed to cover the Bluewater shopping centre.
Bluewater (near Dagenham in London), is a much larger shopping centre than Gunwharf Quays
Are there any Warning Signs or notices on display at these shopping centres, which warn their customers or potential customers and other members of the public that their mobile phones are being tracked ?
Can these systems also track IMEI signals from the neighbouring area outside of the shopping centre or its car parks ?
N.B. Similar location snooping results could be achieved by the Mobile Phone Networks, and their Location Based Data services, especially at, say, Airports, where there are lots of mobile phone micro-cells or pico-cells installed, to try to grab profitable business account customers and tourists with expensive call roaming charges on their network rather than on their rivals networks, when the visitors first switch on their mobile phones after landing.
Secure Web interface ?
Those Spy Blog readers who remember our criticisms of various Mobile Phone Location Based Services systems launched in recent years, will know that we are rightly sceptical when we see that such potentially sensitive data e.g. the location of your children, is not being processed and securely stored locally, but is happily being uploaded and then made available via the inherently insecure internet.
Path Intelligence Explorer is our secure, internet delivery solution. Your data can be accessed 24/7, allowing you the convenience to interrogate your information from anywhere in the world
What proof is there that such a web based system is not vulnerable to unathorised access from anywhere in the world ?
There is no indication that this data is strongly encrypted, either when it is being uploaded from the snooping antennas, nor when a customer downloads web based graphical or Excel spreadsheet reports.
Why not use it in Prisons instead ?
There is a place for this mobile phone location snooping technology, to operate without the informed consent of the people whose mobile phone locations are being tracked by the FootPath(tm) system , but that is not in any public shopping areas. It could and should be deployed in every prison, given the vast numbers of illegal mobile phones which are smuggled into British prisons every year.
See Thousands of Mobile Phones seized in UK Prisons - evidence of corruption ?
There have been attempts to use similar RFID badge based location tagging in a couple of US Prisons, so as to keep prison gang members under surveillance.
Please do not deploy such prison panopticon technology against the innocent public.
Illegal to spoof IMEI
The first reaction of some of our more technically proficient readers might be to start thinking of ways to devise IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identifier) spoofing devices, to frustrate any such snooping system.
However, apart from probably disrupting the local mobile phone system for other users, including possible life saving calls to the Emergency Services, this would be illegal in the United Kingdom and punishable by up to 5 years in prison, a serious enough offence to invoke extradition proceedings from abroad, if necessary.
See Mobile Telephones (Re-programming) Act 2002
This badly worded Act criminalises the mere possession of equipment or software (i.e. a computer and a serial cable or BlueTooth connection) which may be used, or the actual act of changing an IMEI without the written permission of the (usually foreign) handset manufacturer (incredibly, not, the UK based mobile phone network operator),.-
This Act has been recently amended to also criminalise simply advertising or offering such an IMEI re-programming service or product.
Note that the stupid wording of this Act also criminalises any spoofing or changing of IP addresses or MAC addresses of BlueTooth or WiFi or internet data connected WAP phones, SmartPhones etc. which connect to the internet via GSM or 3G data services i.e. most modern mobile phones, PDAs and portable computers which can act as mobile telephones.
See More:Big Brother UK NewsHave Your Say: Path Intelligence - Phorm for shopping centres?
Please note, only selected comments will be published.
Or discuss this report in our our new forums
This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 9:23 pm and is filed under Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News, General . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Free Newsletter
Loading ...Related News
- Mobile Spy ups mobile snooping powers
- Spy laws track mobile phones
- McDonalds Starts RFID Trial in Korea
- Mobiles to become digital wallets
- Mobile phones ‘more dangerous than smoking’
Email This Page To A Friend
Latest Headlines
- Amnesty urges next US president to ban torture
- Ireland accused of failing on flight rendition
- Brown: To Be More Than an Accessory to War Crimes
- UK ready to scrap killer cluster bombs
- Report: US cluster bombs were faulty
- Iraq War May Have Increased Energy Costs by $6 Trillion
- A Real Inside Job; Anthrax
- Orwellian Ubiquitous Computing?
- Appeal from Tony Benn / Stop the War Coalition
- American Psychological Association Supports Torture
More Breaking News
Archive
