Paul Lewis

London Guardian

Monday, July 21, 2008

Tens of thousands of Britons are being covertly tracked without their consent in a technology experiment which has installed scanners at secret locations in offices, campuses, streets and pubs to pinpoint people’s whereabouts.

The scanners, the first 10 of which were installed in Bath three years ago, are capturing Bluetooth radio signals transmitted from devices such as mobile phones, laptops and digital cameras, and using the data to follow unwitting targets without their permission.

The data is being used in a project called Cityware to study how people move around cities. But pedestrians are not being told that the devices they carry around in their pockets and handbags could be providing a permanent record of their journeys, which is then stored on a central database.

The Bath University researchers behind the project claim their scanners do not have access to the identity of the people tracked.

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Eamonn O’Neill, Cityware’s director, said: “The objective is not to track individuals, whether by Bluetooth or any other means. We are interested in the aggregate behaviour of city dwellers as a whole. The notion that any agency would seriously consider Bluetooth scanning as a surveillance technique is ludicrous.”

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But privacy experts disagree, pointing out that Bluetooth signals are assigned code names that can, to varying degrees, indicate a person’s identity.

Many people use pseudonyms, nicknames, initials, or abbreviations to identify their Bluetooth signals. Cityware’s scanners are also picking up signals that are listed using people’s full name, email address and telephone numbers.

Contacted about the Cityware project, the office of the information commissioner said in a statement that the public should “think carefully” before switching on their Bluetooth signals. A spokesman said the government watchdog would “monitor” the experiment.

“This is yet another example of moronic use of technology,” said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, an independent campaigning group defending personal privacy. “For Bath University to assert that there aren’t privacy implications demonstrates an astonishing disregard for consumer rights. If the technology is as safe as they claim, then all the technical specifications should be published and people should be informed when they are being tracked.”

He added: “This technology could well become the CCTV of the mobile industry. It would not take much adjustment to make this system a ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure over which we have no control.”

Although initially confined to Bath, Cityware has spread across the planet after the software was made freely available on the internet sites Facebook and Second Life. Thousands of people downloaded the software to equip their home and office computers with Cityware scanners.

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This article was posted: Monday, July 21, 2008 at 11:58 am

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