Visitors to Hyde Park, one of London’s most famous tourist spots, were covertly tracked via their mobile phone signals in a trial undertaken by the Royal Parks to analyse footfall amid drastic funding cuts.

Officials were able to retrospectively locate park-goers for 12 months using anonymised mobile phone data provided by the network operator EE via a third party.

Aggregated age and gender data was also made available during the initiative. If a zone of the park contained more than 50 people at once, it was possible to “drill down” to the aggregated demographic data of visitors to that area too, creating a detailed picture of how different people used the park in previous months.

The third party which supplied the phone-tracking service, Future Cities Catapult (FCC) – a government-funded initiative which focuses on urban renewal – harvested data that officials from the Royal Parks said allowed them to review the number of visitors to Hyde Park and their distribution on a heat map.

The data also showed the percentage of people to have visited from different boroughs, towns and cities.



EE triangulated visitors’ locations from local mobile phone masts and sold the data to FCC, which has been tasked with the transformation of Hyde Park’s technology. Only EE users were captured in the trial.

The trial took place from August 2014 to August 2015 and used mobile data with a four-week delay, according to EE.

Colin Buttery, deputy chief executive at the Royal Parks, told the Guardian the organisation could benefit from up-to-date methods to measure visitors: “It would be great to find out how many people are in the park today, but that is very much blue-sky thinking.”



But Buttery added that it would not be possible to use mobile data for same-day visitor counts, while EE confirmed all its mobile data was sold with a four-week delay.

The Royal Parks and FCC said location data could inform policing of crowds at large events, tailor amenities to park usage and protect the ecology of the park, which was visited 12.8m times in 2014.

The trial follows a decade of severe cuts to the Royal Parks’ government funding and a period of rapid diversification of its offering to visitors, including the launch of events such as Winter Wonderland, the annual festival and theme park, which attracted 4.5 million visitors to Hyde Park last year.



A ferris wheel at Winter Wonderland, which is one of the money-spinning events Hyde Park holds to make up its government funding shortfall. Photograph: Han Yan/Xinhua Press/Corbis

The Royal Parks’ government funding has fallen to an all-time low, while visitor numbers have hit record highs. State funding for the eight parks dropped from approximately 80% of total revenue 10 years ago to just 35% last year.

The number of visitors has nearly doubled to 77 million during the same period, making it the most popular urban parkland in the world.

The deal with FCC is one of a number of ways to help the parks plan ways of raising revenue to assist with their £35m annual operating costs, which have not increased over the past 10 years despite inflation. New cafes, shops and galleries also compensate for the funding shortfall.

The Hyde Park initiative shares similarities with plans to track visitors to London’s private garden bridge, revealed by the Guardian in November.

Usman Haque, co-founder of Thingful, a search engine for the Internet of Things, said: “The notion of public spaces includes within it some notion of being anonymous within that space. When you don’t have the option of defining that anonymity for yourself, I would argue your rights have been taken away.”

EE discloses in its privacy policy that it shares aggregated personal data about sales, customers and traffic patterns to third parties and says that the statistics will not include any information that “is likely to identify you”.

The sale of location and demographic data has become big business for mobile phone carriers, which are looking for new ways to generate revenue.

Customers are increasingly accessing “over the top” services such as Skype and WhatsApp through mobile internet data, which carries a lower profit margin than call minutes or multimedia messaging. According to AdAge, third-party data sharing now represents a $24bn (£16bn) industry.

In addition to providing mobile data, FCC also deployed soil moisture sensors and air pollution kits to monitor Hyde Park’s environmental status. Buttery said FCC’s work was just one way the Royal Parks was attempting to boost sustainability and protect the natural ecology while raising self-generated revenue.

A Royal Parks spokesman said: “Future Cities Catapult is very much a research project to which we have provided a venue for them to carry out a range of investigations including air, soil and water quality.

“While it would be useful to know how visitors use the park for future management, such as the provision of activities and amenities, and to protect the wildlife, we do not have plans to track real-time data of visitors through mobile phone data.

“The visitor data we saw as part of this project was several months old and was simply dots on a screen which showed us the flow of visitors. Any research of our visitors is carried out through official market research data.”

Scott Cain, chief business officer at FCC, said: “The work we do is around innovation that makes cities better. We take a human-centered designed approach to engage with people.

“In Hyde Park we were looking to help the park manage its resources and ecology more efficiently as well as tailor its service provision to the way in which the public actually use the park.”

An EE spokesman said: “Big data has proven to be a highly effective method of improving infrastructure and public services. We worked as part of the Sensing London project to inform the better use of the royal parks and provide greater understanding of the needs of park users.

“This would include providing anonymous and retrospective network usage data of large groups of people – without ever intruding on the privacy of individuals.”