London Indoor Collection of Wi-Fi phone data was halted

NetEase Science and technology news August 13, according to foreign media reports, British officials said in Monday, set in the City of London's electronic recycling barrels must immediately stop the detection and capture the mobile phone data from the pedestrians. The British renew London Company has installed more than 10 electronic recycling bins that display advertising information in the streets of London's financial district. In addition to its imagery function, these devices can also detect and collect data on the distance, speed and manufacturer of the smartphone used by pedestrians through Wi-Fi signals. In the one weeks after the device was installed, renew collected approximately 4 million valid data (530,000 stand-alone devices, if divided by MAC address). The company said the data was stored anonymously, in order to track consumers ' shopping behavior through further analysis, and to put targeted advertising into consumers in the future. London's regulators, after being informed of Renew's behavior, said the tests to collect consumer phone data must be stopped immediately. "We have asked the company to consider halting this data collection immediately and have presented the issue to the UK privacy watchdog, Information Commissioner. Whether technically feasible or not, such things appear on the street, and we need to study them carefully to get the public informed and supportive. "The latest attempt by the renew company is hasty and clearly needs more consideration," said London's regulatory official. At the same time, data collection-even anonymous-needs to be stopped. "After the London regulator made a decision to stop the data collection immediately, Renew's president, Kaveh Memari, also issued a statement explaining:" I am worried that too much attention will remain on the headlines. The essence of the matter is that we have some technical tests, and that's what's more valuable. "We are no longer experimenting." In our initial experiment, only a limited number of devices were involved and anonymously collected some MAC addresses from the street, and the device sent a data report on the total traffic from the site every three minutes. Many of the features that have been speculated to be developed are now finally found to be viable. "(Lu Xin)