6 ms·
Digital signs in Brookline are collecting data from your phone as you walk by
- Temporary_31337 3y agoFUD. Collecting randomised MAC addresses is hardly something I would worry about. And if you are paranoid you turn off the wifi.
- goodSteveramos 3y agoIf they don’t convey information why would they bother collecting it?
- ToucanLoucan 3y agoBecause 4/5ths of the tech sector has been built on the back of absurdly low interest rates and gesturing to the future, shrugging your shoulders and saying "monetizing user data"?
- jMyles 3y agoMaybe to follow users during a single discrete trip through the space?
- stemlord 3y agoI realize these are public spaces we're talking about but to what extent are we willing to have our bodies and behaviors amplified, stored, copied, and otherwise scrutinized before we're allowed to feel some inherent right to personal privacy has been violated
- Temporary_31337 3y agoIf all the things to worry in the world, even in the narrow subsection of data privacy which feels like a 1st world human right, this particular case is not the one to worry about. Worry about how much Meta and Alphabet know about you, worry about the governments, but not the roadsign. Feels like a distraction
- aembleton 3y agoIf they employed someone with a clicker to count the number of passers by would you feel that your privacy had been violated? What if they used a light beam that counted every time someone passed through it?
- bonton89 3y agoI guess mac address tracking is better than the facial recognition method K-Mart was using.
- goodSteveramos 3y agoI had the same thought but then the kiosk could do that and they wouldn’t need to transmit the MAC to their server.
- quantified 3y agoSays that the MAC addresses are encrypted. Are they hashed, or truly encrypted? If encrypted, they can be decrypted.
- wizee 3y agoThe BLE MAC address consists of a random periodically changing part and a deterministically generated part based off encrypting the random part with a device-specific secret key (the Identity Resolving Key). This allows paired devices to identify the BLE advertiser since they know the IRK, while random devices like signs would not know the IRK and thus would not be able to deanonymize the MAC address. This feature is called Resolvable Private Addresses (RPA).
- Narkov 3y agoLarge retailers were doing this a decade ago. Doesn't MAC randomization used by both Apple and Android devices make this redundant?
- cma 3y agoDon't some people turn off randomization so that their router can assign a fixed internal IP address?
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoIf by some people you mean a small proportion of a small community like Hacker News then yes.
- rootusrootus 3y agoYes, but that setting is per network (at least on iOS). I only turn it off for my home network.
- gruez 3y agoSame on android. It defaults to per-network and the only way to change it is per network.
- Simulacra 3y agoLonger! Since the early 2000s.
- justinclift 3y agoWere they only using the data externally, or were they also selling/sharing it with third parties?
- linkjuice4all 3y agoI'm no legal expert but it seems like this data might be subject to FOIA requests - or at least should be anyway. If it is truly anonymized (yeah, right) then it could be released publicly. I'm not really sure what the general public would actually do with this data - but they paid for it so they should have access. Even better would be to not collect it at all. Is there some way to increase the cost of collecting/storing data like this so that more municipalities/organizations will just consider stuff like this "not worth it"? Even in cases where courts have found that the government (or their agents e.g. a police officer) didn't have the authority to surveil the public without a warrant they were able to purchase private data and construct a parallel chain of evidence that didn't involve the warrant-less surveillance.
- AnarchismIsCool 3y agoHow does a randomized mac address or "ip address" provide demographic info? Either this is terrible tech journalism because they're making shit up or it's terrible tech journalism because the company is doing something much more concerning but they don't understand it and can't articulate it.
- whoopdedo 3y agoIt serves the purpose of redirecting public funds into a private company's coffer. > collecting data from prople's phones ... and then sharing that information with the town By "sharing" I assume they mean "selling". The question to ask is who in the city approved this and what is their relationship with Soofa?
- Larrikin 3y agoWhat's the best way to anonymously ruin their data?
- tantalor 3y agoShould be relatively easy to "flood the zone" with tons of fake MACs as you walk by. Once they realize 100 million people did not really visit that sign, they might reconsider.
- dclowd9901 3y agoAn enterprising person could probably design a casing for a solar powered Pi and stick it to the top of the kiosk.
- zxexz 3y agoOr just set up your own recorder at each sign and replay the last week’s traffic in random order.
- bonton89 3y agoReminds me of the guy who created rolling traffic jams on google maps by pushing around a wheelbarrow full of phones.
- lodovic 3y agoI was wondering that too. Instead of having to guard my phone's settings all the time to prevent leaking data, I'd rather poison the well. It would be interesting to see if you can use a Flipper Zero to flood these devices with fake or corrupted data (and perhaps cause some interesting side effects).
- ac29 3y agoFlipper Zero doesnt have wifi (though there are external solutions). Probably easier to do what you describe with a laptop or smartphone.
- tomlockwood 3y agoThis has been happening for literal years now.
- pmayrgundter 3y ago"To avoid data collection from Soofa signs, they would either need to turn off their phone’s wifi detection and Bluetooth or avoid the signs as a whole." These should be defaults. Android has options to WiFi scanning off. Does OSX?
- justinclift 3y agoWell, iOS is apparently supposed to allow for turning it off. But that doesn't actually work. Saying that as an iPhone user who keeps turning Bluetooth off in the Settings app, but it doesn't stick. It's always on again a day or so later (the next time I check). So either iOS is buggy in this regards, or it's not actually possible to turn Bluetooth off permanently. :(
- kibwen 3y agoIn addition, even if you go into the settings app and turn off wifi (which is supposed to be an actual disabling, unlike toggling the wifi in the quick access menu, which is automatically undone after a certain amount of time), it will be turned on again the next time the device reboots.
- hgfghj 3y agoI just tested this on my iPhone, and kibwen’s claim is false. The wifi remained disabled after a reboot.
- justinclift 3y agoAre you able to leave it off for a few days and see if it magically turns back on without you touching it?
- hgfghj 3y agoNo, I don't have a spare phone.
- 3y ago
- neilv 3y agoWhat is the contract between Soofa and the City of Brookline? > Assistant town administrator Devon Fields, who led the implementation of the program before her recent departure from the position, [...] The town’s transportation division previously had an employee who worked directly with Soofa regarding data collection, but they left the department more than a year ago and have not been replaced. [...] the department has not been actively using information collected by the boards, [...] Fields will be the incoming deputy city manager of operations for the city of Chelsea. Is that contract regretted by the city? If so, how much? (The journalist seemed to hint that the program was a flop for Brookline, but didn't get much into that. For a career move, Chelsea is a different kind of Greater Boston city than Brookline is, so could be a more interesting challenge, or better growth opportunity.)
- internetter 3y ago> Is that contract regretted by the city? If so, how much? I haven't researched the exact terms of the contract, but it's possible the signs were pro-bono, as 1. Part of it is that advertisers can pay ~$100-$250 a month to display ads on these signs and I'm guessing soofa takes a cut 2. In Brookline, these were sponsored by Brookline Bank, so they get free advertising
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- EdwardDiego 3y agoA German adtech company was going to do this in collaboration with Shazam, I strongly suspect the GDPR put paid to that.
- Simulacra 3y agoI learned about this from an old book, called "No Place to Hide" (2006) about how shopping malls have these chokepoints, that have Bluetooth and other data sensors to collect EMIDs etc. today I think it's even worse. Data from mobile devices are being pinned and harvested constantly. Maybe one day, Apple? will allow us to see and block pinging signals attempting to harvest data. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/No-Place-to-Hide/Robert-OHarrow/9780743287050 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/No-Place-to-Hide/Robe...
- aembleton 3y ago> Maybe one day, Apple? will allow us to see and block pinging signals attempting to harvest data. Your phone is the one doing the pinging. I guess Apple could stop it doing that, but then it would be slower to get your location and the Airtag system would be less effective.
- HeavyFeather 3y ago> The signs also collect IP addresses. Uh, false? What IP address? This sentence is meaningless, users don’t connect to the sign, so there’s no IP to it. This article is just scaremongering by people who don’t know technology.
- ryanjshaw 3y agoAgreed, there is no IP address to collect, so this part of the article is inaccurate. The rest of the article is not necessarily scaremongering, but they don't explain the issue well: it's not just a "giant clicker" as described, because it collects personally identifiable information (cellphone MAC address) without permission. This would be illegal in many other countries. Additionallu, they claim the data is "encrypted" but since it's not an open algorithm it's possible that it's flawed, either because it's deterministic or reversible.
- voidUpdate 3y agoI mean, all encryption is reversible, that's sort of the point :P I'd much rather it was hashed instead
- aembleton 3y ago> personally identifiable information (cellphone MAC address) On many phones they rotate. Are they still PII?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wutwutwat 3y agoNothing new... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluetooth-wireless-tracking-privacy.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluet... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_Reveal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_Reveal https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/19/21011527/retail-tracking-apps-wifi-bluetooth-facebook-ads https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/19/21011527/retail-tracki... https://liveramp.com/ https://liveramp.com/ to name a few
- internetter 3y agoalso this liveoverflow video I particularly enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeAKTjx_eKA&t=937s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeAKTjx_eKA&t=937s I'm curious how often governments (as opposed to businesses) have done this?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoPeople need to know. There are no new crimes, but they're always wrong.
- neilv 3y agoWhen Soofa started, they managed to get USB-charging benches installed around the Boston area. The concern I raised at the time was that the company was being allowed to install general purpose equipment housings in prime heavy-foot-traffic locations -- and the company could use these to deploy surveillance capitalism equipment they controlled. Looks like that's a direction Soofa is going in.
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoHabits: - Leave home: turn wifi off, turn mobile data on - Arrive home: turn wifi on, turn mobile data off - Bluetooth off unless paired with car / earbuds *Need to check MAC randomisation settings
- lloeki 3y agoHabits -> Shortcuts.app -> Automation -> Personal automation on a geofence
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoHehe, yes, except I have Location off unless navigation is required ;)
- lxgr 3y agoWhy? This makes your location less accurate, breaks Airdrop (on iOS), and doesn't really help privacy given that MAC randomization has been a thing for a while now. One exception is if you have ever connected to a hidden SSID: Due to how the protocol works, your phone has to broadcast that SSID name occasionally to probe for any access points nearby that might be part of it. Newer iOS versions specifically warn of this when connecting to one.
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoWhy does my location have to be accurate? Why does my location have to be known by my phone at all, outside of when I need to do something location related?
- lxgr 3y agoEverybody uses their phone differently of course, but I'd find it very inconvenient having to enable Wi-Fi every time I want to check my location on a map. I don't think it's too much to ask of a mobile OS to make that safely possible without exposing PII over the air to any advertisers nearby.
- 3y ago
- joecool1029 3y agoAs others have pointed out, mac randomization mostly greatly reduces privacy risk. I'm not sure wifi scanning emits your mac address unless you connect to hidden ssid's. Bluetooth devices always bark out some kind of beacons when turned on. This is basically a door people counter made for areas where you couldn't have a door. Malls used that tech 30+ years ago, little LED sensor that counted up every time the beam was broken. Small LCD screen usually at the bottom of the gates you pass through going in. If not a gate, then usually a beam with a reflector on the other side and the screen was on back of the beam/sensor unit. For this use case, easier to count active mac addresses to figure out how busy each area is, doesn't have to be precise but it lets the town and advertiser know whether it makes sense to install a sign somewhere. Gives a general idea of ad impressions and is way cheaper and less intrusive than using cameras. With that out of the way, I'd be more concerned if these were like other kiosks that also broadcast wifi and that connection was collecting unique information. This should be the main concern, this is where the good easy to correlate personal information is. That and cameras on advertising devices that do face/attention recognition.
- r_klancer 3y agoThere was a Soofa sign near my house across the river in Somerville that (now that I think about it) I haven't seen for a while now. The branding wasn't quite as prominent as the Brookline Bank sponsored one in the photo. As I recall it displayed a vaguely useful calendar of local and city events, plus a question you could reply to on Twitter so they could show "engagement". I'm not surprised nor especially troubled that the sign gathers pseudonymized MAC addresses in hourly buckets. In the last several years there's a mini-trend of startups attempting to provide more or less anonymized smartphone traffic data to cities and towns for urban planning purposes. In theory this is good! Ideally it helps city hall be more data driven and see things that might not filter up to city hall, in a "pave the cowpaths" way (E.g,. do we need a new circulator shuttle stop? What's happening that one weekend in May that drives so much foot traffic and that we're not aware of at city hall, and should send a police detail to control that intersection? Oh, that brewpub has an annual event we didn't know about that blew up on Instagram.) In practice I think the problem is the wins tend to be minimal compared to the effort involved. All that said, I don't love the conspiratorial, low-trust assumptions you're encouraged to make by the bare statement "They’re collecting data from your cell phone." But without privacy regulations I suppose that's where things will inevitably go -- people will assume a priori that "data collection" is itself threatening. (I certainly foresee a lot of rich retirees agitating to cancel the contract at the next Brookline town meeting.) So I wonder if the main benefit of better privacy regulation in the US would be preventing further deterioration of the basic trust that allows the "collective intelligence" vision of the 00's to come to fruition.
- lormayna 3y agoHow they are going to infere demographic info from MAC addresses?
- transpute 3y ago“I’ve never heard anyone cite useful data, you know, useful to the rest of us, that resulted from the Soofa signs being located in various locations,” said Brookline select board Vice-Chair John VanScoyoc in an interview with Brookline.News. He elaborated that the data being collected does not offer any new perspective that couldn’t be easily observed. Is this a challenge to attackers to find a use case for the data?
- rgovostes 3y agoTangentially: Where is Soofa sourcing these giant e-paper displays? I’ve only seen them this size in Brookline.
- bilekas 3y ago> When a phone has wifi searching enabled, it is constantly sending out signals to attempt to connect to a network. This is one thing with iPhone that infuriates me. Even if you "turn off" the WiFi it will always turn back on after a short time and connect to known networks. or if I change to another location with a known network it will automatically connect to it after turning the WiFi back on. For the life of me I can't find a way to keep it off consistently.
- sumuyuda 3y agoI created custom shortcuts for actually turning off Bluetooth and Wifi, and use those exclusively instead of the dark pattern buttons in control center. You can also turn them off in Settings. Also anytime a macOS or iOS update is applied, Apple turns back on Bluetooth even if it was turned off. They want you to leave them on so their Find My network can function, regardless of what the user wants.
- maxlin 3y agoSeems a bit like kind of privacy theater worrying about these kind of things. A town close to me has a sign that shows the number of people that have gone past on the sidewalk. Possibly counts stuff by a magnet/weight sensor or such in the ground. Never have thought that was in any way a privacy problem. Neither is this.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoWhy give these bastards an inch?
- maxlin 3y agoWhy give anyone any permission you can deny? Why build wind turbines that "ruin the view" either? That kind of extreme NIMBY attitude would have us living in caves if it wasn't for the other side. The worst of it is that it just attacks what is honest and visible the first, encouraging dishonesty and secrecy because stuff like this would never actually come to hurt you in any tangible way. I hope you come to realize that.
- ethagnawl 3y agoI understand that this is "harmless" tracking but, out of equal parts spite and paranoia, it still makes me want to stick my device in a Farady bag when I'm out and about.
- Y_Y 3y agoAs stylish a tinfoil tote would be, I think it would be detrimental to legitimate uses like receiving signals.
- ethagnawl 3y agoYeah, that's a given. About the only functional use I can think of would be if devices still had headphone jacks, you could probably get away with snaking headphones out and listening to music/podcasts/whatever you'd already downloaded.
- Havoc 3y agoGiven that most phones now spoof that MAC and rotate it this is basically just measuring footfall. Not ideal but also doesn’t seem overtly privacy harmful
- Confiks 3y agoMany commenters point out that Bluetooth MAC address randomization on phones mitigates most of the privacy risk, but forget that most other devices – even including the pressure sensor in you new car's tires – use a static address that allows you to be tracked.
- CodeWriter23 3y agoCue the ACLU moving the MAC address goalpost up a few layers to "quite sensitive" "IP information".
- JohnFen 3y agoI already put my phone in airplane mode whenever I enter a business, but now I have to keep my phone in airplane mode when I'm just walking around in public?
- lxgr 3y agoOr just use one that supports MAC randomization when probing for networks, like any iOS or Android device released within the last couple of years.
- JohnFen 3y agoI do that already, but I'd rather just not appear at all. I admit this is a position of hostility, but my hostility towards stuff like this has been well-earned over years.
- lxgr 3y agoThat's going to be tricky, though – infrared/ultrasound sensors will be able to establish your physical presence in front of these things even without you carrying any electronics.
- JohnFen 3y agoI wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with that, honestly, as long as it's not face/gait/etc. recognition. The problem is that the tech industry has been so abusive about electronic data collection for so long that it's burned through even the smallest sliver of trust about such things.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoYes. I already do that because the cell network doesn't need to know where I am when I'm not even using it.