Spy bins and passive Wi-Fi monitoring

A spy bin in London. Image source: Mona Boshnaq/AFP/Getty Images

The humble litter bin has now become a high tech device with the ability to track people's movements. The Renew ad firm has installed technology that is able to measure Wi-Fi signals in rubbish bins around London's Square Mile. According to The Guardian the advertising firm has suggested that it,

would apply the concept of "cookies" – tracking files that follow internet users across the web – to the physical world.

Renew's chief executive Kaveh Memari, it quoted as saying, "We will cookie the street."

The spy bin's ability to capture the serial numbers of smartphones and analyse signal strength in order to track people's movement's along the street, have not been without controversy and has resulted in the City of London Corporation demanding Renew to withdraw the program.

The data captured from these devices could have potential uses for advertising. For example, the Sydney Morning Herald, suggests that if it enabled companies to see how long people spent in particular locations each day, commercials could be targeted towards individuals:

But if a company could see that a certain smartphone user spent 20 minutes in a McDonald's every day, it could approach Burger King about airing an ad on the bin's video display whenever that user walks by at lunchtime. Or it could target its commercials in real time by distinguishing between people who work in the area and visiting tourists.

Such surveillance has drawn comparisons with the 2002 film Minority Report and raises important questions about privacy as well as public awareness of the extent to which their movements are being watched. The City of London Coporation, who according to The Guardian, only discovered the use of the spy bins via the press, released a statement noting that "Anything that happens like this on the streets needs to be done carefully, with the backing of an informed public".

The spy bins are being investigated by Britain's data protection watchdog, while the privacy advocate group Big Brother Watch, is urging that questions should be asked  "about how such a blatant attack on people's privacy was able to occur".

Renew chief executive, Memari, released a statement in response to the media interest which he described as being a bit breathless, and commenting on the future potentials of the spy bins:

"A lot of what had been extrapolated is capabilities that could be developed and none of which are workable right now."

But Wi-Fi tracking of smartphone users is not just restricted to rubbish bins. The Economist reported that American fashion retailer, Nordstrom trialed a system that tracked smartphone users as they moved through its stores or walked nearby. The firm did post a public notice about the system, and withdrew the program when it was covered by a Dallas-based television channel. The New York Times was next to take up the story prompting a privacy debate around passive monitoring.

Nordstrom, and several other companies used a system provided by Euclid Analytics, which can track precise movements of phones without having to connect to Wi-Fi networks. According to The Economist,

The technique takes advantage of the fact that Wi-Fi wireless networking protocols are "promiscuous": the Wi-Fi adaptors in laptops, phones and base-stations reveal a lot of information about those devices as they attempt to negotiate connections with other devices nearby. Even before a device hooks onto a Wi-Fi a network, it continuously spews identifying information, including a unique, factory-set identifier, over the air. Most devices send "probe requests" akin to a town crier shouting out the names of networks which the device has previously connected to, so that a nearby base-station that matches any of these requests can respond. The requests run unremittingly across all available frequencies until a connection is made. Even devices that are seemingly turned off, such as sleeping laptops, send out such probes, though at a slower rate. Place several Wi-Fi base-stations in a shop, then, and you can pick up these probe requests, extract the device IDs, trilaterate the positions of the devices sending them, and thus track the movements of individual shoppers, seeing which racks or displays they stop at, and what paths they follow through the store.

The Economist notes that this is just the next step in the evolution of "retail science", which analyses the movements of shoppers and assists retailers in determining where to best place products and displays. While this used be done by video, Wi-Fi allows more accurate tracking. This concerns privacy advocates because despite, signs notifying them of the tracking, the increasing strength of Wi-Fi means that passers by can also be detected. They also note the possibility that monitoring systems could collect the list of known networks on an individual phone and use it to find out further details including place of work or residence about the phone user, from which individual identities can be plausibly be deducted.

After the New York Times article, Euclid and other firms announced they had joined forces with the Future of Privacy Forum, to create a group focused on developing best practices for retail location analytic's companies. Commenting on the new group, Euclid co-founder and CEO, Will Smith, noted, 

“New technologies are helping retailers better understand what customers want and make shopping more convenient for everyone ... Privacy has always been a priority as we’ve designed and built our services, and we are excited to work with FPF to develop best practices for the retail analytics industry.”

Monitoring smartphone user's location via Wi-Fi may help advertisers and retailers but issues of privacy invasion via these systems must be addressed. And this goes beyond purely location to the data that can be extrapolated from movement patterns. Bradley Voytek, a neuroscientist quoted in The New York Times article notes, “The creepy thing isn’t the privacy violation, it’s how much they can infer.”

The following video explains why and how bricks and mortar shops are using Wi-Fi tracking to monitor customers activity in order to keep pace with online vendors.

Future of Privacy Forum director, Jules Polonetsky maintains that,

“Companies need to ensure they have data protection standards in place to de-identify data, to provide consumers with effective choices to not be tracked and to explain to consumers the purposes for which data is being used ... By being transparent about what is going on, location companies and retailers can make sure shoppers understand the benefit of the bargain."

And considering the spy bin incident, this applies just as much to Wi-Fi monitoring on the street as it does inside retails stores.  

Wearable computing beyond Google Glass...

While Google Glass is receiving lots of attention at the moment, they're not the only ones in on the wearable computing gig.

Italian company GlassUp has just listed their own wearable computing project on a crowdfunding site in order to raise the $150 000 necessary to complete the project.

Maker, Gianluigi Tregnaghi claims it was already working on the GlassUp project two years ago, well before Google announced its own glass. There are differences between the two Augmented Reality glasses. GlassUp is considerably cheaper, at $US399 ($A432) compared to Google Glass' $US1500 ($A1625) price, and does not have as many features. It is described as a "receive only" device which means that unlike Google Glass, customers are not able to respond to email, text or take photos. The display screen is also directly in front of the eye rather than up to the side on Google's version.

According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald and Mashable, the information in the smartphone is sent to the glasses via Bluetooth. The notifications are displayed on GlassUp's lenses, projected in front of the user. Similar to Google Glass, the notifications are based on which apps the user downloads. 

The company has already been receiving trademark attention from Google who, GlassUp claims, has requested they change the product name.

Meanwhile in Australia, Sydney-based company Explore Engage has been developing wearable computing. For the past two years, the company has devoted $2 million to creating prototype smart glasses. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the company is positioning its glasses as a challenger to Google's version. Explore Engage's chief technology officer, Paul Kouppas notes that certain things aren't possible on Google Glass because they are monocular and not directly augmenting your line of sight. Explore Engage however is augmenting both lenses directly in the user's field of view which means they can put content right in front of your vision.

Explore Engage's Augmented Reality Glasses. Image source: The Sydney Morning Herald

The company is working up navigation, education, tourism, real-time translation, home entertainment, gaming, medical and sports-event glasses apps. The team wants to next work on apps for the glasses which include a CPR instructions overlay with voice prompts for what to do in an emergency, and, a cycling "heads up display" which provides route and safety information, navigation and communication between riders. In a departure from Google's mass market ambitions, Explore Engage says its niche product is, 

"more about particular use cases and bespoke design first, and mass marketing second...You could do a bit of a mashup between something like Second Life and a game like Doom, and allow them to co-exist in the real world."

Kouppas demonstrated the glasses on Cybershack:

So despite the attention currently being give to Glass, there are other contenders in the wearable computing game offering versions tailored to the contexts in which they see the possibilities for augmented reality most relevant. If you're keen on wearing AR glasses, it appears that once these models have been developed there will be increasing choice, making it easier to find a glass that suits you.

Google Glass and Mobile First-Person Journalism

There has been a lot of discussion around the usefulness and appropriateness of Google Glass. While many of the suggested uses focus on its Augmented Reality attributes and new ways of seeing the world, The Guardian recently reported on a more grounded and noteworthy use - that of "mobile first-person" journalism.


Tim Pool, is taking advantage the particular qualities of our smart devices for "mobile first-person journalism". Smartphones, live streaming apps, 3G, and affordable drones, offer an opportunity for the journalism endeavors of both professional journalists and ordinary citizens to stream events captured on their phones and other devices, that give them access to images and events that may otherwise be beyond the reach of traditional journalism. For example, people actually living through political instability, or involved in the protests can film events as they're happening and stream or post them without the censorship sometimes experienced by the media. For example, Pool himself, turned a commercially available remote controlled drone into "Occucopter" which flew over Occupy protests and streamed live footage via smartphone to the world. This was particularly useful when police were trying to keep journalists away during the police removal of protesters from Zuccotti Park during Occupy.

More recently however, Pool has been using Google Glass to cover protests in Istanbul. As a "Glass Explorer", Pool has had the opportunity to trial Glass and has found it is particularly useful for live streaming protests:

"When there's a wall of police firing plastic bullets at you, and you're running through a wall of tear-gas, having your hands free to cover your face, while saying 'OK Glass, record a video', makes that recording process a lot… easier," says Pool. 

"As soon as I saw Google Glass, I realised that it would allow me to do what I always do with this first-person live recording, but my hands would be free... I don't want to stand filming in front of the water cannon and guys with Molotovs. I want to show you what it's like to be there as best I can, even if that ends with me running full-speed into a cafe and rubbing lemons all over my face after being tear-gassed."

"There's no one standing in front of you: you're looking through a window at this event. And with social media, people can chat with me while I'm broadcasting, and chat to one another, which is just as powerful."

Pool has been working for Vice covering the protests in Istanbul, Cairo and Brazil during 2013 but has been doing this style of journalism since Occupy Wall Street in 2011.  Rather than seeing it replacing traditional journalism, he sees it as complementary, and his coverage has also been broadcast by major media networks. However data connection is a major issue with mobile journalism particularly when livestreaming. To accommodate this Pool takes multiple SIM cards enabling him to switch networks if they drop out. But even without livestream video, mobile-first journalism can provide useful commentary. He notes a recent example where a teenage girl's tweeting of a shooting in shopping mall in Wisconsin, became the primary source of information for journalists.

But Glass is proving particularly apt for "mobile first-person journalism" or "citizen journalism". A clip was recently posted on YouTube of "The First Fight and Arrest Caught on Glass", and while the majority of what is on film is a crowd of people, and a pretty uneventful arrest, the clip demonstrates the potentials - both good and privacy encroaching - that Glass can offer.

On the upside, it can encourage "citizen journalism", and  in cases as the fight above you can easily see its uses as evidence or if there had been police misconduct. It could also capture less serious and more entertaining events. In this sense it is not much different from the filming capabilities of a mobile phone, except that it is less obvious and hands-free which makes it easier to use. On the downside are the obvious privacy and surveillance concerns. As Stop the Cyborgs note, 

Notice the long tracking shots. Also notice that no one notices. Now imagine 10% of the population doing this all the time, walking in and out of buildings and homes. Imagine all this data being time stamped and geotagged, flowing to a large database in the cloud. A omniscient eye; a real time streetview extending into homes and businesses; society as a glass prism.

The ability for Glass to take surveillance to an even more creepy level is obvious. But Stop the Cyborg's also raise the question in relation to "citizen journalism", whether Glass will actually transform what events we see:

While undoubtedly it is true that more news footage will be captured by amateurs, this does not mean that citizens will become investigative journalists exposing systematic issues. Rather citizens will become crowd sourced paparazzi and informers. They will of course expose celebs. They will catch the occasional crime or even Rodney King style police abuse not just humorous incidents. However this will still be embedded within the dominant dispositif. They will contribute images to be judged by the existing legal, economic and media apparatus rather than challenging it. This is not the activist journalism of Indymedia, secret revelations of ‘Spies For Peace‘ and Wikileaks, or the muck raking investigation of Private Eye but rather the crowd sourced submission of America’s Funniest Home Videos or World’s Dumbest criminals. Video is typically something which reveals human actions rather than systematic organizational issues. The normalizing gaze is extended and reproduced not fundamentally challenged by placing cameras on people’s heads.

Thus while Glass may give us tools to see the world in a new way, what we choose to see is not always determined by the technology, but by us. 

Hello Lamp Post

Hello Lamp Post is a project that combines gaming, mobile phones and smart cities through the notion of playful cities. The creation of PAN studio it is the winner of the Bristol's Watershed arts venue's Playable City Award.

According to a recent article in The Guardian the project encourages people to communicate with street furniture including bus stops, post boxes and lamp posts by using the repair numbers found on the objects as SMS codes. Texting this number to a central server "wakes up" the object, and prompts questions via text. The next participant who encounters that object can learn about the previous replies. It is hoped that this will encourage regular conversations with the objects allowing people to learn stories about the hidden lives of the city's population, effectively enabling people to interact with the urban environment in more game-like ways.



PAN co-founder Ben Barker describes how the team devised the project:

The team spent the early months of the project thinking about memory and city, and how we build our own psychogeographies of familiar environments. "Personally I was inspired by Austerlitz, a novel by Seabald in which the city was a walkable version of the protagonists brain. We became obsessed with how we put these memories back in the real world, how do we unite the physicality of the city and the stories we tell about it?
"In all our conversations we were keen to avoid making an application that would limit who could play. Using SMS and the codes on objects we could avoid GPS and make it accessible to all. By making it open to everyone, all players needed was an interest in the stories of others."

For co-developer, Tom Armitage, the project is a way of reclaiming the term "Smart Cities" from major corporations such as IBM and Cisco which increases the reliance on their infrastructure and their idea of the smart city.

"It's exciting to see lots of great thought going on around alternate versions of the Smart City," says Armitage. "And it's thought that really focuses on all the other elements that make up a city - not just its technology. Dan Hill, CEO of Fabrica (and formerly Arup and Sitra) has a great recent blogpost on this. The work of New York-based designer Adam Greenfield also explores designing not only for networked cities, but also network citizens.
"There's a long tradition of technology reshaping the city by harnessing its citizens – services like Foursquare or Dodgeball, games like MogiMogi, even cycle hire platforms like Vélib. These all alter and improve the city through technology and people. We're taking some of that DNA and then investing the city with some personality."

The team hopes that by facilitating a different type of interaction with the objects in the city, and a game that does more than require task completion and points accumulation, that users might be able to change their perspective on the city and urban environment.

Google Glass and AR eyewear

There has been much talk and interest in AR eye-wear since Google announced its "Glass" last year. Wearable augmented reality technology has been around for a while now, developed for uses for example in the military, but the Google name-tag and big plans to make it part of our everyday life, has raised its profile high in our consciousness.

Reviews

There have been mixed reviews for those who have had access to the product and been able to trial it. In this post we will look at one review that praises the technology and one which is more skeptical. For those who are unfamiliar with the glass and what it does, you check out the minimalist glass site or watch the official video:

But back to our reviews. First up is a review that is enthusiastic of Google Glass and its possibilities. This is followed by an account of the glass which is a little more tempered in its opinion of the product's potentials. The reviewers we draw upon are tech bloggers Robert Scoble of "Rackspace" and http://scobleizer.com, and Mike Butcher. Butcher is also a journalist and the editor for the European TechCrunch. Of course these are just two opinions among the plethora of posts and reviews of Google Glass out there so if you want more, feel free to go forth and find them.

Robert Scoble

Scoble's review is pro Google Glass. In fact Scoble declares the glass so significant that it's life changing. Here are some excerpts from Scoble's review. The full review can be found here.

1. I will never live a day of my life from now on without it (or a competitor). It's that significant.
2. The success of this totally depends on price. Each audience I asked at the end of my presentations "who would buy this?" As the price got down to $200 literally every hand went up. At $500 a few hands went up. This was consistent, whether talking with students, or more mainstream, older audiences.
3. Nearly everyone had an emotional outburst of "wow" or "amazing" or "that's crazy" or "stunning."
4. At NextWeb 50 people surrounded me and wouldn't let me leave until they had a chance at trying them. I haven't seen that kind of product angst at a conference for a while. This happened to me all week long, it is just crazy.
5. Most of the privacy concerns I had before coming to Germany just didn't show up. I was shocked by how few negative reactions I got (only one, where an audience member said he wouldn't talk to me with them on). Funny, someone asked me to try them in a bathroom (I had them aimed up at that time and refused).
6. There is a total generational gap that I found. The older people said they would use them, probably, but were far more skeptical, or, at minimum, less passionate about the fact that these are the future, than the 13-21-year-olds I met.

Also, Google is forbidding advertising in apps. This is a HUGE shift for Google's business model. I believe Larry Page is moving Google from an advertising-based company to a commerce based company.

I continue to be amazed with the camera. It totally changes photography and video. Why? I can capture moments. I counted how many seconds it takes to get my smartphone out of my pocket, open it up, find the camera app, wait for it to load, and then take a photo. Six to 12 seconds. With Google Glass? Less than one second. Every time. And I can use it without having hands free, like if I'm carrying groceries in from the car and my kids are doing something cute.

This has changed my life. I will never live a day without it on. It is that significant.

Glowing reviews from Mr Scoble then. But to balance the reviews we'll now look at Mike Butcher's not quite so enthusiastic review.

Mike Butcher

In a nutshell, Butcher claims that using Google Glass is well, just weird. He poetically describes the technology as "this era’s Segway: hyped as a game changer but ultimately used by warehouse workers and mall cops." The full review can be found here but here are some of the main points of Butcher's critique:

"Next up is using your voice to do various commands like “Take a picture.” If you have someone standing in front of you, this is extremely odd. Suddenly they are cut out of the conversation and you’re talking to the Glass. This is very unlike being able to check something on your smartphone while you are chatting casually to someone. The latter feels quite normal, but performing similar operations while wearing Google Glass would seem downright rude in front of someone.

Ultimately this suggests to me that Google Glass will be incapable of being used socially. Okay, people in the tech world may use it socially and wander around with them on at conferences Googling each other. But it’s my belief that ‘normal’ people will not.

In part this was suggested by Andrew Keen onstage at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam. His point is that there is “no permission” given when the person in front of you is brandishing Google Glass. He’s right, and I can see most people asking the person to remove their Glass before conducting a civil conversation. You just don’t see that happening when two people with smartphones start talking.

Where I can see Google Glass working is in activities where you require both hands to be free. Skiing down a mountain filming, using the Glass like you would a GoPro camera, for instance. And in industrial applications – building and manufacturing, yes, I can see this would work very well: “Show House Plans” for instance, would be a great command for a building app. And you can see the police suddenly thinking of a few useful applications."

So while Butcher thinks the technology will have some beneficial uses, he believes it is not going to seamlessly integrate into day to day life for the majority of people. Butcher also raises a good point concerning privacy. If it is so easy to take pictures, recordings, and collect data using the glass as Scoble suggests, then what right do wearer's have to subject others to the lens of their glasses, could wearers breach privacy by surreptitiously recording others, and what information about individuals can be accessed by wearers. In the end who has the right? Google glass wearers or non-wearers. For those who are keen to sport the new eye-wear, it might be a good idea to employ Google Glass etiquette. Google has recently released official advice on appropriate behaviour while wearing the smartglasses and to help wearer's avoid becoming "Glassholes".

Of course there are those who question the need to have all this information available at eye-level all the time. The UK newspaper, The Guardian, produced a brilliant spoof of Google Glass with their Guardian Goggles, for April Fools Day this year. You can watch the clip here.

Perhaps the Guardian Goggle's slogan hits the mark when it comes to such technologies "Guardian Goggles: because life's too short to think for yourself"

More seriously, Charles Arthur, technology editor for The Guardian recently reviewed Google Glass, discussing its potentials, shortcomings, possible impact on social interaction and privacy concerns:

Smart Cities are about people too

With all this talk about smart cities it is easy to forget that the future of cities is as much about people as it is about technologies. This is something Anthony Townsend addresses in his keynote speech at 2012 Code for America which critiques "smart cities" and observes the limited engagement with citizens in smart city rhetoric.

There is an increasing amount of interest in and claims to Smart Cities both by city governments and companies looking to provide their version of smart city intelligence to cities each seeking to promote their brand of city smarts. IBM and Cisco are such companies.

IBM Smart Cities: 

Operates on the basis that a city is made up of infrastructure, operations and people working as an interconnected system of systems. According to IBM a Smart City drives sustainable economic growth and prosperity. Cities are data driven and leaders can analyse data to make better decisions, anticipate problems and coordinate resources. By collecting and analyzing the extensive data generated every second of every day, tools such as the IBM Intelligent Operations Center coordinate and share data in a single view creating the big picture for the decision makers and responders who support the smarter city. Planning and management strategies include: public safety, smarter buildings and urban planning, government and agency administration; Infrastructure strategies include: Energy and water, environmental, transportation; Citizen programs include: social programs, healthcare, education.

IBM Smart cities include: Portland, Memphis, Rio de Janeiro. Rio is the most integrated and biggest example of the Smart City Operations Center.

Cisco Smart and Connected Communities: On their website Cisco describes their program thus:

As world populations shift to urban areas, community leaders are pressed for answers to related problems. These include overcrowding, pollution, budget and resource constraints, inadequate infrastructures, and the need for continuing growth. Cisco Smart+Connected Communities solutions use intelligent networking capabilities to bring together people, services, community assets, and information to help community leaders address these world challenges. By connecting the unconnected, we can do amazing things to address these real world challenges and create a more sustainable environment. 

Cisco Smart Cities include: Northern Ohio, City of Holyoke, San Francisco, and Amsterdam. 

The emphasis of these programs is to provide "smart" systems and technologies to assist in running cities efficiently and in ways that aim to make the city less polluted, less congested and less over-extended. But as Townsend noted, much of the talk is about the role of technology as a savior in these cities, relegating the actual human input aside. While it may be useful to predict where crime, emergencies or congestion may happen, it is also necessary to work on the underlying issues and to involve citizens in the process, empowering both themselves and the city.With so much data being generated by the city and its residents, it is also necessary to interrogate issues surrounding the collection and retention of such data, as well as ask what all of it is used for. Doing this may raise issues of surveillance and privacy, among other less sinister information and uses. However, by focusing on the technology as separate from people, many of these concerns have been rendered less visible, lending an element of neutrality to the systems and infrastructure of smart cities. This suggests that their needs to be a version of smart cities that not only is concerned with technology but which is inclusive of people. To be smart, cities must also engage their citizens in working toward solutions.

Others suggest that smart cities do not hold the answer for a greener, cleaner, safer, efficient, equitable and tolerant city. Indeed Kevin Slavin suggests that it is not smart cities and smart urbanisms to which we should be looking, but to new ways of living in the city:

Exploring Sydney's Digital-Urban Interface

Accessing the digital layers ... networked urbanism is ruining our posture!

Recently, Sophia and I took a group of 25 urban geography students on a field trip in the Central Business District of Sydney, designed to examine various ways in which the digital and the urban are coming together.

We based the field trip on the 'Systems/Layers Walkshop' concept designed by Nurri Kim and Adam Greenfield for Do Projects. Nurri and Adam have produced a fantastic booklet that can be used to help prepare for such an exercise, based on their experiences of running these 'walkshops' in a number of cities.

The purpose of the walkshop is to develop a better understanding of networked urbanism and its implications. To quote from their booklet:

We live in an age in which the form of cities, the ways in which we experience them, and the choices they present us with are all in the process of profound and rapid change, driven by the presence of networked information-processing systems everywhere around us. Mobile phones, CCTV cameras, building-scale displays, embedded sensors, and remotely-operated barriers are all part of this transformation. Between them, these systems superimpose a layer of information on top of the physical bricks and paths of the city, and this is increasingly a place where control over space and behavior can be exerted.

We believe that understanding this layer, the systems that make it up, and its implications for the freedom to move and act is vital to full citizenship in the congested, contested urban spaces of the twenty-first century.

And so, the walkshop is a tool to develop this understanding of layers and systems, and to generate discussion about their implications. This is what you do:

What you’re going to be looking for are appearances of the networked digital in the physical, and vice versa: apertures through which the things that happen in the real world are gathered up by the global informational network, and contexts in which information originating on the network affects what people see, confront and are able to do.

Places where information is being collected.

Places where information is being displayed.

Places where networked information is being acted upon.

I also asked the participants to read Dan Hill's wonderful essay on 'The Street as Platform' in preparation for the day.

We focused our attention on a couple of relatively small areas in the Central Business District. For those who know Sydney, here's how we rolled...

We started at Central Station, where we had a talk from two people from the City of Sydney about their Food Truck program and mobile app.

We then caught a train from Central Station to Circular Quay, for a walk around followed by a talk from the folks at Skedgo, who are responsible for the real-time public transport app TripGo.

After a break for lunch, we then caught a train back to Town Hall Station, and broke up into small groups to explore the terrain between Town Hall and St James Station on foot. We reconvened as a large group to report back on our small group observations and reflect on the day.

Here's a quick report on what we saw and what we learnt, and some reflections on the experience.