Snooping; Every Tom, Dick and Harry is at it

Having had the egregious Phorm foisted upon an unsuspecting public by their ISPs, we now have shoppers spied upon using Path Intelligence. As is usual, people are not to be informed about this, they are to be experimented upon first. Indeed, they have been.

Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones.

The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.

The device cannot access personal details about a person’s identity or contacts, but privacy campaigners expressed concern about potential intrusion should the data fall into the wrong hands.

The surveillance mechanism works by monitoring the signals produced by mobile handsets and then locating the phone by triangulation – measuring the phone’s distance from three receivers.

This system is already installed in a Portsmouth shopping centre: Gunwharf Quays and another two are to follow. So, those of you shopping in Portsmouth, I have a question; did these bastards ask your permission before snooping on your movements around the shopping centre? I won’t be holding my breath waiting for the answer, for I know full well what it is.

Why, exactly, do these people want to spy on us?

The company that makes the dishes, which measure 30cm (12 inches) square and are placed on walls around the centre, said that they were useful to centres that wanted to learn more about the way their customers used the store.

As opposed to simply asking them, that is… And, of course, they will have their own sales figures and the observations of their staff. This, however, is not enough, it seems.

A shopping mall could, for example, find out that 10,000 people were still in the store at 6pm, helping to make a case for longer opening hours, or that a majority of customers who visited Gap also went to Next, which could useful for marketing purposes.

As Spyblog points out, that’s a lot of people in a shop… However, their own observations should tell them that there are a lot of people shopping late – you don’t need to track them via their mobile phones to do this; simple, plain, old-fashioned eyeballs do the trick nicely.

In the case of Gunwharf Quays, managers were surprised to discover that an unusually high percentage of visitors were German – the receivers can tell in which country each phone is registered – which led to the management translating the instructions in the car park.

If I worked in a shopping centre and a lot of German speakers were coming though the door, I’d notice. It isn’t difficult. Again, you do not need expensive and intrusive technology to provide you with the blindingly obvious.

So, without wishing to appear unduly paranoid, there has to be something else going on:

Path Intelligence, the Portsmouth-based company which developed the technology, said its equipment was just a tool for market research. “There’s absolutely no way we can link the information we gather back to the individual,” a spokeswoman said. “There’s nothing personal in the data.”

Uh, huh?

Security:
Identify unauthorized individuals in ‘no go’ areas of the centre
Identify suspicious ‘left’ luggage

They are lying, then… They can identify individuals via the IMEI number of the phone (which is what they use to track peoples’ movements) – well, all they need to do is link the system to CCTV and it’s done.

Well, it looks as if I’ll be needing to switch off my handset and remove the battery before going shopping, now. Is there any fucker who just wants to mind their own business and leave the rest of us to mind ours? Why is it that every technological development that is designed to make our lives easier is seen by spivs as a means to make a fast buck by spying on us? My mobile phone is for my benefit, not the benefit of some sharp little salesman who wants to make a killing by bombarding me with spam texts or using my Bluetooth as a means to target me with advertisements. That is not why I have the phone and these bastards absolutely do not have my consent to use it for their benefit.

Interestingly, while these people are happy enough to rape our privacy, they are a little more coy when it comes to theirs:

Sharon Biggar, the company’s chief operating officer, said that one of the stores which had already deployed the receivers did not want its name revealed for fear of alarming its customers.

I see. So they are happy enough to poke about in our lives, snooping on us as we go about our personal business, yet do not want us to know this much about them. Is it, I wonder, because they realise that it is immoral, unethical, and will cost them dearly in sales should the punters get to know about it? Certainly I will refuse to use any company or shopping centre that uses this system and I very much doubt that I’ll be the only one. If these nasty snoopers thought otherwise, they wouldn’t be so secretive about their plans, would they?