A company called Renew installed "smart" recycling bins in London just prior to the 2012 Olympics. These bins recognize and track the MAC addresses for each person walking by. A MAC address [wiki] is a set of characters that is unique to each WiFi enabled device, including smartphones. As long as your device has the WiFi setting left on, it is sending a signal pinging other devices nearby. These bins simply pic that up and track your MAC address.
Potential privacy issue? Absolutely.
People are not entirely comfortable with this kind of tracking. Privacy is still highly valued by many and rightly so. New technologies can be hard for some to understand and what we don't understand can be unsettling. Right now throughout developed countries, governments are playing catch-up when it comes to regulation of new technologies. But take into account a few things:
- London is already one of the most surveilled cities in the world. The US and many other countries are not far behind.
- Every day people give more of the information to social networks and share public status updates about their everyday life.
- These devices simply track MAC addresses of phones, no personal information is stored.
But this could be huge
By tracking people's movements throughout the day, these bins provide advertisers with incredibly useful data. It could give Company A a huge advantage over Company B. In an example given by the original article, one coffee shop could better understand its customers' loyalty. Are they getting their coffee in different places on a regular basis? If so, ads could be changed in certain locations to let that customer know of any specials or new flavors.
Bars could use the technology to track gender, dwell time, kind of purchase, and much more. This kind of information is super useful.
In just one day, 12 London bins tracked over 100,000 people, noting their presence almost 1 million times.
[Source]
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