[chbot] Traffic lights and bluetooth

[Charles Manning]

Your BT is basically hanging out the window screaming "one two three four
five" every second or so.
They notice when that goes past one place.
They notice when it goes past another place.
They time the difference.

I doubt they're writing it in a database or anything that lasts longer than
an hour or so to run their algorithms.

If you want nefarious usage of this info, then look at marketing...

There certainly are systems that track BT inside malls etc. There is a
system used for evaluating foot traffic in malls that watches movement of
BT devices.
They see how far people go into shops.
They see how people linger in front of shops.
They track if people cross from one side of a mall to another.

I don't think they store anything long term, or try to associate ids with
people - just watch movement. This gives them an idea as to whether their
advertising and display windows are working. eg. person walking along, but
stops probably looked at the display window. Did they then go inside or
not? Where else did they stop? Where did they actually go in? They stopped
next to the ice cream freezer in the supermarket,where did they go next? Do
people have different patterns at different times of day?

But they've been doing this sort of tracking for a long time - long before
BT. Some supermarkets embedded RFID tags in supermarket trolley handles
allowing them to track movement around the supermarket. This gets used for
optimising product placement (eg. put the milk and bread at the back of the
supermarket, but set up the flow so most people go through the junk food
isle too).

As for tracking Mark and noticing he stopped at McD three times this week,
so let's jack up his life insurance premiums... I doubt that's happening.

-- Charles





On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 3:14 PM, Mark Atherton <markaren1 at xtra.co.nz> wrote:

> Interesting viewpoint.
>
> I would only think that it would be lawful to track someone as part of an
> employment contract during working hours.
>
> http://www.xora.com/ have some interesting/spooky products
>
> personal microchips next, with chip readers on every street corner ?
>
>
>
> On 3/09/2015 2:47 p.m., Michael Field wrote:
>
>> I worry about the opposite. Soon it might be considered 'odd behaviour'
>> to go out without an electronic tag of some sort on you, enough to viewed
>> as 'abnormal' behavior.  I can just hear In court "... but your cellphone
>> was switched off at the time between X and Y. Is that not the behavior of
>> somebody who was worried that you might able to be tracked?".
>>
>> And also somewhat on topic:
>>
>>
>> http://gizmodo.com/woman-says-she-got-fired-for-deleting-a-24-7-tracking-a-1703757185
>>
>> "A California woman is suing her former employer for invasion of privacy,
>> labor infractions, and wrongful termination after she was fired, allegedly
>> for uninstalling a GPS-enabled app called Xora that tracked her constantly,
>> even on the weekends and in the middle of the night.
>>
>> Myrna Arias, a sales rep for wire-transfer company Intermex, was expected
>> to keep her phone on at all times to field calls from clients. Arias says
>> that her boss, John Stubit, admitted that he tracked her off-hours, and
>> “bragged that he knew how fast she was driving at specific moments.”"
>>
>>
>> On 3/09/2015 12:22 p.m., Mark Atherton wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Charles,
>>>
>>> My concern is aggregation of tiny pieces of (apparently) useless
>>> information. Add them together, and larger pictures can be revealed.
>>>
>>> As one example: start tying number plate and BT MAC address together,
>>> look up number plate, and you can converge on a persons name. Fill your
>>> city with bluetooth sniffers, and you can start tracking people. There are
>>> lots of holes in my example, but it is an example of how apparently
>>> disparate data can be aggregated.
>>>
>>> Haven't seen you at any Robotics meeting recently. Hope things are OK.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Mark
>>>
>>
>
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