City of London halts smartphone tracking after campaign group calls foul

The City of London Corporation has called a halt to the tracking of smartphones of passers by through devices installed in trash cans.

According to a report by Quartz, 12 recycling bins in London have been revealed to have the ability to track unsuspecting passers-by through their smartphones or other devices.

Renew London, the company that fitted 12 pods featuring LCD advertising screens, has been asked to stop the tracking (See: London's smart trash cans can track people's mobiles) 

According to chief executive Kaveh Memari, the company had "stopped all trials in the meantime".

The corporation had taken up the issue with the Information Commissioner's Office.

Privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, raised the issue after the technology was featured by online magazine Quartz.

According to Memari who spoke to the BBC, the devices had only recorded "extremely limited, encrypted, aggregated and anonymised data".

He added that the current technology was being used to monitor local footfall, in much the same way that web pages monitored online traffic.

Adding that there might be further developments in the future, he said the public would, however, be notified about any changes.

The BBC report quoted a City of London Corporation official as saying that irrespective of what was technically possible, anything that happened like that on the streets needed to be done carefully, with the backing of an informed public.

In an open letter Renew CEO Kaveh Memari sought to downplay what the bins could detect. ''I'm afraid that, in the interest of a good headline and story, there has been an emphasis on style over substance that makes our technology trial slightly more interesting than it is,'' he wrote.