ACM TechNews

Bluetooth Is Watching: Secret Study Gives Bath a Flavor of Big Brother

Guardian (UK) (07/21/08) Lewis, Paul

Bath University's Cityware project is an experiment to learn how people move around cities that uses scanners at various locations to track people's whereabouts via Bluetooth radio signals transmitted from devices such as mobile phones, laptops, and digital cameras. The researchers behind the project say their scanners do not have access to the identity of the people being tracked. "The objective is not to track individuals, whether by Bluetooth or any other means," says Cityware director Eamonn O'Neill. "We are interested in the aggregate behavior of city dwellers as a whole." However, privacy experts note that Bluetooth signals are assigned code names that can indicate a person's identity to varying degrees. Many people use pseudonyms, nicknames, initials, or abbreviations to assign names to Bluetooth signals, and Cityware's scanners are picking up signals that are listed using people's full names, email addresses, and telephone numbers. "This technology could well become the CCTV of the mobile industry," says Privacy International director Simon Davies. "It would not take much adjustment to make this system a ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure over which we have no control." Although initially confined to the city of Bath, the Cityware project was expanded once the software was made available online, and now more than 1,000 scanners around the world detect passing Bluetooth signals and send data to Cityware's central database.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jul/21/civilliberties.privacy

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