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London Shut Down Its Data-Collecting Recycling Bins

Regular folks did not respond well to the news of their cell phones being tracked without their consent, and neither did the local authorities.
Image via Renew London.

Renew London remained quiet on the virtual front over the weekend after news broke about the company’s recycling bins-cum-data collection devices last Thursday. Despite the silence, regular folks did not respond well to the news of their cell phones being tracked without their consent, and neither did the local authorities.

As of this morning, the City of London Corporation, the local bureaucracy in charge of the area of London in which the twelve bins in question were placed, ordered Renew to stop their data collection experiment, effective immediately.

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Greg Williams, a representative for the Corporation, spoke with me this morning about the decision. “The bins have been around for more than a year, but not using data,” Williams said. The receptacles, brought in for the Olympics, needed to be bombproof, and “in order to pay for such expensive bins, the firm developed a TV screen that gives public information, which meant they could do partnership work with people.”

When asked if the Corporation knew Renew’s plans previously, Williams said there was no formal agreement. “Before the project was properly looked into, they started to go ahead with it, which we thought was precipitate,” Williams added. “We are a local authority. Doing something that’s not [in our purview] needs discussion. We would’ve wanted to look into this carefully and then consult and talk to people.”

The Corporation has since reported itself to the Information Commission, which is an independent organization in the United Kingdom “set up to uphold information rights in the public interests.”

Renew’s CEO responded to the shutdown this morning with an open letter on the company’s website. He likened the process of collecting MAC addresses to knowing how many hits a website has received. He wrote,

Future developments will, however, not just depend on technology, but also, most importantly, on people being comfortable with interactive technology – much as has happened over the course of the weekend on the internet. This has always and continues to be our key concern. For now, simply think of the Phase I testing as a glorified counter on the street. At this stage, we were merely running a pilot with extremely limited, encrypted, anonymous/aggregated data. Come the time we discuss creating the future levels of protection, we can move to an improved service where we can bring better content to people.

This issue will likely come up again in the future. If not with Renew, then with someone else. But for now, it appears that the line for public data collection has been drawn.