It’s a well-known maxim in the technology industry that if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product. We get to use incredible services such as Gmail, Facebook and Twitter for free – and, in return, the big tech firms sell access to our eyeballs to advertisers.
But this isn’t always the case. Sometimes, even when we pay for a service, we’re also the product being sold.
For example, something that EE, O2 and Vodafone all do, but don’t really like to shout about, is sell anonymised, aggregated data about our physical movements to local authorities, transit agencies and any other companies prepared to sign large enough cheques. And that’s how I came to discover many of the really mad things that Transport for London (TfL) can figure out about us by using our location data, provided by the O2 mobile network.
Using the Freedom of Information Act, I’ve managed to obtain the Data Protection Impact Assessment and the Statement of Work for TfL’s Project Edmond – which stands for Estimating Demand from Mobile Network Data. It gives transport planners and policy makers an amazing quantity and quality of data on people’s movements.
The way Edmond works is very clever. TfL isn’t actually monitoring all of our phones all of the time, presumably because it knows that to do so would be hugely controversial.
Instead, it contracts with O2 to license data over
