Update: New York's City Hall has asked the ad company to get rid of the beacons.
Public phone booths have become an anachronistic feature of urban landscapes thanks to everyone carrying phones in their pockets, but they still have at least one important function: a display booth for advertising. And now, in New York City, that advertising has been equipped with a technology called beacons that use Bluetooth to emit signals that activate receptive apps on people's phones to either show them ads or track their location. It's a kind of beautiful technological poetry: New York's phone booths now try to 'call' the smartphones of every person who walks by.
Buzzfeed, which discovered the deployment of "hundreds of [Bluetooth beacons] inside New York City phone booths" using a beacon-detecting Android app says the technology "could turn any city into a giant matrix of hidden commercialization — and vastly deepen the network of surveillance that has already grown out of technologies ranging from security cameras to cell phone towers." It sounds ominous! It sounds a little less ominous if you include caveats about the limitation of this technology.
First off, beacons themselves don't collect information about you or "track your every move." They get your phone to do it. And they can only get your phone to do it if you have Bluetooth turned on and if you have an app on your phone that is receptive to the signals being broadcast by beacons. For example, if you have a Sephora app on your phone, and you have Bluetooth turned on, and you walk past a Sephora store that has beacons, they can activate the Sephora app to show you an ad ("Come in and get 10% off getting pretty!") and the app can log that you walked by.
Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum, who advocates on behalf of firms that use beacon technology, writes on LinkedIn that "beacons don't track you; you track beacons."
Beacons themselves don't collect any data. They do not send marketing messages to your phone. They broadcast location marks that your phone and apps using your phone can take advantage of to understand more precisely where you are.
Titan, the advertising company that controls the display on New York City phone booths, installed beacons made by Gimbal in its displays. According to Buzzfeed, one of their users thus far was to communicate with smartphones that had the Tribeca Film Festival app. The company that does get to collect information in a broader way thanks to beacons -- if the various caveats are met -- is Gimbal. Retailers that use Gimbal-powered beacons need to incorporate Gimbal technology into their apps, which Gimbal says will be done transparently. But Gimbal gets to collect information across apps. According to its own literature, it will learn the following about smartphone users with Gimbal-powered apps on their phones:
The Gimbal SDK resides on the mobile device and, once the user has opted in, passively develops a profile of mobile usage and other behaviors. The profile ensures that retailers and brands deliver much more personalized, relevant content based on:
• Demographics – age, gender, income, ethnicity, education, presence of children. • Interests – sports, cooking, politics, technology, news, investing, etc.• Personal places of interest (PPOI) – top 20 locations where user spends time (home, work, gym, beach, etc.), around which developers can create per-user geofences.
When I downloaded the Tribeca app, this was the only notice I got that might indicate the use of beacons.
They could definitely be more transparent, rather than sending users digging into their settings to figure out which apps enable this.
So, beacons are out there. They will help retailers, venues and advertisers to better track you, but only if you have Bluetooth turned on and only if you download their apps. It's yet another reason to turn off Bluetooth on your phone, unless you like the idea of your smartphone talking to New York City's otherwise lonely and abandoned phone booths.