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Big Brother Watch releases new report: ‘The Streets Are Watching: How Billboards Are Spying On You’

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Opaque companies are mining data from millions of people’s phones to decide which adverts should be shown on billboards all over the country, a Big Brother Watch investigation has found.

Precise GPS locations, how phone users interact with apps and even the kind of shops they visit are all used to generate advertising profiles, from “food-loving, frequent eat-out diners” or to “18-24-year-old cinema-goers”.

These invasive profiling techniques have been used for years to deliver targeted ads on the internet and mobile phones. Now they are deciding which adverts people see while walking down the high street. The Internet’s intrusive advertising has reached out of the screen and into the real world.

Key Findings

  • Millions of phones in the UK are tracked by advertising companies who create profiles from the data that influence the real-world adverts people see on the billboards on Britain’s high streets.
  • Profiles of tiny interest groups are linked to GPS tracking data in huge predictive models that allow brands to know where specific kinds of people are likely to be at any time of the day, so they can target the right billboards with their ads.
  • High-tech tools can even tell if you have walked past a brand’s advert and allow the brand to re-target the ad on your phone to hammer home their message.
  • Trackers often rely on users agreeing to dense small print and vague language in privacy policies to get ‘consent’ to process and sell data, if they provide details of where data is sent at all.

Tracking tools are embedded in a huge range of mobile phone apps. They collect large amounts of data to generate advertising profiles or to sell to data analytics companies, often without explaining the ultimate destination.

German advertising tech company Adsquare has pioneered the use of phone tracking data to program digital billboards. It claims to comply with privacy laws as phone users have permitted tracking tools to collect their data.

The company does not publish a list of its data sources. Big Brother Watch has established they include controversial tracking company X-Mode [recently renamed Outlogic] which was banned by Apple and Google’s app stores for selling data to the US military.

Trackers made by these companies are embedded in many apps, with millions of cumulative downloads, from travel guides to games. Analysis by Big Brother Watch found that the privacy policies of many of these apps failed to detail the trackers hidden in the code, or where these trackers sold their data.

Even the most comprehensive privacy policies required users to follow link after link to third-party websites to understand where their data might end up. Clear Channel UK, one of the UK’s biggest billboard companies, is an Adsquare client – although the German data company does not mention CCUK as a client online.

At least 1 in 10 mobile phones in the UK contain trackers that ultimately send data to Adsquare, the minimum threshold the company claims its models need to work. At least 8 million UK phones are sending location, behavioural or other data to the German data broker.

Profiles based on phone users’ interests are linked with GPS data, allowing advertising companies to model how different interest groups move through the city and predict which billboards a brand’s

target audience will walk past. Adsquare can even work out if a phone has been in the vicinity of a particular billboard ad and re-target the phone with the same advert to hammer home the message.

There are serious questions about whether data companies can rely on claims of “consent” when full details of data processing are not given to consumers, or consumers are expected to follow links to a large number of third parties to understand how their data is processed.

This invasive development in advertising technology comes as Big Brother Watch can also reveal that there are potentially thousands of billboards capable of using face-scanning cameras to tailor adverts to whoever is walking past, in shopping centres, on high streets and even in taxis.

However, unsuspecting members of the public are not told when facial detection is in operation.

Billboards in Manchester, Birmingham and two of London’s biggest shopping centres are capable of facial detection. The tech has previously been used to change adverts depending on the emotional state, gender or age makeup of the crowd passing by – without telling people the face-scanning technology is in use.

At the same time, American tech company ALFI is working to install face-scanning tablets in the back of taxis, so targeted ads can be shown to passengers. It already has a deal with Value Cabs in Belfast and is seeking to roll out the tablets across the UK.

QUOTES

Jake Hurfurt, Head of Research and Investigations at Big Brother Watch said:

“We’ve uncovered new ways in which millions of people’s movements and behaviours are tracked to target us with ads on the streets, resulting in some of the most intrusive advertising surveillance we’ve ever seen in the UK. Privacy tick boxes on apps are being used to wrongly claim people have agreed for their data to be sold on to companies they’ve never heard of, which can even impact the billboards they then see.

“Radical reforms are urgently needed to force apps, trackers and data harvesters to respect people’s privacy, give people real choices about how their data is used, and be transparent about how they’re using it. The ICO should open a high priority investigation into how intrusive online advertising is spilling onto the streets.”

NOTES:

Spokespeople are available for interview. Please direct enquiries or requests for interviews to [email protected] or 07730439257

A copy of Big Brother Watch’s report, ‘The streets are watching: How billboards are spying on you’ can be found here: https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/The-Streets-Are-Watching-You.pdf

The post Big Brother Watch releases new report: ‘The Streets Are Watching: How Billboards Are Spying On You’ appeared first on Big Brother Watch.


Source: https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/2022/10/big-brother-watch-releases-new-report-the-streets-are-watching-how-billboards-are-spying-on-you/


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