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Comment by nkoren | Hacker News Reader

> This is just a convenient data grab and profiteering.

I know people working on this project, and that is absolutely not their motivation. They want to better understand the movement of people within the system, so they can design better stations, trains, and services.

The traditional way of understanding such passenger movements is by parking students with clipboards and people-counters all around stations, doing passenger interviews and such. This traditional methodology is not only hugely expensive, but the data it generates is spectacularly bad, and has lead to some incredibly poor planning at times.

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The point that this will be only used to improve services was denied in the article itself:

"What they told people at the time was we're going to use this data to improve services. But now thanks to [Sky News] investigative reporting, we find out that it's partly to improve the services, but also it's to exploit people's data for revenue, doing advertising."

This just in, our reporter has learned that telling people "secrets" make them share articles with their friends. More to come in our next clickbait article.

Using the data to optimise advertising (and ad pricing) is pretty obvious. Nobody seems to be annoyed that there's advertising in the first place, this is a non-issue.

Knowing more accurate footfall counts down individual corridors is essential for better planning of stations and services. And yes, it's also a boon to pricing advertising along those corridors. No way to improve one without improving the other.

But that's literally all they're getting from this: spatially granular and accurate passenger movements. They're not collecting personally identifiable data or even aggregated demographic metadata. Just footfall counts. (Read their policies: they just collect device MAC data, which is hashed with a salt that is destroyed on a daily basis. This allows them to trace MAC addresses through the network without ever being able to trace it to an individual.) But, yes, those footfall counts are relevant to advertisers. So? TFL isn't a profit-making organisation: everything they get from advertising is re-invested in operations and new infrastructure.

Anyhow, you're trusting them with your life when you ride they're vehicles. They do a pretty good job with that. Trusting them with fleeting awareness of your MAC address seems like a much smaller ask.

> I know people working on this project, and that is absolutely not their motivation.

It doesn't really matter the motivation if the system that gets built in the end has the same vulnerabilities and potential for abuse.

Attitudes change, and history shows us that governments have a bad track record for sticking to original motivations. Companies are even worse, once they realize the profit potential of something.

Could you give more details of the kind of information they receive from wifi tracking that they don't already through oyster barriers and how this helps with service designs?

Passenger movements within stations, and between stations where there are often many possible routes.

Just guess but: Accurate real-time data of passenger movement through the stations.

Barriers only tell you when they enter/exit, they give you no information about the routes people use, how long it takes them, how many people transfer between lines etc

They want to detect overcrowding of stations which means before people have gone through any barriers

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