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Seattle Sets the Stage for Automatic Traffic Camera Expansion - The Urbanist (www.theurbanist.org)

submitted 2 days ago by kinther@lemmy.world to c/seattle@lemmy.world

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[–] LettucePrey@lemm.ee 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

At some point they realized some people left their bluetooth on on their phones (which wasn’t the case when the initial deployment happened, bluetooth was seen by most as a battery sucking crap technology) and by comparing the bluetooth ping logs at two points they could approximate driving speeds to a decently accurate degree. You couldn’t use the data to pinpoint a specific user really and you couldn’t pinpoint speed exactly so it was no use to law enforcement, but it was fabulous data to model traffic on.

This is exactly why I turn my bluetooth off of my phone. I know grocery stores use this too for tracking where people shop within the store.

[–] specialseaweed@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Absolutely. There is a granularity of data and ability to process it today that did not exist when Houston was using it, but we were aware then of the serious questions of privacy regarding the ethics of reading devices without permission that all of us were grappling with. The conclusion was that it was ethical to use because tools didn't exist to de-anonymize that data even if someone wanted to. There was no way to match a bluetooth MAC address to anything.

That was a different time though. Privacy got nuked from orbit.