It\u2019s a well known maxim in the tech industry that if you\u2019re not paying for the product, then\u00a0you<\/em>\u00a0are the product. We get to use incredible services like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter1<\/a>\u00a0for free \u2013 and in return, the big tech firms sell access to our eyeballs to advertisers2<\/a>.<\/p>\n But this isn\u2019t always the case. Sometimes, even when we pay for a service, we\u2019re\u00a0also<\/em>\u00a0the product being sold.<\/p>\n For example, something that EE, O2 and Vodafone all do, but don\u2019t really\u00a0love<\/em>\u00a0to shout about is sell anonymised, aggregated data on our physical movements to local authorities, transit agencies and any other companies with a chequebook large enough.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s why today I\u2019m going to tell you about some 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.<\/p>\n Using the Freedom of Information Act, I\u2019ve managed to obtain the Data Protection Impact Assessment, and the Statement of Work for TfL\u2019s Project EDMOND \u2013 which stands for \u201cEstimating Demand from Mobile Network Data\u201d3<\/a>.<\/p>\n That\u2019s right, this week\u2019s newsletter is dangerously close to being\u00a0actual reporting<\/em>\u00a0instead of just my usual\u00a0bloviating<\/a>. And having now fallen down the rabbit-hole digging into it, I\u2019m amazed by the quality of information it gives transport planners and policy makers. And honestly, I\u2019m a little freaked out.<\/p>\n So let\u2019s dive in and explore it together.<\/p>\n The way EDMOND works is very clever. TfL isn\u2019t actually monitoring all of our phones all of the time, presumably because it knows that to do so would be hugely controversial.<\/p>\n So instead, it contracts with O24<\/a>\u00a0to license data over shorter periods of time. For example, in 2023, it took data from \u2018up to\u2019 40 normal weekdays between the start of April and end of June, when nothing weird was happening like school holidays or bank holidays5<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is an enormous dataset, with potentially up to 25 million phones included in it6<\/a>, but it still doesn\u2019t include everyone in London because some people use other networks like EE, Vodafone, and so on.<\/p>\n So it\u2019s crucial to understand that EDMOND isn\u2019t just a pile of data \u2013 it is a model, where TfL has taken the data from O2, and has done some clever maths to scale it up to estimate the the movements of everyone in London over the age of 12.<\/p>\n There is also the elephant in the room. Though it might be surprising to learn that O2 is selling data insights on its users, it is\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0selling personal data7<\/a>. What\u2019s being sold by O2 and licensed by TfL is\u00a0aggregated, anonymised data<\/strong>.<\/p>\n This means TfL can\u2019t see the movements of individual people, and of course everything is fully GDPR-compliant and above board \u2013 as you\u2019d expect for a major corporation and a transport agency.<\/p>\n In fact, according to\u00a0the 2018 Travel in London report<\/a>, any time the data suggests there were fewer than ten phones in a given statistical area, the data was automatically excluded so to avoid inadvertently unmasking people based on their metadata.<\/p>\n So to be absolutely clear, there\u2019s no big scandal here8<\/a>. In fact, using this sort of data is increasingly routine for local authorities and others9<\/a>. To the extent that O2 even has a brand name for this line of its business \u2013 \u201cO2 Motion\u201d.<\/p>\n But that doesn\u2019t mean what\u2019s happening isn\u2019t interesting. In fact, I\u2019m willing to bet that most people outside of the mobile industry are completely unaware their movement data is being used in this way.<\/p>\n Now let\u2019s get to the good stuff. What does all of this data do for TfL, and what data do they have to play with?<\/p>\n Because of the aforementioned privacy restrictions, they don\u2019t simply get dots on the map show them where everyone was. Instead, the data is broken down into hundreds of \u201cMedium Super Output Areas (MSOAs)\u201d \u2013 this is a statistical standard that divides up the country into groups of between 2000 and 6000 homes.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a map showing London\u2019s MSOAs:<\/p>\n Looking at this, you can see why data on this level might be useful.<\/p>\n Using the aggregated data from O2, TfL can see which areas of London people are travelling from and where they are travelling to \u2013 which is exactly the sort of information you might need if you were, for example, planning where to run buses or\u00a0impose an Ultra-Low Emissions Zone<\/a>\u00a0that disincentivises car use.<\/p>\n Read on<\/a><\/p>\n The post It\u2019s crazy how much TfL can learn about us from our mobile data (JamesO\u2019Malley)<\/a> appeared first on London Reconnections<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Big Brother meets Big Data It\u2019s a well known maxim in the tech industry that if you\u2019re not paying for the product, then\u00a0you\u00a0are the product. We get to use incredible services like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter1\u00a0for free \u2013 and in return, the big tech firms sell access to our eyeballs to advertisers2. But this isn\u2019t always the case. Sometimes, even…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3467,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-camcab"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3466"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Careful now<\/h2>\n
What TfL knows<\/h2>\n