Tue 22 May 2007
Loca is a pervasive surveillance art project that is utilizing Bluetooth to track people via their Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones. The project uses a large number of interconnected Bluetooth nodes that track people’s movements in an urban environment.
“Mobile companies have information about everywhere we go that gets generated every time we use our phone. We’re looking at how we can have access to such information, by setting up an independent network that we create within a city centre that enables us to track people without their permission or knowledge - and send them messages as well.”
When the project was deployed at the ZeroOne Festival is San Jose, California, the system sent attendees messages about where they had been and asked about their intentions for being there. For example, one such message read, “You were in a flower shop and spent 30 minutes in the park; are you in love?”
Those contacted were eventually led to the Loca kiosk where they could obtain a log of all their activities, which sometimes reached over 100m long. It should be noted that movement was only tracked on phones with discovery mode turned on.
This kind of project makes you wonder who else is tracking our movements and cataloging them. Not even necessarily through Bluetooth, but the phone companies themselves have a good idea where our phones are connecting from. Who uses this information and who has access to it?
[ via BBC ]