[r_klancer]

There was a Soofa sign near my house across the river in Somerville that (now that I think about it) I haven't seen for a while now. The branding wasn't quite as prominent as the Brookline Bank sponsored one in the photo. As I recall it displayed a vaguely useful calendar of local and city events, plus a question you could reply to on Twitter so they could show "engagement".

I'm not surprised nor especially troubled that the sign gathers pseudonymized MAC addresses in hourly buckets. In the last several years there's a mini-trend of startups attempting to provide more or less anonymized smartphone traffic data to cities and towns for urban planning purposes.

In theory this is good! Ideally it helps city hall be more data driven and see things that might not filter up to city hall, in a "pave the cowpaths" way (E.g,. do we need a new circulator shuttle stop? What's happening that one weekend in May that drives so much foot traffic and that we're not aware of at city hall, and should send a police detail to control that intersection? Oh, that brewpub has an annual event we didn't know about that blew up on Instagram.)

In practice I think the problem is the wins tend to be minimal compared to the effort involved.

All that said, I don't love the conspiratorial, low-trust assumptions you're encouraged to make by the bare statement "They’re collecting data from your cell phone."

But without privacy regulations I suppose that's where things will inevitably go -- people will assume a priori that "data collection" is itself threatening. (I certainly foresee a lot of rich retirees agitating to cancel the contract at the next Brookline town meeting.) So I wonder if the main benefit of better privacy regulation in the US would be preventing further deterioration of the basic trust that allows the "collective intelligence" vision of the 00's to come to fruition.

[mistrial9]

American here - it is foolish to trust so much; history has shown again and again that a few determined actors, often wearing a uniform, can and do "fleece the sheep" for fines, tracking or whatever else.. With that said, there are plenty of benign or even constructive uses for traffic data. This is not traffic data alone. The worst offenders of privacy violation and aggressive monetization with or without consent, can do a lot of damage.