Beacons can push you ads — and help track your every move.
Photographs by Jon Premosch for BuzzFeed News
A company that controls thousands of New York City's phone booth advertising displays has planted tiny radio transmitters known as "beacons" — devices that can be used to track people's movements — in hundreds of pay phone booths in Manhattan, BuzzFeed News has learned.
And it's all with the blessing of a city agency — but without any public notice, consultation, or approval.
Titan, the outdoor media company that sells ad space in more than 5,000 panels in phone kiosks around the five boroughs, has installed about 500 of the beacons, a spokesman for the city's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), Nicholas Sbordone, confirmed to BuzzFeed News.
Beacons are Bluetooth devices that emit simple signals that smartphones can pick up. They're best known for their growing use in commercial settings: in stores, for example, to alert customers to sales, or in stadiums, to tell patrons which entrances are least crowded.
But the spread of beacon technology to public spaces could turn any city into a giant matrix of hidden commercialization — and vastly deepen the network of surveillance that has already grown out of technologies ranging from security cameras to cell phone towers.
Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News
New York City residents had no say in the deployment of Titan's beacons. Titan notified DoITT of its plans to install the beacons in 2013, which the city agreed to without a formal approval process because, according to Sbordone, the company said it was using the devices for maintenance purposes only. Titan installed the beacons from September to November 2013; a source with knowledge of the situation alerted BuzzFeed News to the program anonymously for fear, the source said, of being fired for speaking publicly.
One of New York's leading privacy advocates, New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman, denounced the program after learning of it from a reporter Sunday.
"To the extent that the city is involved in this, the lack of transparency [is] of even greater concern," said Lieberman, who called on the city to make public the details of the arrangement.
"Consumers should be aware when they're in a zone that projects beacons," said Doug Thompson, the CEO of dot3, a beacon technology company, who also runs BEEKn , an industry blog. "It shouldn't be kept hidden from them."
Neither Titan nor DoITT would provide the specific locations of the beaconized phone booths, but they appear to be densely concentrated in central and lower Manhattan. On a 20-block stretch along Broadway and Sixth Avenue (from the bottom of Madison Square Park to just north of Bryant Park), BuzzFeed News identified 13 Titan-Gimbal beacons — or more than one, on average, every two blocks. To detect the beacons, BuzzFeed News used an Android app that lists nearby beacons, their identification codes, and signal strength, which gets stronger as a phone approaches the transmitter.
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