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from the something-privacy-laws-something-something dept.
The Belgian city of Kortrijk in West Flanders is reportedly using data provided by a mobile phone company to count the number of people present in the town and where they come from.
Even more worryingly, local public-service broadcaster VRT has reported that city officials will try to cross-reference this data with credit and debit card databases.
Kortrijk is a popular tourist destination: between July and August, 799,336 people visited the town, almost 20,000 a day when students, employees and residents are excluded.
According to VRT, the city is paying telco Proximus €40,000 a year for data on how many phones are in each part of the city, presumably using cell location data. Proximus then apparently extrapolates data for the rest of the area while taking into account subscribers to other networks and those without mobile phones. We've asked both Proximus and local city officials for comment.
But the Belgian data protection regulator has told The Register that, contrary to reports, it had not approved the scheme and was examining whether or not it breaks Belgian data protection law.
In an email, a spokesperson said:
We did not approve the tracking of mobile phones in Kortrijk. The Privacy Commission (the predecessor of the Belgian Data Protection Authority) had reacted positively to a similar project in 2016; that was three years ago and was not about this precise case. We have heard concerns from citizens about this project, therefore we will look into it. We cannot comment further at the time because we do not have all the details about the project and the processing.
The data will be collected once every three months and analysed to improve marketing campaigns for tourism and commerce.
Data provided to the city apparently includes the nationality of the subscriber or the province or even municipality within Belgium they come from.
The intention is that city hall will then cross-reference this with data from Visa and debit card companies to see how much people are spending. VRT said the first results show sales days bring in more visitors – 49,000 for Whit Sunday. Of these, 79 per cent of local visitors were from West Flanders, 4.82 per cent came from Hainault, and 1.53 per cent from Antwerp. Of foreign visitors, half were French and 14 per cent Dutch.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday November 02 2019, @03:15PM
city hall will then cross-reference this with data from Visa and debit card companies to see how much people are spending
And that my friends is why I only use cash to pay for most things. And I've been called paranoid for the better part of 20 years...
Having said that, I expect callous data exploitation such as this to come from private concerns, because anything is good to make a buck for these sonsabitches. I expected better from elected muni authorities though. That's the really sad part of this story.