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When apps wants to access data from your smartphone’s motion or light sensors, they often make that capability clear. That keeps a fitness app, say, from counting your steps without your knowledge. But a team of researchers has discovered that the rules don’t apply to websites loaded in mobile browsers, which can often often access an array of device sensors without any notifications or permissions whatsoever.

That mobile browsers offer developers access to sensors isn’t necessarily problematic on its own. It’s what helps those services automatically adjust their layout, for example, when you switch your phone’s orientation. And the World Wide Web Consortium standards body has codified how web applications can access sensor data. But the researchers—Anupam Das of North Carolina State University, Gunes Acar of Princeton University, Nikita Borisov of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Amogh Pradeep of Northeastern University—found that the standards allow for unfettered access to certain sensors. And sites are using it.

The researchers found that of the top 100,000 sites—as ranked by Amazon-owned analytics company Alexa—3,695 incorporate scripts that tap into one or more of these accessible mobile sensors. That includes plenty of big names, including Wayfair, Priceline.com, and Kayak.

“If you use Google Maps in a mobile browser you’ll get a little popup that says, ‘This website wants to see your location,’ and you can authorize that,” says Borisov. “But with motion, lighting, and proximity sensors there isn’t any mechanism to notify the user and ask for permission, so they’re being accessed and that is invisible to the user. For this collection of sensors there isn’t a permissions infrastructure.”

That unapproved access to motion, orientation, proximity, or light sensor data alone probably wouldn’t compromise a user’s identity or device. And a web page can only access sensors as long as a user is actively browsing the page, not in the background. But the researchers note that on a malicious website, the information could fuel various types of attacks, like using ambient light data to make inferences about a user’s browsing, or using motion sensor data as a sort of keylogger to deduce things like PIN numbers.

In past work, researchers have also shown that they can use the unique calibration features of motion sensors on individual devices to identify and track them across websites. And while the World Wide Web Consortium standards classify data from these sensors as “not sensitive enough to warrant specific sensor permission grants,” the group does acknowledge that there are some potential privacy concerns. “Implementations may consider permissions or visual indicators to signify the use of sensors by the page,” the standard suggests.

The prevalence of ad networks also makes it difficult to get a handle on the issue. The researchers even found three scripts attempting to access user sensors in ad modules on WIRED.com, though at least one had been removed when the researchers rechecked the site for this story. Other media sites, including CNN, the Los Angeles Times, and CNET have ad networks using similar scripts as well.

Stratumseind in Eindhoven is one of the busiest nightlife streets in the Netherlands. On a Saturday night, bars are packed, music blares through the street, laughter and drunken shouting bounces off the walls. As the night progresses, the ground becomes littered with empty shot bottles, energy drink cans, cigarette butts and broken glass.

It’s no surprise that the place is also known for its frequent fights. To change that image, Stratumseind has become one of the “smartest” streets in the Netherlands. Lamp-posts have been fitted with wifi-trackers, cameras and 64 microphones that can detect aggressive behaviour and alert police officers to altercations. There has been a failed experiment to change light intensity to alter the mood. The next plan, starting this spring, is to diffuse the smell of oranges to calm people down. The aim? To make Stratumseind a safer place.

We get that comment a lot – ‘Big brother is watching you’. I prefer to say, ‘Big brother is helping you’

All the while, data is being collected and stored. “Visitors do not realise they are entering a living laboratory,” says Maša Galic, a researcher on privacy in the public space for the Tilburg Institute of Law, Technology and Society. Since the data on Stratumseind is used to profile, nudge or actively target people, this “smart city” experiment is subject to privacy law. According to the Dutch Personal Data Protection Act, people should be notified in advance of data collection and the purpose should be specified – but in Stratumseind, as in many other “smart cities”, this is not the case.

Peter van de Crommert is involved at Stratumseind as project manager with the Dutch Institute for Technology, Safety and Security. He says visitors do not have to worry about their privacy: the data is about crowds, not individuals. “We often get that comment – ‘Big brother is watching you’ – but I prefer to say, ‘Big brother is helping you’. We want safe nightlife, but not a soldier on every street corner.”

When we think of smart cities, we usually think of big projects: Songdo in South Korea, the IBM control centre in Rio de Janeiro or the hundreds of new smart cities in India. More recent developments include Toronto, where Google will build an entirely new smart neighbourhood, and Arizona, where Bill Gates plans to build his own smart city. But the reality of the smart city is that it has stretched into the everyday fabric of urban life – particularly so in the Netherlands.

In the eastern city of Enschede, city traffic sensors pick up your phone’s wifi signal even if you are not connected to the wifi network. The trackers register your MAC address, the unique network card number in a smartphone. The city council wants to know how often people visit Enschede, and what their routes and preferred spots are. Dave Borghuis, an Enschede resident, was not impressed and filed an official complaint. “I don’t think it’s okay for the municipality to track its citizens in this way,” he said. “If you walk around the city, you have to be able to imagine yourself unwatched.”

Enschede is enthusiastic about the advantages of the smart city. The municipality says it is saving €36m in infrastructure investments by launching a smart traffic app that rewards people for good behaviour like cycling, walking and using public transport. (Ironically, one of the rewards is a free day of private parking.) Only those who mine the small print will discover that the app creates “personal mobility profiles”, and that the collected personal data belongs to the company Mobidot.
‘Targeted supervision’ in Utrecht

Companies are getting away with it in part because it involves new applications of data. In Silicon Valley, they call it “permissionless innovation”, they believe technological progress should not be stifled by public regulations. For the same reason, they can be secretive about what data is collected in a public space and what it is used for. Often the cities themselves don’t know.

Utrecht keeps track of the number of boys and girls hanging in the streets, their age and whether they are acquaintances

Utrecht has become a tangle of individual pilots and projects, with no central overview of how many cameras and sensors exist, nor what they do. In 2014, the city invested €80m in data-driven management that launched in 80 projects. Utrecht now has a burglary predictor, a social media monitoring room, and smart bins and smart streetlights with sensors (although the city couldn’t say where these are located). It has scanner cars that dispense parking tickets, with an added bonus of detecting residents with a municipal tax debt according to the privacy regulation of the scanner cars. But when I asked the city to respond to a series of questions on just 22 of the smart projects, it could only answer for five of them, referring me to private companies for the rest of the answers.

The city also keeps track of the number of young people hanging out in the streets, their age group, whether they know each other, the atmosphere and whether or not they cause a nuisance. Special enforcement officers keep track of this information through mobile devices. It calls this process “targeted and innovative supervision”. Other council documents mention the prediction of school drop-outs, the prediction of poverty and the monitoring of “the health of certain groups” with the aim of “intervening faster”.

Like many cities, Utrecht argues that it acts in accordance with privacy laws because it anonymises or pseudonymises data (assigning it a number instead of a name or address). But pseudonymised personal data is still personal data. “The process is not irreversible if the source file is stored,” says Mireille Hildebrandt, professor of ICT and Law at Radboud University. “Moreover, if you build personal profiles and act on them, it is still a violation of privacy and such profiling can – unintentionally – lead to discrimination.” She points to Utrecht’s plan to register the race and health data of prostitutes, which came in for heavy criticism from the Dutch Data Protection Authority.

Another unanswered question regards who owns data that is collected in a public space. Arjen Hof is director of Civity, a company that builds data platforms for governments. “Public authorities are increasingly outsourcing tasks to private companies. Think of waste removal or street lighting,” he says. “But they do not realise that at the same time a lot of data is collected, and do not always make agreements about the ownership of data.”
‘A smart city is a privatised city’

Hof gives the example of CityTec, a company that manages 2,000 car parks, 30,000 traffic lights and 500,000 lamp-posts across the Netherlands. It refused to share with municipalities the data it was collecting through its lamp-post sensors. “Their argument was that, although the municipality is legally owner of the lamp-posts, CityTec is the economic owner and, for competitive reasons, did not want to make the data available,” Hof says. This was three years ago, but for a lot of companies it remains standard practice. Companies dictate the terms, and cities say they can’t share the contracts because it contains “competition-sensitive information”.

When I interviewed the technology writer Evgeny Morozov in October, he warned of cities becoming too dependent on private companies. “The culmination of the smart city is a privatised city,” he said. “A city in which you have to pay for previously free services.”

Morozov’s fear about public subsidies being used for private innovation is well illustrated in Assen, a city of 70,000 people in the north of the country. Assen built a fibre-optic network for super-fast internet in 2011, to which it connected 200 sensors that measure, among other things, the flow of cars. There was an experiment to steer people around traffic jams, even though traffic in the city is relatively light. The city also connected its traffic lights, parking garages and parking signs to this grid. The cost of €46m was split between Brussels, the national government, the province and the municipality. Companies such as the car navigation firm TomTom have used the sensor network to test new services.

The project, called Sensor City, filed for bankruptcy a year ago. Now the publicly funded fibre-optic network, sensors and all, will be sold to a still-unidentified private company. The municipality will have to strike a deal with the new owner about the use of its public traffic lights and parking signs.

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“Researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a device that uses radio waves to detect whether someone is happy, sad, angry or excited.

The breakthrough makes it easier to accomplish what scientists have tried to do for years with machines: sense human emotions. The researchers believe tracking a person’s feelings is a step toward improving their overall emotional well-being.

The technology isn’t invasive [?]; it works in the background without a person having to do anything, like wearing a device. The device called EQ-Radio, which was detailed in a paper published online Tuesday, resembles a shoebox, as of now. In the future, it may shrink down and integrate with an existing computing gadget in your home.

It works by bouncing wireless signals off a person. These signals are impacted by motion, such as breathing and heartbeats. When the heart pumps blood, a force is exerted onto our bodies, and the skin vibrates ever so slightly.

After the radio waves are impacted by these vibrations, they return to the device. A computer then analyzes the signals to identify changes in heartbeat and breathing.

The researchers demonstrated their system detects emotions on par with an electrocardiogram (EKG), a common wearable device medical professionals use to monitor the human heart.

The use of technology that allows the police to “see” inside the homes of suspects has raised privacy questions.

At least 50 US police forces are believed to be equipped with radars that can send signals through walls.

The use of the radar device, known as Range-R, was made public in a Denver court late last year.

It was used by police entering a house to arrest a man who had violated the terms of his parole.

In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that police cannot use thermal cameras without a warrant, specifically noting that the rule would also apply to radar-based systems that were then being developed.

“The idea that government can send signals through the wall of your house to figure out what’s inside is problematic,” Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union told USA Today.

“Technologies that allow the police to look inside of a home are among the intrusive tools that police have.”

“Google has big hopes for its Glass head-mounted computer, chief among them a desire to make the unit smaller and more comfortable to wear.

Those were just a couple of the goals for a polished version of the device laid out Tuesday by Babak Parviz, the creator of Glass, who is also the director of Google’s “X” special projects division.

“Essentially we’d like to make the technology disappear,” he said during a conference on wearable technology in San Francisco.

“It should be non-intrusive” and as comfortable to wear as regular glasses or a wristwatch, he said.

Shrinking the unit would require advances in optics and photonics, he said. More computing power is also needed to make the device faster at answering people’s questions on the fly, Parviz said.