UK shoppers tracked by mobile phone

A NEW gadget is tracking customers in a Portsmouth shopping centre by the emissions from their mobiles.

While it has long been possible to triangulate a mobile's position using the cell network itself, it only allows a phone's location to be pinpointed to within a couple of kilometres.

The new system at Portsmouth's Gunwharf Quays mall can tell when people enter the shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there and the route they take as they amble about.

But the system doesn't come cheap. New receivers, costing £20,000 a month to rent, are required and The London Times reckons twenty of the things would be required to equip a major mall such as Bluewater, just to the East of London.

The company supplying the Portsmouth system says it's a merely a market research tool: "There's absolutely no way we can link the information we gather back to the individual,” a spokeswoman told The Times. "There's nothing personal in the data."

However, as the system uses the phones' IMEI code - which is registered to users by mobile companies - there is nothing preventing the system tracking individual's movements to within metres.

Managers at the Portsmouth mall were surprised to discover that it had a large number of visitors whose phones were registered in Germany, which resulted in them providing bi-lingual signs. µ

L'Inq
London Times