Belgian city slurps mobile data to track visitors • DigitalMunition

Local regulator says it hasn't approved scheme. Meanwhile, Spain up to similar tricks

Lovely historical Kortrijk in West Flanders, Belgium

Updated The Belgian city of Kortrijk in West Flanders is 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 DigitalMunition 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:

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.

It also emerged yesterday that the statistics authority in Spain (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, INE) is planning to track every mobile handset in the country that uses the three largest network providers – Movistar, Vodafone and Orange – over a period four days in November.

Between 18 and 21 November, mobile subscribers will be counted and their location logged. A further four days of data slurping are already planned for Christmas and next summer.

Spanish citizens have been assured the data will be anonymous and aggregated.

To ensure anonymity, the INE has divided the country into cells with a minimum of 5,000 inhabitants. So Madrid is made up of 128 cells while in rural areas the individual cells will stretch for miles.

Location checks will be made between midnight and 6am to establish a place of residence, and again between 9am and 6pm when subscribers are assumed to be at work. To account for shift workers, locations will also be checked at six specific points during the day – 6am, 10am, 2pm, 6pm, 10pm and 2am.

The aim is to provide information on numbers of people commuting from dormitory towns into municipal centres and those staying near home for work.

Researchers also hope to gain a better understanding of so-called "empty Spain" – the swathes of rural countryside suffering severe depopulation. The institute will run similar checks for two days in the summer and on Christmas Day to check holiday movements.

The INE is confident that no data laws will be breached by the mass surveillance because the data is genuinely anonymised. It also notes that similar questions are asked in the Spanish census.

An INE mouthpiece told DigitalMunition (courtesy of Google Translate):

An El Pais report is here, in Spanish. ®

* Updated at 0900 on 1 November to add

City officials got in touch with The Reg to say (translated): "We do not collect the data itself but get reports from Proximus. These reports are completely anonymous and only show how many people have visited our town and from what country, or city.

We could never track anyone individually and would never want to.

Thus, only streams of visitors larger than 30 people are counted by Proximus.

So [for example] if there are 250 people from Antwerp who visit our city on a Monday, we'll know; if only 28 did, we will not."

Such reports "allow us to spend our marketing resources more efficiently and see whether certain campaigns work or not.

"How many people really go car-free on a Sunday? Is it worth publishing [a campaign article] in a Walloon magazine or is it a waste of money? Moreover, we also use this data to better solve complex mobility issues."

It did not respond to a question about payment data cross-referencing.

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