Look at the bench, and see if you can figure it out. It’s on the west side of Babbio Patio, tucked in the corner, out of the way of major foot traffic. What you’ll notice immediately is that about one-fifth of the wooden seating area is obstructed by a large solar panel. A pair of USB ports on a console on the front side of the bench provides juice for devices that can connect with it.
Other than that, it’s a regular looking bench — a good place to sit between classes! But what is less obvious is that this bench might be watching you. Underneath the solar panel is a small Wi-Fi enabled sensor that sends data to an office building in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. When enabled, anyone who passes within 150 feet of the bench with a Wi-Fi-enabled mobile device in their pocket is picked up by the sensor and registered as a unique visitor. The sensors can’t access personal information from your phone — they’re designed to pick up the unique ID associated with any Wi-Fi enabled device — but still, if you come back the next day, it knows it’s you again, not a new visitor.
The bench on the west side of Babbio Patio is manufactured by Soofa, a company founded in 2014 by three graduates of the MIT Media Lab. The bench’s name is not a riff of “sofa” but a variant of the acronym for “smart urban furniture appliance.” Urban planning tools, including this bench, are enjoyed largely by city planners that can use new forms of mass data to make smarter decisions on projects. This data helps cities decide, say, whether they want to build a new park in an underdeveloped area with high foot traffic.
Sandra Richter, the co-founder and CEO of Soofa, wrote in a blog post that increasing the amount of available data on foot traffic can empower cities. “City leaders would be able to plan capital improvement projects more effectively and measure their success post implementation, analyze the attendance of events to learn which ones to repeat and which ones to enhance or change, and reduce staffing costs by optimizing maintenance schedules based on how much use different locations actually get,” she wrote.
So then what is Stevens doing with these benches? Are students and faculty getting tracked? According to a staff member from the Office of Planning and Design, “No,” definitely not. This bench was donated by an alumnus, the staff member said, and what was liked about it was not the tracking capabilities but the solar-powered charging station. Though tracking capabilities are available, the staff member assured they aren’t used by the university.
Should Stevens decide to enable tracking technologies, Soofa’s privacy policy promises that all data is anonymized. “Soofa observes the information being sent by mobile devices, including the device’s MAC address, manufacturer, and signal strength,” the policy reads. “After receiving the non-identifiable data sent by mobile devices, Soofa applies a cryptographic function to the MAC addresses to further anonymize them. Soofa analyzes the data it observes and provides aggregate anonymous information to our customers, such as cities.”
But even with anonymization, privacy advocates worry that data-driven urban planning tools corrode digital privacy rights. Timothy Yim, the Director of Data & Privacy at the San Francisco-based nonprofit Startup Policy Lab, told Landscape Architecture Magazine that “de-identification,” the process of stripping “personally identifiable information” from a data set, does not necessarily prevent “reidentification” at a later date.
“It is very hard to guarantee that any de-identification process is 100 percent foolproof,” he told the magazine. “And the more data that we have sitting in private repositories, like data aggregators and data brokers, the greater the likelihood that reidentification is possible.”
Digital rights advocates also question the ethical responsibilities of cities or organizations that have these benches. For example, there are no signs marking a 150-foot perimeter around Soofa benches warning pedestrians to turn back if they don’t want their devices registered. Soofa’s privacy policy mentions that aggregated, anonymized data is shared with customers, but it is unclear how data given to those customers will be restricted, if at all.
But until Stevens says that they have enabled the tracking technology, these questions shouldn’t be too concerning. For now, pull out your charger, sit back, relax, and enjoy the bench.
Be First to Comment