Phone Booths In New York City Are Invading and Tracking Your Cell Phone When You Pass By — How To Stop It

Photo by Krystian Olszanski.

Update: New York’s City Hall has asked the ad company to get rid of the beacons.

By Kashmir Hill
Public phone booths have become an anachronistic feature of urban landscapes thanks to everyone carrying phones in their pockets, but they still have at least one important function: a display booth for advertising. And now, in New York City, that advertising has been equipped with a technology called beacons that use Bluetooth to emit signals that activate receptive apps on people’s phones to either show them ads or track their location. It’s a kind of beautiful technological poetry: New York’s phone booths now try to ‘call’ the smartphones of every person who walks by.

Buzzfeed, which discovered the deployment of “hundreds of [Bluetooth beacons] inside New York City phone booths” using a beacon-detecting Android app says the technology “could turn any city into a giant matrix of hidden commercialization — and vastly deepen the network of surveillance that has already grown out of technologies ranging from security cameras to cell phone towers.” It sounds ominous! It sounds a little less ominous if you include caveats about the limitation of this technology.

First off, beacons themselves don’t collect information about you or “track your every move.” They get your phone to do it. And they can only get your phone to do it if you have Bluetooth turned on and if you have an app on your phone that is receptive to the signals being broadcast by beacons. For example, if you have a Sephora app on your phone, and you have Bluetooth turned on, and you walk past a Sephora store that has beacons, they can activate the Sephora app to show you an ad (“Come in and get 10% off getting pretty!”) and the app can log that you walked by.

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