These Digital Kiosks Snatch Your Phone’s Data When You Walk By

Digital kiosks from Soofa seem harmless, giving you bits of information alongside some ads. However, these kiosks popping up throughout the United States take your phone’s information and location data whenever you walk near them, and sell them to local governments and advertisers, first reported by NBC Boston Monday.

“At Soofa, we developed the first pedestrian impressions sensor that measures accurate foot traffic in real-time,” says a page on the company’s website. “Soofa advertisers can check their analytics dashboard anytime to see how their campaigns are tracking towards impressions goals.”

While data tracking is commonplace online, it’s becoming more pervasive in the real world. Whenever you walk past a Soofa kiosk, it collects your phone’s unique identifier (MAC address), manufacturer, and signal strength. This allows it to track anyone who walks within a certain, unspecified range. It then creates a dashboard to share with advertisers and local governments to display analytics about how many people are walking and engaging with its billboards.

This can offer local cities new ways to understand how people use public spaces, and how many people are reading notices posted on these digital kiosks. However, it also gives local governments detailed information on how people move throughout society and raises a question of how this data is being used.

Local civil rights groups are trying to stop the sale of location data. The Massachusetts American Civil Liberties Union warns these datasets can often end up in the wrong hands, and could help identify when people are nearing sensitive locations, such as abortion clinics or protests.

“Today, data brokers are allowed to buy this information, repackage it, and then sell it to anyone with a credit card,” said the ACLU in a blog post. “There are no state or federal laws prohibiting this practice.”

A Soofa spokesperson said it does not share data with any 3rd parties in an email to Gizmodo, and it only offers the dashboard to an organization that bought the kiosk. The company also claims to anonymize your MAC address by the time it gets to advertisers and local governments.

However, Soofa also tells advertisers how to effectively use your location data on its website. It notes that advertisers can track when you’ve been near a physical billboard or kiosk in the real world based on location data. Then, using cookies, the advertisers can send you more digital ads later on. While Soofa didn’t invent this technique, it certainly seems to be promoting it.

Data tracking practices are becoming more and more common in real-world advertising, and many of them are far worse than what Soofa is doing. It’s long been known that digital billboards track what groups are passing by them, and conduct similar practices to online advertisers, to understand how effective their ads are. However, these tools now seem to be used by local governments and are becoming more pervasive in the real world.