Transport for NSW helps advertisers steal your data

BY KIERAN ADAIR

You might not remember it, but once upon a time you were able to catch public transport in this city without being forced to digest the loud, obnoxious advertising that now litters our trains and buses.

You can thank our current Premier for that change. In 2013 when she was Transport Minister, Gladys Berejiklian sold the advertising rights for Sydney trains and stations to a cabal of outdoor advertising companies, gifting them 150 LCD screens that now blare advertising to commuters waiting on busy train platforms.

At the time, Berejiklian spruiked her plan’s use of “innovative technologies and new ideas”, claiming the advertising would deliver “at least $100 million over five years.”

I’m pretty sure there’s nothing ‘innovative’ about billboards – there’s already enough of them littering our public spaces – and as far as the $100 million’s concerned, none of it seems to have gone into a fare reduction.

Worse yet is the effect exposure to advertising might be having on our health.

Recent studies have linked the prevalence of junk food advertising to the growing problem of child obesity. According to Timothy Gill, an Associate Professor at the Boden Institute of Obesity, Nutrition and Exercise,

“We know that children pester their parents about buying junk food and that being exposed to junk food advertising makes them agitate for these products more often. We have very clear evidence about that.”

A similar link applies to beauty advertising, and issues with body image, especially in women.

“Women and girls compare themselves to these images every day,” says Jean Kilbourne, director of Killing Us Slowly, “And failure to live up to them is inevitable because they are based on a flawlessness that doesn’t exist.”

People often claim to ignore advertisements, but the messages still get through on a subconscious level – whether they welcome or not – ruining our health, body image, and wallets.

It’s for this reason that another, more recent, announcement should be cause for concern. Earlier this month Andrew Constance, Berejiklian’s successor, was out spruiking another innovation for our bus network – a trial of free Wi-Fi on 50 buses.

“It is exciting to see another example of how public transport can be enhanced with technology,” he said.

While that sounds innocent enough, and maybe quite useful, the devil is in the fine print. It won’t be the NSW Government providing the Wi-Fi, but APN Advertising, a beneficiary of the current advertising scheme.

Upon connecting to the Wi-Fi service, APN Outdoor will track the user’s location data as well as other non-specified private information, which can be shared with third parties. This data includes name, address, date of birth, and location details – but can be extended to include photographs, credit card and employer details.

Greens MP Mehreen Faruqi is troubled by the news.

“The Transport Minister [Andrew Constance] is boasting this as a win for the public, but is failing to make clear how the free Wi-Fi is being paid for, burying the ‘catch’ in the fine print,” she says.

“Not making it clear to tens of thousands of bus commuters that they’ll be signing up to hand over their personal information to a private company is simply irresponsible.”

Tracking this kind of personal data is part of a new trend called behavioural advertising – where marketers aggregate troves of personal data and use it to make predictions about what a person’s likely to purchase.

Along with the privacy concerns regarding the aggregated data, these predictions “can not only change how people see themselves, but also cause them to modify their behavior” Rebecca Walker Reczek, Associate Professor of Marketing, wrote recently in The Conversation.

According to Yankelovich, a market research firm, a person living in a city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day. Today that number is closer to 5,000 today. These ads have the ability to affect our health, body image, and even lifestyle decisions.

While the Government can’t control all advertising, the bulk of which happens online and on private billboards, it is within their power to limit its prevalence in the public spaces they control – buses, trains, ferries, and parks – and give us back our peace, quiet, and privacy on our commute home.