Hyde Park tracks visitors using customers mobile phone networks

Part of a year-long project running from August last year to improve the park's facilities amid increasing funding cuts

Families enjoy Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park (Getty Images)

Visitors to Hyde Park were covertly electronically tracked using data provided by their mobile phone networks in a year-long project to analyse footfall amid brutal funding cuts.

EE customers, via third party Future Cities Catapult (FCC), were retrospectively located in the park from August 2014 to August 2015, with users’ aggregated age and gender also available.

The data from FCC, a government-funded initiative focusing on urban renewal, was used by park officials to analyse visitors – of which there 12.4 million in 2014 – to the site in the hope of improving and streamlining the park’s facilities.

Successive government cuts have brutally reduced Royal Parks’ funding: down from 80 per cent of their total revenue a decade ago to just 35 per cent last year, the Guardian reported.

Despite this, and the increased footfall, parks have compensated with new cafes, shops and galleries – as well as initiatives such as the collaboration with FCC.

Only EE customers’ data was used in the project (as per the network’s privacy policy) and was taken after a four-week lag – but some have urged caution over the use of such data.

Usman Haque, co-founder of Thingful, a search engine for the Internet of Things, said public spaces carry with them a “notion of being anonymous”.

“When you don’t have the option of defining that anonymity for yourself, I would argue your rights have been taken away,” he told the Guardian.

But an EE spokesperson said the use of big data was a “highly effective” way of improving public services but emphasised they provided such data without “ever intruding on the privacy of individuals.”

A Royal Parks spokesperson added there were no “plans to track real-time data of visitors through mobile phone data.”