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Radio 'sniffers' likened to fed e-surveillance

http://www.idg.net/ic_183672_1794_9-10000.html

By Bob Brewin 05/29/2000 The privacy debate is likely to get more heated with the growing popularity of a wireless technology that detects which stations car radios are tuned to and feeds the information to advertisers via the Web.

Mobiltrak Inc., a Birmingham, Ala.-based start-up firm, says it can help focus an advertising campaign by ascertaining which radio stations potential customers listen to in the vicinity of retail outlets.

Mobiltrak uses FM radio "sniffers" that can detect, from several hundred feet away, the station to which a car radio is tuned. It can do that because every radio receiver is also a minitransmitter.

"This gives us a large-scale, perfectly random sample from 10% to 20% of the passing traffic," said Jim Christian, Mobiltrak's CEO.

Mobiltrak equipment, mounted in unobtrusive shelters about the size of household cable TV boxes, can sample as many as 100,000 listeners per installation per day, Christian said. The company operates in the Phoenix, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Toronto metropolitan markets and in more than 100 stand-alone retail locations outside of those markets.

Privacy advocates said they view Mobiltrak's activities with alarm.

David Banisar, the Silver Spring, Md.-based deputy director of Privacy International, said Mobiltrak is conducting the kind of "random electronic surveillance" carried out by the National Security Agency, which is the government's electronic-intelligence-gathering organization.

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