The Moscow mayor’s office has commissioned the development of a system designed to compile a detailed digital profile of users of all city services. This is reported by Open Media, citing materials on the site of public procurement.
According to the documents, authorities intend to create an ‘information system for monitoring and analysis of internet activity’. The tender’s starting price is 280 million rubles.
A user profile should include data on debts and fines, a transport pass and a social card. The system will cross-reference information with data from public Wi‑Fi hotspots and from operators, monitor ‘territorial bans’ and ‘medical violations’, and also take into account data from public opinion surveys.
In addition, the system is intended to track ‘loyalty’. What this entails is not specified in the documents.
All data must be anonymised and not contain a first name and surname or place of birth, and the system ‘will not infringe on privacy’, said the head of Moscow’s Department of Information Technology Eduard Lysenko.
However, experts are concerned about its possible uses:
“This is a unified system of surveillance over Muscovites, centralising all data about us,” said Stanislav Shakirov, the technical director of RosKomSvoboda.
He noted that such systems can indeed help officials plan city infrastructure, but they ‘always contain potential surveillance mechanisms’:
“I am almost certain that information in this system will be personalised down to each citizen, and, most likely, it could at some point be bought on the black market, just as information from surveillance cameras with facial recognition can be bought today.”
Originally the system was aimed at analyzing activity of mos.ru users. With it, the city hall can already collect data to build a ‘portrait’ of a person, including gender, age, income and the like. It can also identify connections between users.
Earlier, the Moscow Centre for Traffic Management intends to deploy a dedicated system for monitoring passenger flow through smartphones.
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