Lannion Brittany traces pedestrians smartphones: The city of Lannion in Brittany will trace pedestrians via their smartphone

If you walk around Lannion, in Côtes-d'Armor, Brittany, know that you will be tracked by your smartphone. The city has decided to work with the Éco-compteur company, a specialist in the census of people flows, to have twenty sensors in its downtown streets capable of identifying smartphones and not human warmth as usual. . Contacted to understand the technology set up, Éco-compteur was not immediately reachable. The objective pursued by this experiment over several months is to understand how people move and thus help the municipality to better predict urban development to achieve by 2030, reports the regional daily Le Télégramme.

"This will allow us to have a global vision of the flows with a goal of revitalizing the city center, the goal being to go to the businesses that are located there.According to the results obtained, adjustments will be made", explains Paul Le Bihan, Mayor of Lannion. The sensors will record phone data to determine the number of pedestrians. The newspaper specifies that the company will be able to determine the route of the people, the place of departure in the defined area at its point of arrival, the time spent, the courses, etc.
Lannion fits in with the trend of so-called smart cities.

Lannion Brittany traces pedestrians smartphones

At its scale, Lannion, with its 20,000 inhabitants and hundreds of thousands of passages over a week, is part of the trend of data mining by cities to create smarter services to citizens. This is commonly known as smart cities "in the jargon of your tech Some metropolises are better prepared than others in the world, like Singapore or Copenhagen.In France, 24 municipalities, metropolises and French urban communities are currently developing smart services, notes the JDN.

On the flip side, some experts worry that the more technology advances, the more difficult it will be for citizens to keep their privacy. For its part, Éco-compteur claims to have received the agreement of the French policeman for privacy, the CNIL, under the European Data Protection Regulation (RGPD) But as specified by our colleagues NextInspact, CNIL intervenes rather a posteriori, if the consent of the persons concerned is not respected for example.