After Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Google €403m over location data, the company says it will now obtain consent in person. Nine uniformed walkers follow users on foot, ring a bell and ask permission before writing down a street name. Regulators and consumer groups are not convinced.
— "and at that point the subject usually crosses the road, which we are obliged to record as a refusal," said Declan Mulhern, describing his first week as a consent officer for Google in central Dublin.
Mulhern is one of nine walkers hired by the company in response to a €403m fine from Ireland's Data Protection Commission over the way it handled users' location data. The regulator found users may not have understood their movements were being used to target adverts. Google's answer is to have someone ask them.
Under the scheme, a uniformed officer follows a consenting user at a distance of nine paces and requests permission, aloud, before writing down which street they are on. Nothing is recorded without a verbal yes. Refusals are noted in pencil and then, the company says, rubbed out.
A survey by knocking
The principle is not new. In 1086 the only way to find out what a country contained was to send men to stand in it and ask, and the men were not popular then either.
Google's director of ambient permissions, Ruth Okonjo-Traynor, said the company had underestimated how much people valued being asked.
"We had built something that knew where nine hundred million people were standing and had never once said good morning to any of them. That was the failure."
Okonjo-Traynor said the walkers carry no phones, no cameras and no recording equipment of any kind. They carry a notebook, a pencil and a small hand bell, rung once on approach so nobody is startled.
Training took nine days. Recruits practised the approach script, the polite withdrawal and what the company calls the doorway problem, which is what to do when a user goes inside a building and the officer does not have consent to follow.
Early results
The first full day of operation was a Saturday, which Google concedes was a mistake. Officers reported that shoppers walk faster than the training assumed and that consent obtained outside a pub does not reliably survive the next hour.
Mulhern said his own user withdrew permission four times before lunch and restored it twice, each reversal duly logged.
"She asked me what I was going to do with it," he said. "I said I was going to write down that she went to the chemist. She said fair enough, and then she said no again outside the chemist."
Ireland's Data Protection Commission has not endorsed the scheme. An assistant commissioner, Niamh Dowling, said the fine concerned the clarity of consent, not the staffing of it.
"We asked them to make it obvious to people what was happening," Dowling said. "I accept that a man in a high-visibility vest ringing a bell is obvious. I am not yet persuaded it is proportionate."
Consumer groups unimpressed
The European consumer organisations whose complaints triggered the case have described the arrangement as a category error. Their concern, they say, was the tracking, not the silence of it.
Henrik Vaalsted, a policy lead at a Copenhagen consumer body, said the industry had a long habit of answering the wrong question with great sincerity.
"Every time we object to the scale of something, we are offered a more courteous version of it at the same scale," he said. "Then we are told we have won."
Vaalsted noted that nine walkers cannot cover a city, and that Google has not explained what happens to the remaining users. The company says the scheme is a pilot and that expansion is under review.
The logistics
Each officer works a nine-hour shift and is assigned one user per shift, which the company accepts is a reduction in coverage from the previous system. Okonjo-Traynor called this a feature.
The notebooks are collected at the end of the day and driven to a storage unit near the docks. Nobody has yet decided who reads them, or whether anyone should.
Advertisers have been briefed that targeting may be slower. One media buyer said he had received a report stating that his target customer walked to a bus stop, waited, and then got on the bus, which he described as the most honest data he had ever been sold.
Mulhern is philosophical. He was a postman for nineteen years and says the job is broadly the same, except that nobody used to ask him what he was doing there.
"People are friendlier than the phone was," he said. "They tell you where they're going before you've asked. Then they say don't write that down."
And so he doesn't. The pencil hovers, the bell stays quiet, and the walk continues to a destination that will exist only in the memory of two people who were there.
