Have you passed the cafe, and you immediately showed his advertisement? This is not paranoia

There is a free WiFai in Moscow. Its operator collects a lot of user data

In 2018, many posts appeared in social networks of residents of large cities describing about the situation: a person passes by a cafe, and later sees the advertising banner of the very cafe in Facebook. At first it seemed a strange coincidence, but over time it became obvious that so often coincidences did not occur. The technology that allows us to monitor users and offer them suitable advertising is used by Maxim Telecom. Over the past six months, the number of its customers has grown from several cafes and shops to a thousand outlets only in Moscow. The Special Corps of Medusa Daniil Turovsky found out how the business of the company is developing and how its employees relate to accusations of monitoring users.

In the spring of 2018, Maxim Telecom, which provides WiFai in Russian transport (Moscow and St. Petersburg metro, Sheremetyevo and Domodedovo airports, Aeroexpress), launched a network of sensors, “scanning” the environment for tens of meters around. The routers, who called MT_BOX in the company, began to record telephone identifiers ( MAC addresses ) of people with the wifai turned on.

Maxim Telecom began to sell these routers to small and medium-sized businesses (mainly cafes, shops and fitness centers). After installing in the room, the sensor begins to track the owners of smartphones that are nearby and send advertising to them. Having fallen under scanning, the passerby identifier is compared with the Maxim Telecom base: about 30 million devices connected to their Wifey have accumulated in it. The user gets into this base, having passed the mandatory registration on the Weifai network using his mobile phone.

Identifiers filter people, dividing them into target audiences. Having once got into the base, the user profile begins to grow with information: all its movements, data on the field, age, income, interests (based on the analysis of the websites visited through Vaifai), and the technical characteristics of the smartphone are preserved in it.

At the beginning of the year, the company thought about how, having such a network, to earn extra money, and decided to use this data to sell targeted advertising. According to the director of the Internet business "Maxim Telecom" Artem Pulikov, this happened "due to the growth of appetites with us and our shareholders."

Who are these shareholders, Maxim Telecom does not completely disclose. RBC found out that one of the co -owners of the company (through the offshore Geromell Trade) was Alexei Krivoruchko, then the General Director of the Kalashnikov concern JSC and at the same time the General Director of Aeroexpress LLC. Through it, the company may be associated with the vice mayor of Moscow on transport Maxim Liksutov. In an interview, Krivoruchko said that he and Liksutov were “friends for many years” and it was he who called him to the post of head of Aeroexpress. In 2018, Krivoruchko left all his companies and positions, becoming Deputy Minister of Defense.

Ketchup or mayonnaise

“We see how the devices move in the subway, where they go, where they enter the subway,” says Pulikov. - That is, we can understand that they live, for example, with the Dynamo metro. So, we can take them and show them an advertisement for some cafe on Dynamo. But customers said that they did not happen. We analyzed this and realized that just the locations [at the metro station] are not enough. For example, about 300 thousand people leave the Pushkinskaya metro station, but about half of them will not go towards the right cafe, but in the opposite, towards Red Square. Another part of the people will go along the other side of the street. But people who pass by the cafe every day come in the cafe, and we see [using MT_Box] that they pass by every day from Monday to Friday. They have a daily pattern, and we can send them targeted advertising with a discount on coffee or breakfast, for example. ” According to Pulikov, MT_Box was created to filter people who pass their locations.

One of the presentations of Maxim Telecom states that the sensors recognize about 60% of passers -by passing by - and "three of the five owners of mobile devices can be associated with our routers." It also says that, among other things, routers can be installed in supermarkets so that users, going to the store, receive, for example, SMS about the sale of shampoo with a 20%discount.

Maxim Telecom began testing sensors for advertising on external surfaces. Pilot sensors installed near the road to scan car flow. “If there are more women in the stream, then when they drive up to the outside, we show them a certain video,” says Pulikov.

Recently, when connecting to Vifai in the Moscow metro, the owners of smartphones began to show screens with simple questions. Between viewing the commercials, passengers are asked about love for animals, their favorite football club or offered to choose: ketchup or mayonnaise? Polls launched to enrich the profile of each user. “Ketchup will answer - immediately in Heinz will leave,” explains Pulikov. - If a person says to us: “Yes, I have a cat,” then we, understanding this, next time we show him an advertisement for a cat. If a person visits [through our WiFay] sports sites, then Nike will be able to come to him. Remember the picture funny? The husband and his wife are sitting on the couch at home, a cat nearby, they look at Telik, and in the window you can see the face of a person who looks, and his wife says: “Don’t be afraid, dear, this is just a marketer watching our behavior to give us a more suitable advertisement.” This, of course, highlights in a blunder, but somewhere it is. ”

Banner or SMS

In March 2018, RBC briefly talked about one cafe using MT_Box. Over the next six months, MT_Box has been installed in a thousand rooms. Most likely, now any passerby, walking around Moscow, every day several times falls into the zone of action of the sensors.

For customers, the company has created a web interface with which you can load advertisements to the system; After that, they undergo moderation. In it you can choose between the advertising banner in Vaifai transport and SMS-owners. In addition, users who often pass by a particular cafe, but have not settled for a long time, can be returned: the cafe will send to former visitors advertising in the main social networks. In the same system, user parameters for advertising are selected: age, gender, interests.

One of the reports of the company stated that after the installation of the sail of the Kapuchinka coffee shop in the Avtozavodskaya area, they showed 8415 advertising banners passing by users; About 1% entered the coffee shop.

The system of coffee houses “Pumping Bread”, clothing stores United Colors of Benetton, Tom Tailor, Black Star Wear, bargier “Farsh”, a Gfitness fitness club, connected to the system. Black Star Wear showed about 98 thousand advertisements - 665 people came to them; The “daily bread” showed about 64 thousand advertisements - about 1000 people came to them; United Colors of Benetton showed about 2.5 million advertisements - about 18 thousand people came to them.

Surveillance or progress

In March 2018, the Moscow metro system MT_FREE found a vulnerability that allowed you to determine the phone numbers and social portraits of the metro passengers according to the MAC addresses of their smartphones. This became known from the post on the Habrahabr website programmer Vladimir Serov. The vulnerability allowed the user’s very profile that Maxim Telecom now sells to advertisers. In addition, the programmer wrote a script that allowed to monitor the movements of any WiFay user connected to MT_FREE.

Problems with user data safety and hacking Maxim Telecom have been from the very beginning of the company. In 2015, unknown people twice replaced the MT_FREE network, creating their own with a similar name. Because of this, the passengers of the Moscow metro in March saw porn , and in October the inscription : “Go to ... buckets and buckets! H. You, not the Internet. "

In the same year, the “Kaspersky Laboratory” reported that Maxim Telecom monitors the clients: “Of course, all this information is processed in the spirit of big data, but God forbid it will leak somewhere else. Separately, you can rejoice for security forces, who, in addition to all users traffic, are also available from the chambers in wagons by means of SORM . ” True, the publication quickly disappeared from the website of the Kaspersky Laboratory.

Sensors and data collection are only one of the innovations in Russian transport related to observing passengers. Simultaneously with the start of the work of the MT_boh sensors, in March 2018, a person recognition system earned in the Moscow metro. The system allows you to recognize up to 20 persons per second, comparing them with photographs from the database of the federal wanted list. When the closest policeman coincides, a signal comes to a special smartphone, after which he must check the suspects. With the help of the system, the police have already detained several people. In October 2018, after a video knowledge, an activist of the Political Party “Another Russia” was detained in the subway, whom an employee of the Center for Combating Extremism entered the base. There were no messages of the error of the person recognition system yet.

The company’s employees told Medusa that they could go into the profile of a particular device, but “it's difficult”. “We do not have any inner search engine with a devil on the logo, everything is done at the request level. We can write a request that, guys, here are the MAS-Adris, I am interested in the data that we have on it. ”

The agreement , which the user is proposed to be accepted during registration, states that “Maxim Telecom” “does not collect personal data (information that allows you to unequivocally identify an individual), but collects polls, data from the browser, the route of movements, information about the device”, “the contractor will not deliberately view or disclose any private posts or other electronic methods of exchange of messages (for the message (for the exception of cases provided for by law). "

The Medusa company said that they were treated from the police as part of the investigations of crimes, but did not disclose details.

“People are very worried that someone is following them,” says Artem Pulikov from Maxim Telecom. - The scandal with a data leak on Facebook also warms up all this. There are people who are generally striving for the fact that at least some information is known about them. We conduct polls, and there are a pool of people who say that they do not use our wifai because they do not want to leave their phone number. We are not dumb. Most people are also not dumb. The fact that search engines aggregate social networks have long passed. If you close this, then you need to close everything at all, and the next step we will say that the TV and the Internet are bad, let's get back to the Stone Age. For me it will be the beginning of the end. ”

Daniil Turovsky