12 August 2013 Last updated at 07:23 ETBy Joe Miller BBC News
Advertisers can buy space on the bins' LCD screens
The City of London Corporation has asked a company to stop using recycling bins to track the smartphones of passers-by.
Renew London had fitted devices into 12 recycling "pods", which feature LCD advertising screens, to collect footfall data by logging nearby phones.
Renew's chief executive, Kaveh Memari, said the company had "stopped all trials in the meantime".
The corporation has taken the issue to the Information Commissioner's Office.
The action follows concerns about privacy issues raised by the Independent newspaper.
Mr Memari told the BBC that the devices had only recorded "extremely limited, encrypted, aggregated and anonymised data" and that the current technology was just being used to monitor local footfall, in a similar way as a web page monitors traffic.
He added that more capabilities could be developed in the future, but that the public would be made aware of any changes.
The bins, which are located in the Cheapside area of central London, log the media access control (MAC) address of individual smartphones - a unique identification code carried by all devices that can connect to a network.
A spokesman for the City of London Corporation said: "Irrespective of what's technically possible, anything that happens like this on the streets needs to be done carefully, with the backing of an informed public."
The City of London Corporation has asked a company to stop using recycling bins to track the smartphones of passers-by.
Renew London had fitted devices into 12 recycling "pods", which feature LCD advertising screens, to collect footfall data by logging nearby phones.
Renew's chief executive, Kaveh Memari, said the company had "stopped all trials in the meantime".
The corporation has taken the issue to the Information Commissioner's Office.
The action follows concerns about privacy issues raised by the Independent newspaper.
Mr Memari told the BBC that the devices had only recorded "extremely limited, encrypted, aggregated and anonymised data" and that the current technology was just being used to monitor local footfall, in a similar way as a web page monitors traffic.
He added that more capabilities could be developed in the future, but that the public would be made aware of any changes.
The bins, which are located in the Cheapside area of central London, log the media access control (MAC) address of individual smartphones - a unique identification code carried by all devices that can connect to a network.
A spokesman for the City of London Corporation said: "Irrespective of what's technically possible, anything that happens like this on the streets needs to be done carefully, with the backing of an informed public."