PRESS: Moscow govt pays mln of rbl to track citizens’ movements

MOSCOW, Mar 4 (PRIME) -- Moscow officials pay millions of rubles to connection operators for geo analytics to know where citizens live and work, their locations with accuracies of up to 500 meters and several minutes, business daily Vedomosti reported on Monday.

The Moscow Information Technologies Department has been buying geo analytics since 2015, according to the state purchases website, and has spent 516 million rubles from the city budget, including 101.8 million rubles in 2018, on the data.

In reports, Moscow and the Moscow Region are divided into slots of 500 meters by 500 meters, and each of them has information on the number of people residing and working there.

Officials are also interested in movements of citizens across the city. Operators describe how many trips a person does in the metro, how long does it take people to get to work and back home. To get this information, operators choose a metro station as a certain zone and register when a person enters and quits this zone.

A spokesperson for mobile operator T2 RTK Holding said that if subscribers’ routes are superimposed on a city map, it is seen how load rises on highways, railways, and the metro.

A representative for mobile operator MTS said that authorities can make decisions on transport infrastructure and flows and plan public transport circulation.

(65.8145 rubles – U.S. $1)

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