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Hyde Park Royal Parks Foundation EE

Hyde Park officials work with EE to track visitor data

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By Gillian West, Social media manager

December 28, 2015 | 2 min read

One of London's most popular tourist spots, Hyde Park, has been covertly tracking visitor's mobile data in a bid to record footfall following funding cuts.

Working with EE, park operators - Royal Parks - were able to capture age and gender data during a 12-month trial. Future Cities Catapult (FCC) supplied the phone-tracking service, harvesting data for Royal Parks officials which showed the percentage of people who had visited from different boroughs, towns and cities.

The trial comes following a number of cuts to Royal Parks' funding which has seen the operator to diversify its visitor offering by adding events such as Winter Wonderland.

A spokesman for Royal Parks commented: "While it would be useful to know how visitors use the park for future management we do not have plans to track real-time data of visitors through mobile phone data.

"The visitor data we saw as part of this project was several months old and was simply dots on a screen which showed us the flow of visitors. Any research of our visitors is carried out through official market research data."

An EE spokesperson added: "Big data has proven to be a highly effective method of improving infrastructure and public services. We worked as part of the Sensing London project to inform the better use of the royal parks and provide greater understanding of the needs of park users. This would include providing anonymous and retrospective network usage data of large groups of people - without ever intruding on the privacy of individuals."

According to the mobile operator the trial took place from August 2014 to August 2015 with a four-week delay on the data.

Royal Parks deputy chief executive, Colin Buttery, told the Guardian it would be even better if the park could get more up-to-date information as the trial did not include same-day visitor counts. "It would be great to find out how many people are in the park today," said Buttery. "But that is very much blue-sky thinking."

Hyde Park Royal Parks Foundation EE

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