Request ID: FOI-2660-2324 Date published: 20 November 2023
You asked
Hello team,
This FOI is similar in nature to request ID: FOI-1855-2324
Please could you share a list of all businesses (or other entities) that provide or sell to TfL datasets gathered from people in London?
More specifically, please could you release the details of any agreements with social media providers (eg, Strava), journey planning apps (Citymapper), and micro-mobility operators (e.g. Lime, HumanForest) to share the data of people in London with TfL?
For any agreements in place now or historically, please could you share:
- Documents outlining the types of data that are shared and whether that data is used per individual or in aggregate form
- Data protection impact assessments relating to such agreements
- Additional documents outlining how TfL uses such data
- Reports produced summarising insights gained from human movement tracking and geolocation
Many thanks in advance for your help
We answered
Our ref: FOI-2660-2324/GH
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 26 October 2023 asking for information about TfL data sets.
Your request has been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and our information access policy.
I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. However, to provide the information you have requested would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.
Under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with requests if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information, locating and retrieving it and extracting it from other information would exceed the appropriate limit. In this instance, we estimate that the time required to answer your request would exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’.
We do not hold this information in one central place, and would therefore need to contact many different areas within TfL to see if they held information relevant to your request, and if so to compile this information. The description of data as being “gathered from people in London” is also very broad, and could include data that those individuals deliberately supply to a third party, such as personally identifiable DVLA data used in enforcement, information recorded about unidentified individuals, such as people involved in traffic accidents, which we get from police, and demographic information about an area, which presumably starts out as data gathered from people, possibly through the census, but is aggregated before we see it. The number of TfL people we’d need to survey to track all that data would therefore be a huge task.
To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your requests to concentrate on matters which are important to you. For example, if you could limit your request to journey planning apps we may be able to locate the requested information. Another option would be if you could name the suppliers you are most interested in.
Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, TfL does not have to answer your question if it would require the creation of new information or the provision of a judgement, explanation, advice or opinion that was not already recorded at the time of your request. If you have specific questions relating to these topics we may be more easily able to respond to these than to a request for any information held.
If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Graham Hurt FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
