Tracked by phone rush-hour crush

ing wifi connection movements on the Tube to help stop crushes.

Speaking at this week’s Big Data London show at Olympia, O2’s analytics director Alastair McMahon said transport models “are now based on things people actually do rather than a theory of what they do, which helps us forward plan for the next 20 or 30 years.

“As our mobility patterns change, this is going to help employers figure out what kind of investment is needed for people to work from home or have flexible working patterns.

“It will also help transport providers offer more flexible tickets and incentivise people to travel outside peak times. In a future data-rich environ- ment, we can travel by Tube, bus, Uber or black cab on one e-ticket or app.

“But the challenge is getting people off peak trains and out of their car as they move out of London to the suburbs and there is more pressure on commuter rail services.”

On privacy concerns, he said: “It’s very, very difficult for someone to look at this data and try to reverse engineer it.”

A TfL spokesman said the data has been “depersonalised, to remove information that could identify people”.

O2 said the only way for someone with a device to opt out of the project was to switch it off. This would mean that a user is “no longer connected to our network so there’s no data to analyse”.

AFTER a scorching summer, which saw the capital turn a parched biscuitbrown, the grass has finally been relaid in Parliament Square.Pictures of the barren earth made headlines in the middle of the year after a lack of rainfall and temperatures consistently reaching the mid to high 30s — in what was the hottest summer on record for England.In July, the Greater London Authority, which is in charge of maintenance, said new grass seed would have to be sown to make up for the damage.The summer was the country’s driest since 1961 and dramatically changed the landscape in the capital, although a hosepipe ban was not introduced.The unusually hot weather came Turfed out: new grass is laid in Parliament Square after a lack of rain over the summer left the ground a parched biscuit-brown