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posted by janrinok on Thursday March 22 2018, @06:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the we're-the-good-guys,-honest dept.

The Guardian mentions that the Gold Coast council in Australia, where next month's Commonwealth Games are hosted, will use a new city WiFi service to harvest Facebook data from visitors.

The data mining, which the council says is legal and will be used to help the city market itself to tourists, relies on visitors using their Facebook accounts to log into a new high-speed WiFi service. Users who object to sharing their Facebook data can still access the free WiFi, but the speed will be much slower and downloads restricted.

The city switched on the wifi service in the tourist hubs of Surfers Paradise, Southport and Broadbeach on Tuesday, 15 days ahead of the Games opening ceremony. It spent $5m to build its own infrastructure for the Games due to concerns about the speed and rollout of the national broadband network.

A city spokeswoman insisted the council would only make "limited use" of the data it mined from tourists. She insisted data would not be shared with "other agencies" although reports about tourist activity based on the information could be made available to the tourism sector "and other sectors as appropriate".

"The most important information is about country of origin, to better understand the use by overseas tourists, who are one of the primary target groups for the service," the spokeswoman said.

"The city will be able to understand patterns of demand and use, including how many people are accessing the service, times of day and the amounts of data used. It will also be very useful for understanding numbers during events and seasonal effects."


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday March 22 2018, @07:45AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 22 2018, @07:45AM (#656513) Journal

    This time it behaved like a dump bear [abc.net.au]:

    Gold Coast council dumps plan to mine Facebook data from Commonwealth Games visitors using free wi-fi

    For Indians, it still looked like a drop bear [scroll.in].

    For others, it looked like a red bear in front of a bull [brisbanetimes.com.au]

    Fury over plan to mine Facebook data at Commonwealth Games
    ...
    The plan has outraged the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties, , which says privacy laws prohibit data collection unless it's necessary for council purposes.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Interesting=2, Underrated=1, Total=3
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5