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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: 3, Insightful) by MostCynical on Thursday March 22 2018, @08:55AM (7 children)

    by MostCynical (2589) on Thursday March 22 2018, @08:55AM (#656523) Journal

    Yes, but blaming facebook might make some people hink they *weren't* going to slurp up all the data.

    Also, now they have to write all sorts of sniffers and IP trace programs to put on their wifi boxes - the data just got alot more expensive, especially as they only have a few weeks to get the new stuff installed.

    --
    "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 22 2018, @09:16AM (5 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 22 2018, @09:16AM (#656528) Journal

    Yes, but blaming facebook might make some people hink they *weren't* going to slurp up all the data.

    That would be the normal reaction - put a spin on it.
    However, I won't discount the possibility they actually believe what they said (as dumb as it may be) - don't forget they are political creatures and the political games aren't conducive to a deep understanding of what "data mining" and "big data" and "artificial intelligence" actually mean.

    Also, now they have to write all sorts of sniffers and IP trace programs to put on their wifi boxes...

    If they are semi-literates in IT, they may actually waste the public money in doing it - with HTTPS almost everywhere (FB and Google especially) packet sniffers will be useless.
    An HTTP proxy would be the best they could do to capture the browsing history - nothing different from what our ISP do to obey the "metadata retention" laws we have now.

     

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday March 22 2018, @09:26AM (3 children)

      by MostCynical (2589) on Thursday March 22 2018, @09:26AM (#656530) Journal

      so, is he value the facebook-limked marketing/personality insights, and/or the location/marketing opportunities to be fed into the feeds, or something else?

      If the first two, facebook is essential. If the "something else", then maybe they can still extract data (value) from "free" wifi.

      --
      "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday March 22 2018, @09:47AM (2 children)

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 22 2018, @09:47AM (#656532) Journal

        Some info on behaviour can be inferred from the location and the WiFI point can offer a vague idea about the location (less capability for triangulation than mobile protocols, I believe). Yes, the MAC address is useful as an ID, but capturing it doesn't require a special packet sniffer;even a consumer grade WiFI router can tell you what MACs are connected.

        The actual identity and nationality of the user can only be gathered from FB (or any site that stores enough personal info and discloses it to an App).

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by MostCynical on Thursday March 22 2018, @09:57AM (1 child)

          by MostCynical (2589) on Thursday March 22 2018, @09:57AM (#656537) Journal

          So, just like shopping centres and anywhere else offering "free" wifi, there is no value without the facebook login for promoted "likes" in your friends' feeds, and ads in the post-login screen, with some datamining about behaviour from facebook.

          I suspect the games organisers will offer free wifi at a bit-better-than-the-original-plan "low speed" and accept they only get ads on login/fine print screens, and the only data available depends on people giving them a real email address.

          --
          "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
          • (Score: 2) by Sarasani on Thursday March 22 2018, @02:37PM

            by Sarasani (3283) on Thursday March 22 2018, @02:37PM (#656608)

            A somewhat relevant quote (albeit about facial recognition) from the book "The Aisles Have Eyes" by Joseph Turow:

            Finally, Schuman advanced the possibility that the facial recognition process might be installed outside the physical store as well as inside: “What if [a retail] chain pushes some attractive incentives to get lots of customers and prospects to download its free mobile app? And buried in the terms and conditions is the right for the app to monitor images?” All these recognition approaches would better enable merchants to identify customers entering their store and offer them customized service and deals based on their shopping histories and the retailer’s calculation of their long-term value to the business. And while accuracy remains a problem today, Schuman said, “look for this technology to get an order of magnitude more accurate over the next couple of years.” As the technology continues to develop, he noted, “the privacy—and associated shopper backlash—risks are obvious.” Nevertheless, he contended, “shoppers (especially younger shoppers) seem to have developed an almost infinite capacity for tolerating such efforts. Make the incentive strong enough—and use the data in subtle enough ways so that you’re not forcing the customer to know how far you’ve gone—and privacy will be a trivial concern. Not saying that it should be a trivial concern, but merely our belief that it will be.” Indeed, over ten years ago retail consultant Karl Bjornson observed that the success of facial recognition systems could well depend on whether the public could be convinced to accept recognition technology as a way to secure their identity and enable them to receive special offers.

            (Emphasis mine)

    • (Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday March 22 2018, @10:04PM

      by fido_dogstoyevsky (131) <axehandleNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday March 22 2018, @10:04PM (#656892)

      ...However, I won't discount the possibility they actually believe what they said (as dumb as it may be) - don't forget they are political creatures and the political games aren't conducive to a deep understanding of what "data mining" and "big data" and "artificial intelligence" actually mean...

      We ARE talking about the state that gave us the J B-P [wikipedia.org] era.

      If they are semi-literates in IT, they may actually waste the public money in doing it...

      In this case incompetence may well be as important as malice. They are political creatures and words they hear mean whatever they want them to mean.

      --
      It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 22 2018, @10:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 22 2018, @10:38AM (#656544)

    Write? Just get a few off the shelf or from open source