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."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday March 22 2018, @01:04PM
No, no. Connecting is fine. Just be sure to use fake info. Sure, that violates Facebook's terms and rules, and doubtless most of the terms in the wall of text they throw up in your face when you're connecting to the "free" wifi, but so what? I especially love that by connecting, you agree to obey all the laws, as if you weren't already obliged to be lawful before you connected.
Remember the lessons from years of pirating music and movies! Gotta push back against bad laws.