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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 23 2018, @06:39AM
I used to get so furious about my "friends" "caring" enough about me to send me an "e-card" on my birthday using those internet card services. I know good and well my birthdate is an identity verifier that is easily used to cause a lot of problems for ME, when people create a financial obligation in my name. I am quite aware a lot of people out there are damned good at this. Then these friends would consider ME the sourpuss for getting upset about it. I would not tell anybody what my birthday was, unless I legally HAD to. All these "store promotions" that would exchange my name/birthday for a "free" something, I'd give them the wrong data just to poison the database. I had just as soon give them my social security number. Its not that I am hiding anything, its just I don't wanna be so stupid as to disclose my location to a predatory animal. I am doing nothing more wrong than a mouse hiding from a cat.
One sore spot in me is that I seem to have no right to control distribution of data I generate, but my Congress seems to think businesses have the right to control how I use data THEY generate.
I do not mean to imply to say *anybody* has any right whatsoever to enforce ignorance of their bad reputation. What I do want to illustrate is what an unfair playing field we create when we base our ability to employ ourselves on our ability to get permission to work, because knowledge of how to do something is not enough, someone else has already claimed "rights" to do it, therefore I cannot unless he says its OK. Can you imagine ONE plumber in town getting in cahoots with the Government so as to keep any other plumber from doing any work? Then everyone has to go underground to change out a leaky washer, hoping the rightsholder does not discover you have illegally modified your plumbing and violated his business model, which was to charge $500 for the job.
In my mind, Congress is in abeyance of the Pledge of Allegiance... specifically the last three words of it, which were what was pledged to in the first three words of it.