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LinkNYC kiosks have become a familiar eyesore to New Yorkers. Over 1,600 of these towering, nine-and-a-half-foot monoliths — their double-sided screens festooned with ads and fun facts — have been installed across the city since early 2016. Mayor Bill de Blasio has celebrated their ability to provide "the fastest and largest municipal Wi-Fi network in the world" as "a critical step toward a more equal, open, and connected city for every New Yorker, in every borough." Anyone can use the kiosks' Android tablets to search for directions and services; they are also equipped with charging stations, 911 buttons, and phones for free domestic calls.
But even as the kiosks have provided important services to connect New Yorkers, they may also represent a troubling expansion of the city's surveillance network, potentially connecting every borough to a new level of invasive monitoring. Each kiosk has three cameras, 30 sensors, and heightened sight lines for viewing above crowds.
[...] Now an undergraduate researcher has discovered indications in LinkNYC code — accidentally made public on the internet — that LinkNYC may be actively planning to track users' locations.
In May of this year, Charles Meyers, an undergraduate at New York City College of Technology, came across folders in LinkNYC's public library on GitHub, a platform for managing files and software, that appear to raise further questions about location tracking and the platform's protection of its users' data. Meyers made copies of the codebases in question — "LinkNYC Mobile Observation" and "RxLocation" — and shared both folders with The Intercept.
According to Meyers, the "LinkNYC Mobile Observation" code collects the user's longitude and latitude, as well as the user's browser type, operating system, device type, device identifiers, and full URL clickstreams (including date and time) and aggregates this information into a database. In Meyers's view, this code — along with the functions of the "RxLocation" codebase — suggests that the company is interested in tracking the locations of Wi-Fi users in real time.
[...] LinkNYC disputes these speculations. David Mitchell, Intersection's chief technology officer, told the Intercept that the code was never intended to be released and was part of a longer-term research and development process. "In this instance," he explained over email, "Intersection was prototyping and testing some ideas internally, using employee data only, and mistakenly made source code public on Github. This code is not in use on the LinkNYC network."
Source: The Intercept
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:09PM
Like I said, the concept is sound. Being able to store a profile and some files (resume, cover letter, etc) on the cloud gives people at rock bottom a leg up. It helps bridge a little bit of the extreme social isolation people suffer in that state. But as somebody who's tried to interact them via devices of my own, it falls short.
The other issue is that the kiosks just showed up one day. Nobody announced them. There was no public awareness campaign. So even if you don't have your phone or tablet or what-have-you on hand, it wouldn't really occur to you to try to use one. Now, if they had thought through their use-cases a little harder they would have put them next to bus stops where you're a bit of a captive audience, waiting for the bus to come. So you might then take a moment to try to use them and see what they're about. Instead, they did not do that and put them next to genius places like USPS mailboxes, which are rapidly falling into disuse because fewer and fewer people use regular mail anymore.
Washington DC delenda est.