Transforming NYC's Payphones into a 'Personalized Propaganda Engine'
villagevoice.com
villagevoice.com
A dystopian "smart city" vision can be seen in the "Hyper Reality" video, http://hyper-reality.co that is inspired by Magic Leap's AR, in which Google is an investor.
[1]: http://screenmediadaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/mta_o...
[2]: https://www.intersection.com/assets/pdfs/Press-Release.pdf
We might give up a lot, but maybe those with nothing to give have plenty to gain.
Do they have ads on them? Of course. So do the bus shelters which are funded using a similar public/private partnership.
If you are worried about the data collection, don't use them or the wifi provided by them. But you are basically saying you trust Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile/Sprint with your data more than you trust Sidewalk Labs/Google. Is that an informed tradeoff?
Hell yeah it would be worth it. If I had to choose who gets my data I think I take Google over an A Mobile ISP like At&t or Verizon
See Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff's video on Surveillance Capitalism, https://vimeo.com/110222526
NYC has the leverage to negotiate better financial terms for capturing the value of city residents data. The money generated from harvesting city resident behavior can then be invested into city infrastructure and services for residents.
Data and networks are here to stay. What is open for negotiation is the split of revenue between city residents and vendors. For example, kiosks could be funded as neutral infrastructure that could be shared by competing vendors. A city itself is "shared infrastructure".
Come on. Telcos are just not competent enough to do what Google do. It's not like they're morally opposed to it or wouldn't try. Remember Verizon injecting headers into their users' http traffic to track them for advertisers?
Edit: the onus is on the city to negotiate better terms with the network provider. The city would have a better negotiating position if there were multiple vendors (including telcos) competing for the network/data business. Once better terms are in the contract, security researchers can help ensure compliance.
Sure, because the telcos have no interest in tracking their customers for profit[1]? As long as it's profitable and legal, any public company will eventually sell metadata regarding you. Since the data is profitable, if we want to protect ourselves from this that leaves us with making it illegal to collect and share, either through contract or by law.
1: http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/7/11173010/verizon-supercooki...
Really? Where?
I have worked on some large marketing projects. We'd love to be able to buy user data from Google.
This facile argument is really getting old. When you get a free newspaper, does that mean you're getting "sold?"
Just because you aren't looking directly at the data doesn't mean you are getting information as a result of it.
That's a lazy and incorrect causal link.
Google goes to great lengths not to sell user data. It's far more valuable if they can hold on to it and use it to continue selling advertising.
It's important to understand the difference. This isn't a great metaphor, but imagine a top university. The professors at said university have accumulated many Nobel prizes. The university uses those Nobel prizes to sell classes to students. Does that mean the university is selling Nobel prizes? Obviously not.
Google uses data to target advertising. That doesn't mean Google's business is selling data.
As an advertiser, Google's ability to target users based on user data is very important to me, so your analogy with Nobel prizes at University misses the mark by a mile.
If Google doesn't let me target users in a region with a specific interest, then I will just go to Facebook.
A university without well-respected and celebrated faculty is similarly "worthless." In fact, the gap in price between community colleges and prestigious universities might even be greater than the gap between targeted ads and non-targeted ads.
> As an advertiser, Google's ability to target users based on user data is very important to me, so your analogy with Nobel prizes at University misses the mark by a mile.
As a student, the prestige of an institution and the prizes it's faculty receive is an important component of choosing to purchase education there.
There's a reason that college admissions brochures love to tout the number of Nobel prizes their faculty have received.
Not even close. As an undergrad you are getting ripped off if you choose a research university. As a student the product you are getting is an education, which has little to do with research quality.
Targeted ads depend entirely on accurate user data, so the analogy is a bit brain dead.
>There's a reason that college admissions brochures love to tout the number of Nobel prizes
Yes, to attract chumps. Anyone who does the minimum amount of research or thinking will quickly discover that nobel prize winners are approximately useless to undergraduate educations. Nobel prizes are the gold plating to the hdmi cables of education.
Calling consumers "chumps" doesn't change the fact of their choices.
Plenty of firms will sell you consumer data if you are looking, but it won't be anything near the granularity of what google collects.
Google is not the "big scary player" in town, Verizon and ATT are.
Important distinction: they use their massive user-data collection as a selling point for advertisers. They do not sell the data directly - they'd prefer to keep a monopoly on the data. Their business model is in selling advertisements. They sell advertisements because they have a massive user-data collection to target those ads towards.
Telcos are very aggressive about monetizing their data.
http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/verizon-aol-pa...
Those have apparently not been coordinated with the kiosks, where a variety of boxes, broken chairs, and random objects are being used as seating and obstructing the sidewalk.
If the tablet had been placed on the flat side of the kiosk, instead of the edge, city residents' kiosk seating would not reduce sidewalk traffic flow. That would also enable two tablets, doubling the seating capacity of the kiosk.
If we go "hierarchy of needs" on this situation, music for a homeless person seems like it should come a little bit behind shelter and food.
What? If anything, Google in particular created much more value for the whole humanity than they generated in profits.
The data will be analyzed for interesting, non monetizeable insights.
Okay, that's kind of creepy.
[Google] actually went so far last year as to shit-can its own "Don't be evil" admonition to its employees in favor of "Obey the law"
No, they didn't[1]. Alphabet has a slightly more formal code of conduct[2], and it's not simply "Obey the law", it's "follow the law, act honorably, and treat each other with respect." Sloppy. Reporting using another news article as a source rather than just looking it up.
1: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html
How is it creepy? Have you ever visited New York, its announced every 15 minutes or so on subways. This might even be something that city officials explicitly required.
My point is more that it's creepy in general, not specifically because of these devices (but the relation to 1984's telescreens is obvious), and that if it's prevalent in NYC (which I assumed), then I definitely don't want to live there. To me that feels like living with a sensationalist newscast about past terrorism always playing in the background, and I don't think that's a good state of mind to keep your citizens in for a decade and a half without good, and recent cause.
> How is it creepy?
I think there's a trade-off to be made between security and how you prime your population with fear. Having frequent messages about being suspicious of any random items in the city in general, not a specific high value target such as an airport, falls too far on one side of the spectrum for me. That it's on a large screen capable of recording video and audio, well that doesn't help[1].
NYC is the most emo about it, but the same basic terrorist religion is present in all state media - both government and "private".
As always, cui bono.
> the same basic tragedy religion is present in all state media
Yes, but it's less pronounced where I live at least. I think New York has possibly had some it's cultural identity subsumed by this, but that's is not entirely new. There are portions of the country where historical occurrences from much further in the past inform the mindset of the population (at least a little) to this day. Such as the civil war.
I still think it's worth point out though, as urging people to be aware of suspicious activity everywhere is at best pointless, and possibly counter-productive. Either you can't relax, or you get a false sense of security about situations where heightened awareness is actually useful (such as large gatherings of people). In that respect, it's security theater.
The entire meme of "terrorism" is counterproductive, unless your goal is to scare the population into helplessness. The people that create explosions and the ones who endlessly harp on the possibility of future destruction are essentially working for the same team.
Honestly, the constant terrorism fear-mongering is one of my least favorite things about the city. A few horrible tragedies are apparently enough to turn a city into being fearful of strangers and "anything unattended" for years.
In 99.999999% of cases, that unattended lunch box is just a lunch box that someone forgot. All this fear-mongering does is further aggravate human's inability to reason about low probability events.
Well, no, the origins are not creepy. I'm a little troubled that it's apparently still so pervasive though.
> and at this point most of the city's population is used to it.
That part is what's creepy to me. That it's still there 15 years later and people are so blasé regarding its existence. It represents something, and puts people in a specific state of mind.
> You can see it especially on any MTA properties such as subways
That's a more appropriate place for it, as a potential target location. Similar to airports. Kiosks at random street locations? I have a slightly different opinion.
You don't bring your own IP when you use public WiFi, so this feels like a very confused argument.
[1] An older article about the feature that may be out of date: http://9to5mac.com/2014/09/26/more-details-on-how-ios-8s-mac...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.chainfire.p...
It's pretty much set-and-forget, randomized per-AP macs and random changes while scanning.
In all seriousness, it's a perfectly legitimate--albeit crass--interpretation, given the expressed intent (none). GGP says "these things ought to be true". Then there's a reply with a bare link saying, effectively, "is" statements are true, "ought" statements are fantasy/desire/normative. The rest of any kind of interpretation requires more context and intent.
Unfortunately, like with many things, there's no way to prevent them from doing it, so "shouldn't" has no relevance here. If it's profitable or entertaining to exploit that data, people will do so.
Legislate and regulate as you may, I can't depend on it because I can't validate it on my side.
If you have no way to verify something, you must always counteract it to the best of your ability.
That said, if you're using public wifi you should be using a VPN anyways, so MAC would be identifiable, but nothing else would.
If the phone has any cooperating apps on it, choices are much wider even.
As a New Yorker, I heartily welcome a city blanketed in free wifi. For the 300Mbs I get off of one of those things, I'll use a VPN just like I do with all public wifi networks.
They are fixing that.
https://support.pokemongo.nianticlabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/...
What's your definition of "everyone"? Those of us in the tech bubble? Sure. Your everyday smartphone user? The internet's just the internet to them, and where it comes from is not a concern.
- Apps that intentionally identify you and your location to somebody (like apps that have permission to use location services, supposedly for some user benefit, and tell the app developer that location)
- Apps that intentionally reveal your presence in a physical location to other devices nearby
- Apps that unintentionally identify you to a network operator or wiretapper (because of unencrypted unique identifiers like cookies)
- Aggregate device profiling because of a unique combination of observable behaviors (e.g., this person has this OS version and this combination of apps)
- Observability of hardware and subscriber identifiers in the RF protocols
All of these are bad for privacy, but the way of fixing them is different.
Tor helps a lot with the third one. To deal with the others, apart from somehow getting that software not to exist or not to be installed on people's devices, it could be sufficient to make some of the software not communicate on the network at certain times or in certain ways, like if the OS could say "maintain radio silence, except for Tor-aware apps".
For the device RF identifiers, we need the ability to change those identifiers, which is kind of sort of there for wifi on some devices (except there was just a paper showing it often doesn't succeed in protecting you), and not there at all for mobile network interfaces.
Not bad for free.
Except that none of this is free. Google gets all of the data collected by these kiosks and the ad revenue. Why was this allowed without any public say in the matter? The very public whose data was bought will also be sold by Google. What's the ad revenue worth on these? There are ads on each sides of these kiosks. These are effectively billboards on some of the most trafficked street on the planet. Does our society really need more advertising?
So did New York get lucky or did Google get lucky?
I've actually spent a fair amount of time around these kiosks as theres one a few blocks from me. I've actually observed it its environment, as part of the urban scenery and I've interacted with it a bunch. I think my comment has merit.
^1 I will use alphabet and google interchangeably, since I am not trying to do math here. If you are looking for a mathematical theory of world domination, just ask google's famously responsive customer service.
> "They are working hard to get you to behave true to your statistical profile," Rushkoff says, "and in doing so they reduce your spontaneity, your anomalous behavior, your human agency, as they try to get you to conform to the most marketable probable outcome. When we're doing that en masse, to an entire city - that kind of long-term manipulation is just astounding."
Jokes aside, we all knew this was coming, right? It's not like your telecom isn't serving you up to the NSA already, and with this you know you're being watched. It's just driving VPN sales.
"If you want free wifi, you have to make compromises."
Also, your experience with service definitely doesn't match my own. There might always be a signal, but it's not always very fast...
Titan has owned and operated all of the city's remaining phonebooths for near 20 years. And I believe the MTA bus stop and subway advertising too. This is something they've already been doing.
Control Group developed those info kiosks you may have seen on subway platforms. They're good people that have got some cool tech. They even post in Who's Hiring here frequently (Hi, Ben!).
If this is something that the city wants, I don't see that there's another way that they would get it. The real problem that I have with LinkNYC though, especially in midtown where I live, is that all the terminals have become 24/7 campgrounds for the city's homeless. They charge their phones and browse the web there. There is no way that I would use one of these things now.
What exactly is the problem with that?
But the reality is that one person is sat camped out with a chair in front of the thing for the entire day. Nobody else can use it. I've seen folks get in fights over these things already.
I spent part of my life homeless. I still see a major problem with how these things are being used right now. We shouldn't be encouraging people to be out on the street all day -- it doesn't solve anything.
I find it hard to blame the homeless (as you are) for taking advantage of a free perk, when it should be the cities and companies being held accountable for returning some portion of the profit back to those whom they are profiting from. Alphabet wants the information -- do you think they would have turned down a request to say that some nominal percentage of the revenue goes back to city social service programs?
The city should be kicking some of this money into infrastructure/services to help the homeless. Instead right now they're doing massive cuts and leaving people to the streets.
Also, if the city is going to provide a service here (which it has, by outsourcing to Intersection), it needs to make it "Available to Everyone", not just "Available". Right now because people can and do camp out there all day it's the latter.
These systems have cameras and the city and Intersection absolutely should be using those cameras to rate-limit peoples' use to make it "Available to Everyone". Except the cameras are facing the wrong way.
Imagine some homeless spends a day at the kiosk and gets a remote job that requires an hour or so a day of online presence. And he/she can _actually_ perform this job thanks to this infrastructure. A couple of months later he/she spends another day at the kiosk and finds an affordable apartment (most likely not in NY). And Voila, we have -1 homeless.
This is a real concern when you're homeless. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-homeless-prefer-stre...
Also, I'm talking about a real guy. He's frequently camped out at the LinkNYC terminals on my corners. (55th & 8th and 56th & 8th).
Of course this is HN where everyone is a self-made success and it's easier to pretend we care about the poor than actually care about the poor. I've been down this road here before.