Are New York’s Free LinkNYC Internet Kiosks Tracking Your Movements?

(repost)

NYCLU and Columbia University have a 2016 video (starts at 2:50) about the corporate origins and privacy policy of Google's LinkNYC surveillance kiosks in Manhattan: https://livestream.com/internetsociety/hopeconf/videos/13081...

Village Voice covered the topic, https://www.villagevoice.com/2016/07/06/google-is-transformi...

> This freedom to opt out entirely is also the last argument that spokespeople for LinkNYC and the city itself fall back upon when challenged with privacy concerns: If you don’t like it, you’re welcome not to use it. It’s a disheartening place to land, especially when discussing infrastructure that’s supposed to be serving people who aren’t served otherwise. To Moglen, it’s simply an unacceptable conclusion. “That’s what they want us to believe, that we have a choice between isolation and monitored connecting,” he says. “Those are not adequate choices in a 21st-century world: We are designing the net to track you — if you don’t like it, don’t use it. The human race is shifting to a fully surveilled and monitored superorganism — if you don’t like that, stop being human. That’s a poor outcome. The United States is a society that was based around the idea that human beings can have liberty. So give us liberty! And don’t tell us that otherwise we can have the death of the net."

Ubiquitous WiFi kiosks with inbuilt cameras, huh? Ostensibly, they're not allowed to track individual user locations, but the combination of functions present in the devices means it would be trivial to start connecting independent databases and building profiles on users. If you were a malicious actor, how would you go about it?

The PoCs on tracking individuals with MAC addresses are old news (and, in fairness, newer iOS devices use random MAC addresses for WiFi probe requests), let alone the user fingerprinting you could do on browsers when people actually use these things. So you've got a database of devices, and then on top of that you start doing facial recognition and gait analysis to collect another set of individual data points. Then you connect devices to people, and you have a pretty nice system for tracking individuals moving through the city, even those with location services and such disabled.

Paranoia? Maybe, but it wouldn't take much for say, Amazon, to start doing this. And Bezos wouldn't be bound by city regulations on citizen privacy.

As life becomes more connected, privacy that was not enforced but just existed due to technical limitations keeps eroding.

We should remember this, anticipate this, maybe sometimes legislate around this, but most of all, build explicit technical counter-measures. Also, all of this may and sometimes will fail, so we need to learn to live in an inevitably more and more transparent world.

Almost certainly. And if you're driving, your EZPass tag will track you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQTdpFAo7eQ

"...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."

Aren't all mobile phones browsers collect this data any way? If your location privacy is enabled to be shared by the browser. I am not sure what this student found beyond this which is worth raising brows.

Also, 3 cameras system in each kiosk is indeed creepy.

As someone who leans libertarian, I tend to shy away from rigid legislative solutions to social problems and corporate overreach.

However, articles like this make me wonder if it isn't time for the government to step in and implement privacy regulations of some sort. I did not consent to have my movements tracked and ads sold to me by privately owned kiosks all over my city of residence.

OTOH, I don't know if I would trust the current government to implement such protections in a way that isn't self serving and possibly counterproductive. Shitshow all around.

I presume that's what they're for, just like the thing Comcast routers do, where they provide public access points whether you want them to or not.

More info: https://cryptome.org/2016/06/linknyc-spy-kiosks-installation...

These kiosks can collect WiFi and Bluetooth MAC addresses of devices people carry. If those are Android devices, then Google probably knows their MACs and can identify users passing by.

My first thought before clicking the article was 'of course - it is NYC and the government there prides itself on being paranoid authoritarians'. This is the same city which brought us stop and frisk, which has a police department that likes to wander broadly out of jurisdiction into foreign countries, and given reports about unmarked X-Ray Vans that they have gotten special pleading okays to block any information from the courts. Their government will almost certainly kill more innocent people in /New York City/ than terrorists ever will which is impressive feat given both 9-11 and earlier historic attacks.

The only people I've seen use those things are hobos and near-hobos.

How's the saying go? If you aren't paying for it, then you are the product? Nothing is free. You are paying one way or another.

Even if they aren't actively tracking your movements, they are collecting data on you and passively tracking your movements since they can use the data to retroactively see where you were.