#citybridge

Bloomberg published a story on 14 September 2016 with reference to some of my work: 

“The kiosks are actually ‘spy stations,’ Benjamin Dean, a consultant and former fellow on internet governance at Columbia University, said at a conference this summer. 

Dean also said the privacy policies governing the system’s free WiFi are too vague. This was a predictable argument -- internet privacy and government and corporate information-gathering are now part of the discussion for any digital service. It’s doubly true given that CityBridge and New York’s government are pitching the service as a kind of public infrastructure, even though it is privately-run and Alphabet is involved. But the company’s response has been that its privacy policies were open-ended because it was still learning how the system would be used.”

For the record, I’ve never actually termed LinkNYC kiosks as ‘spy machines’ (moreover, my title at Columbia was ‘fellow for cybersecurity and internet governance’). This term is an artifact from the presentation that John Young and Deborah Natsios were meant to deliver at HOPE 11, which I eventually delivered as they pulled out of the conference. I renamed the talk “LinkNYC: Free, Public Wi-Fi that isn't Free or Public”. 

They do however have the potential to become such machines given the vagueness of the privacy policy as it stands. This appears to be the intention. As Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, which is one of the CityBridge consortium members, has said: 

"By having access to the browsing activity of people using the Wi-Fi — all anonymized and aggregated — we can actually then target ads to people in proximity and then obviously over time track them through lots of different things, like beacons and location services, as well as their browsing activity. So in effect what we're doing is replicating the digital experience in physical space."

The city’s officials must have had an opportunity to read then approve this privacy policy prior to the project’s launch. That they approved such vague terms, with consortium members like Sidewalk Labs (owned by Google/Alphabet) suggests to me that they do not understand the implications of such vague terms and the power of the technology they are rolling-out across the city.

Et encore un coup d'avance pour les Etats Unis.

La mairie de NYC vient de présenter sa volonté de remplacer toutes les cabines de téléphone publique par ces bornes appelée "link" mêlant Wifi gratuit, tablette Androïde permettant entre autre d'appeler, et affichage publicitaire digitaux. 

Un beau projet comptant un déploiement de 10 000 bornes, hautes de 3m, et couvrant un rayon de 45m avec un très bon débit (la mairie parle de 20 fois plus rapide que les réseaux privés américains). Elles proposent même un port USB pour recharger son portable ! 

La mairie veut également en faire un vrai point de contact pour les New-Yorkais, leur permettant également de consulter un plan interactif, ou contacter les services d'urgence.