Free Wi-Fi kiosks disguised as equity tools siphon data even from non-users.

Evidence

Sidewalk Labs’ first public undertaking was the installation of several hundred free internet-enabled kiosks in New York City, ostensibly to combat the problem of “digital inequality.” As we saw with Google Street View, the company can siphon a lot of valuable information about people from a Wi-Fi network, even if they don’t use the kiosks. Doctoroff has characterized the Sidewalk Labs’ kiosks as “fountains of data” that will be equipped with environmental sensors and also collect “other data, all of which can create very hyperlocal information about conditions in the city.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 714

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what actually happened with the NYC kiosks — were there privacy investigations or backlashes that later constrained the ‘fountains of data’ plan?
• SHARE: Good for someone working on digital equity or smart-city privacy: a concrete case where an equity framing becomes an extraction pipeline extracting from passersby who never use the hardware.
• XREF: connects to: Free digital services are paid for by users’ attention.; Google’s Street View cars secretly harvested personal Wi-Fi payload data. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 452; Free hardware and internet access were traded for personal data and tracking rights — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 877 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Free hardware and internet access were traded for personal data and tracking rights #exemplifies (0.95) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 877
• Facebook’s Free Basics captured data from already-connected users rather than bridging the divide #exemplifies (0.88) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 316
• Surveillance capitalists deliberately conceal how their platforms monetize user behavior #exemplifies (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1411
• Smart-home IoT devices enroll consumers in surveillance-based markets without knowledge or consent #expands (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 751
• Distributed commercial data collection is structurally opaque and hard to contest #expands (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 389
• Digital protest platforms covertly harvest signatories’ data for commercial profit #exemplifies (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 911
• A single app accessed profiles of tens of millions without consent #exemplifies (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 872