For the alternate perspective: https://www.link.nyc
Transforming NYC's Payphones into a 'Personalized Propaganda Engine'
91–100 of 121 posts
Re: Transforming NYC's Payphones into a 'Personalized Propaganda Engine'
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alphabet is paying the city money here. 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.
Aren't these kiosks an infrastructure/service to help anyone, including homeless? 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 hav…
Imagine all the homeless that can't be helped because the one angry violent guy you know that is HIV+ and likes to fist-fight is camped out there all day.
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.
Re: Transforming NYC's Payphones into a 'Personalized Propaganda Engine'
#93A ++good piece. I particularly liked this astute observation by one of the article's sources:-
> "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."
Re: Transforming NYC's Payphones into a 'Personalized Propaganda Engine'
#94I'd really like to hear from a domain expert whether tor or something like it could a) drastically mitigate the impact of this type of surveillance and b) how likely it is that it (tor) could become mainstream (sort of like WhatsApp made end to end encryption mainstream)?
When you take into account the full range of tracking methods cited in the article, I think the impact of Tor would be limited. For example: you probably already have an app on your phone that has an SDK from Gimbal (beacon company in the article) or a similar firm that reads beacons and tracks your location passively. So while Tor would disguise the source of your web requests, the SDK still has free reign to send y…
We have at least five different kinds of problems with mobile device privacy here:
- 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.
Re: Transforming NYC's Payphones into a 'Personalized Propaganda Engine'
#95I was walking down 3rd ave at 2am a week ago. I saw a homeless man with headphones listening to music on YouTube on a link. He had a little chair and was rocking out. It was beautiful. We might give up a lot, but maybe those with nothing to give have plenty to gain.
Those with nothing have plenty to gain, but they should have more to gain. If private companies are profiting off of the backs of the public (both the "haves" and "have-nots"), why shouldn't/doesn't/didn't the city negotiate a profit sharing agreement so that money can go into programs that (among other things) can help the homeless more directly? Shelters to get people off the street, job training programs, librarie…
> private companies are profiting off of the backs of the public (both the "haves" and "have-nots")
What? If anything, Google in particular created much more value for the whole humanity than they generated in profits.
Re: Transforming NYC's Payphones into a 'Personalized Propaganda Engine'
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
With persistent facial recognition it gives Google a very marketable database. The key being that they can store all faces and only need to go back and search them when a customer wants to know all the dates and locations where they have seen that face.
If the displayed advertisements are based on who's passing the kiosk, some very uncomfortable situations could be created - let's say a high-profile clergyman walks by and an Ashley-Madison advertisement is shown.
The ads are all anonymous and based on an aggregate on who is around the unit. It will never be a "Minority Report" type experience, more of a "55% of the users around this location are males, therefore a Draft Kings ad will play". One-to-many, not one-to-one.
Re: Transforming NYC's Payphones into a 'Personalized Propaganda Engine'
#97'That LinkNYC is, ultimately, underwritten by Google should tell you a lot about why New York got so very lucky as to receive an unprecedentedly fast network of citywide public Wi-Fi — 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?
Re: Transforming NYC's Payphones into a 'Personalized Propaganda Engine'
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google's business model is based on selling user-generated data to advertisers, unlike telcos who sell network data to you . 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 cit…
Sorry to break it to you, but Verizon certainly sells data. Check out their data membership with AOL (pretty sure it's them ) to help close the cross device tracking gap. Telcos are very aggressive about monetizing their data.
Lost the window to edit, but here's more info on the Verizon/AOL data deal:
http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/verizon-aol-pa...
Re: Transforming NYC's Payphones into a 'Personalized Propaganda Engine'
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If You See Something, Say Something. Be Suspicious of Anything Unattended." 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.
> Have you ever visited New York, its announced every 15 minutes or so on subways. 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…
I infer you've never been to the US?
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.
Re: Transforming NYC's Payphones into a 'Personalized Propaganda Engine'
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If You See Something, Say Something. Be Suspicious of Anything Unattended." 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.
The slogan and program are a Department of Homeland Security thing, so you see it in a lot more places than just NYC. My guess is it's a string attached to some sort of DHS funding.
My understanding is the slogan was originally from NYC, and they didn't want DHS to use it.