Discover Top Posts Tagged with #doctoroff

In 2023, Doctoroff, then the deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding, was given the task of coming up with a plan to revive New York City after the devastation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He came up with a list of more than 250 potential projects, including a new subway line linking Manhattan and […]

Doctoroff's Top Five Projects to Revive New York City #als #doctoroff #newyork #nyregion #topfive

#Health #als #doctoroff #newyork #nyregion #topfive

Doctoroff's Top Five Projects to Revive New York City #als #doctoroff #newyork #nyregion #topfive

#Health #als #doctoroff #newyork #nyregion #topfive

HOPE XI by the Internet Society on Livestream

On Sunday 24 July, I gave a talk on the new LinkNYC Wi-Fi network being rolled-out across New York City. I have been tracking this project for quite some time - especially since Google/Alphabet became involved through the acquisition of Titan and Control Group.

Called ‘LinkNYC: Free public wi-fi that isn't free or public’, this talk was intended to provide a counter-weight to the giddy, PR-driven narrative that has dominated the discussion about this project.

Up to 10,000 obelisks (called ‘links’) with 3 cameras and 30 sensors each will be erected across the city over the coming years. $500 million in ad revenue will be generated and split 50/50 with the city. The private CityBridge consortium, which operates the network and includes a company owned by Google/Alphabet, claims they will invest $300 million installing the obelisks. This is strange given that they have only claim to be making $250 million from ads over the next 12 years. Something doesn't quite add up.

Privacy policies are notoriously opaque. Even the term ‘privacy policy’ is a bit of an oxymoron when one considers how invasive of one’s privacy the activities described in the privacy policies are.

LinkNYC’s privacy policy provides ample legal room for the private consortium operating the network, CityBridge, to collect, collect, store and analyze sensitive datasets including IP and MAC addresses, click-stream data, prior searches, and other personal/non-personal data. All the data will be collected from public spaces.

This is important because it means that huge amounts of data, collected from public spaces, will effectively be privatized. Access to those data will be curtailed and a natural monopoly will emerge. There is a strong financial incentive to mine the data collected then sell the ‘insights’ (though not the data themselves according to the policy) or build new businesses off the privatized/monopolized data.

It is also worth noting that the city officials must have approved the privacy policy at some point. It does not appear that city officials understand the technology and its consequences to a level sufficient to safeguard the interests of their citizens. Otherwise they would not have approved such a vague privacy policy.

If you want to peer into the future - read this quote from the head of Google/Alphabet Sidewalk Labs, Dan Doctoroff.

"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."

This is the coming decade of ‘smart cities’. We need to tighten up the privacy policies that govern these initiatives now. Otherwise we’ll end up with the same surveillance that has emerged on the internet over the past decade due to this same data-hungry business model.

#smart cities #linknyc #doctoroff #privacy #surveillance