“Google Is Transforming NYC’s Payphones Into a ‘Personalized Propaganda Engine’”
“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.” Not only is CityBridge going to lay miles of new fiber and operate, maintain, and upgrade the network at no cost to you the consumer, it’s going to kick the city at least half a billion dollars over the next twelve years to boot.
The whole thing is financed by advertising. Each kiosk’s twin 55-inch displays will carry targeted ads based on an audience profile algorithmically derived from the information the kiosks collect from their users. But as the old internet saw goes: If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. And that should give New Yorkers pause, says Lee Tien, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation…
there is a different issue in play here: the right of the City of New York to surrender that data for us; the right of our elected officials — over the objections of some of the city’s own watchdogs and in exchange for what is, viewed in the light of the city’s $78 billion annual budget, chump change — to sell citizens’ privacy off the back of a truck to a for-profit company…
The idea of a city built de novo on the principles and values of technologists, unfettered by the inertia, red tape, and turf squabbles that burden actual cities where human beings already live, represents the apogee of messianic Silicon Valley thinking. The so-called “smart city,” the one so wired with sensors and data-collection devices that its residents and operations move with the finely calibrated efficiency of clockwork or computer code, is a mirage techno-utopians have seen shimmering on the horizon for over a decade.”
This is very Silicon-Valley-capitalism logic that is also very in with the “solutions” set in the policy world (by which I mean, the policymakers who are always trying to coin words and proposing very simple policies that they see as modular “solutions” and which will somehow fix everything by, like, putting solar-powered LED lights on trash can lids! Requiring every government office to have a database manager! Everyone just checks a box at the DMV!)
It’s not that these are bad policies or that they don’t have value, but they rest on this belief that something small and specific can and will have big, generalized impacts — and then you vote for the putative impact, not the actual thing, and 5 years later everyone is mad and confused. We forget that we don’t live in an ideal world, and that people don’t behave with rules or consistency.
New elements in the built environment tend to bend to us, not the other way around.
