It Might Be Time For LinkNYC To Fire Up That Facial Recognition Engine

Someone out there really hates LinkNYC. A person, or possibly a small posse of people, went on a little rampage over the weekend, smashing over 2-dozen kiosk screens on 6th Avenue from about 12th Street as far up as 29th Street, and maybe even beyond. Using what object I do not know, but my guess is a sledgehammer. Some of the panels looked like they were ready to shatter to the ground below. A few were further beautified with some elegant X-shaped white tape.

Just when I thought no one but I had any interest in this carnage I found this individual stroking around the point of impact on one kiosk. I tried to suggest to him he might get electrocuted, since the screen was still alive, or that he might cut his fingers on the glassy shrapnel. But it seemed nothing could break his concentration. I have to admit there is a certain artistry in the damage.

I had spotted a couple of social media mentions about this over the weekend. I did not think much of those mentions. Advertising and tablet screens on LinkNYC get smashed up once in a while. It’s just a realistic consequence of putting something flashy and irritating in front of a city that did not ask for it. Welcome to New York, LinkNYC. The old payphones get their share of abuse, too.

But when LinkNYC issued this somewhat pathetic plea, using the “vulnerable” and the poor as pawns, I figured there had to be more than just a couple of kiosks getting battered. The tweet is followed by a sort of kumbaya moment, where all the “likes” and retweets came from people who work at or with the company, but none from anyone outside the Smart City cloister.

The condescension of the sentiment notwithstanding, the best reaction to this would have been silence. Shrug it off publicly but do what you have to do fix this ugly mess. Instead this tweet just draws more attention than needed to the kiosk carnage, inspiring the likes of me to go over there today to see for myself what the hell happened. Asking a sledgehammer-wielding vandal to “be a good neighbor” is ludicrous, especially when the perpetrator of this rampage might very well be among the “vulnerable” so cynically chosen to give weighted guilt to the plea.

The question I have now is about how LinkNYC intends to handle any investigation. Will they actually dip into video footage stored on the kiosks, and can they possibly do it without fanning the flames of anti-surveillance activists?

LinkNYC has stated that protection against vandalism is a primary reason those cameras exist. Their presence this weekend obviously did nothing to prevent this rampage. But can it be used to track down and arrest the perp?

If surveillance footage exists, and if the individual(s) documented on the video are distinguishable, will LinkNYC run the images through facial recognition software, confirming the paranoid assumptions so many New Yorkers seem to have about that technology’s presence within the kiosks?

Or will they take a more low-tech approach, and print up flyers headlined “WANTED FOR VANDALISM” with images taken from the surveillance cameras of the attacker.

Whatever the case I doubt this attack on LinkNYC will be the last. Wait until they start foisting these things upon residents of East New York or the South Bronx.

I also used this tour of the kiosk carnage on 6th Avenue to test once again whether non-working tablet devices appeared in the Link Kiosk Status dataset. I spotted four non-working tablets on 6th Avenue between 12th Street and 28th Street. None of those machines appeared on the LinkNYC Tablets Reported Down page, even when I checked again after the hourly update. That Kiosk Status dataset’s existence continues to baffle me, since it contains essentially no useful content. But the usefulness of the dataset itself is obvious. Politicians and community boards are told it provides valuable and transparent insight into the always-on network, and they don’t have time or enough interest to verify such claims.