I’ve spent a lot of time with the LinkNYC kiosks the past few weeks. It’s become like a mission for me, to get as much entertainment from and knowledge of the workings and non-workings of these advertising monoliths. But you know what? I don’t like being seen poking away at these things. People look at me and I know what they are thinking: He’s poor. He’s homeless. He’s a crusty. For this past week I guess I couldn’t blame anyone for thinking that. My sartorial flourishes have included a prominent mustard stain on my decrepit old winter coat, a ratty old garment even the Salvation Army would refuse.

But I clean up well. It just happens that I looked like a Goddamn slob for 4 or 5 days, making me fit right in with the unpleasantly stereotyped LinNYC user profile that has emerged among observers of these kiosks. I am not imagining these looks. Even when I do not look like a slob people give my attention to these devices a second thought. If I stay with this I might wash up mocked and tagged on Instagram or some other place, flagged as a LinkNYC user and, therefore, a bum.

But I’m sticking with my study of these things because not too many people out here are. I see people using these things once in a while but when I do there is almost always something off about it. Most recently I noticed something at a nearby kiosk on which the tablet screen has never worked, not since the day it was activated. The tablet is turned on but tapping the screen does nothing. It was at this kiosk where I saw a dude dancing and spinning around while tapping away at the unresponsive screen. He was not charging his phone or doing anything but dancing and tapping away at the non-working tablet screen. I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff like that.

The Map App

A small but conspicuous quantity of LinkNYC kiosks possess a strange and illuminating feature. It’s a bug, of course, not a feature. Whatever it is it opens a revealing window into what New Yorkers are looking for on the kiosks’ mapping app, which allow one to search for a specific place of business or for a type of place.

I am starting to see a pattern. LinkNYC users are looking for homeless shelters and pornography. This photo shows that someone or some people had been looking for Midnight Run Inc., a homeless outreach organization. Before that searches were for Show Palace, a nude club in Long Island City; Showtime (maybe they meant Show World?); and a general search for XXX clubs.

Another kiosk showed similar searches. Samaritan Village, a homeless shelter in midtown, is joined by a general search for “shelter” and “adult dvd store”, these queries found among other seemingly benign terms.

Things like this are not supposed to happen on LinkNYC kiosks but, well, they do. The LinkNYC FAQ claims “Link tablet sessions time-out after 30 seconds of inactivity, wiping all user sessions clean.” But I’ve found numerous instances where this is just not true, with the mapping app search history in the photos above just two of them.

What’s That Phone Number?

Another glitch that has persisted since the first Link was activated two years ago involves phone numbers dialed from a tablet’s Vonage app. The numbers are obscured one by one after you dial them, which makes a little bit of sense, since it lets you know that you dialed the right digits while obscuring the entire number from passers-by.

But if the caller walks away without hanging up it’s possible for someone like me to approach the phone and see what number the previous user had called.

I looked up one of the numbers left on a screen I saw somewhere around Herald Square. It was for the New York City Sheriff’s Office.

This is not something that many casual observers of these kiosks would think of, and circumstances where it could be exploited in any meaningful way are kind of far-fetched. But it is a privacy glitch I think the kiosks’ developers should have stamped out a long time ago. The fact that numbers are blotted out after they are dialed implies that some attention was given to the matter of obscuring the phone number from casually prying eyes, but like so much else with LinkNYC its execution was not fully thought out.

Of course obscuring the numbers after they are dialed does nothing to stop someone from shoulder surfing the number as it is dialed. I could imagine a scenario where someone who makes regular use of these kiosks for phone calls could become something of a nuisance, since callers at LinkNYC kiosks typically have to SCREAM so that the person they called can hear them. Annoyed neighbors might take on the situation by prank calling whoever that person had been shouting at through the device, or perhaps harvesting other information from the caller himself. Actually I don’t have to imagine this scenario. Here it is, from my Twitter friend newyorkshitty:

Live from the @LinkNYC kiosk, part 3: how to avoid jail time pic.twitter.com/QUPeqc3UOC

— newyorkshitty (@newyorkshitty) April 7, 2018

Shoulder surfing these kiosks for something like credit cards numbers or PINs is also possible given the clear visibility to anyone located nearby of the touch screen and tactile keyboard. I don’t know how many international phone calls, for instance, are made through these devices but the LinkNYC FAQ advises its users that calling cards (and presumably credit cards) can be used to make international calls. I assume other forms of calling (collect, third-party, etc.) could all be done through LinkNYC. International calls would require use of some type of credit card or calling card, the numbers of which could be entered more or less securely inside a payphone enclosure but not so much on these kiosks.

The Big Screens

It’s too bad the big advertising screens are not interactive. I’ve seen people tapping on the big screen a number of times, once when the screen said you could call 911 by pressing the red button. This was in reference to the red button found on under the tablet screen but one time I saw a dude standing by reach up to touch the red button. It disappeared before he got to it.

But for advertisers wouldn’t it be solid gold to have some way of connecting directly with passers-by, either through touchscreen interaction or an app that somehow engages the customer? One thing that seems modest, if feasible, is a way to get back the screen you just saw, either on the ad panel itself or on your personal smartphone, using an app since the ad screens are not interactive.

For the past weeks and months it seems like CityBridge is stuffing the advertising panels with as much gratuitous content they can think of just to get you to look at these things. I don’t know if their surveillance cameras use eye trackers to detect if passers-by are actually looking at the screens but it would be interesting to know if they are monitoring us for that kind of thing, then passing on to advertisers the amount of eyeball time the screens are getting now that they are blinking fun facts, disembodied AP headlines, and 3rd grade poetry in quantities that vastly outnumber actual advertisements. At this point it’s not as much about the advertisements for LinkNYC. It’s about getting people to simply look at the screens and notice they are there. The content is being put out there to make people think these kiosks are a valuable and welcome contribution to the community. I’m not falling for it but it seems others are. Once they have our attention with the fun facts and the children’s poetry they will have raised the value of the advertising real estate and bludgeon us with ads.

The latest fascination for the kiosks’ big screens involves real-time bus arrival times. It’s only rolled out in a small area of Brooklyn, so I’ll have to see for myself, but from what I read it sounds like another ham-handed attempt at making these devices useful. The Links’ bus arrival times are not going to be like the station-specific arrival time devices being installed by the MTA, but more of a general snapshot of bus service in the area. That sounds confusing to me but I’ll give it a go when I can. I doubt if this gesture, which seems to have been pounced on by LinkNYC to gain political brownie points with a certain City Council member (not to mention Smart City tech trolls) will halt the ongoing rollout of the MTA’s station-by-station bus arrival time displays.