LinkNYC’s Mapping App: What Have People Been Searching For?

It surprised me at first that such a glitch could exist, and that it could stay in existence for weeks at a time. But on average I’m finding four or five LinkNYC kiosks per week that are bugged out in a way that contradicts promises made on the LinkNYC FAQ and in other contexts. When you use a LinkNYC tablet for something like browsing the NYC.gov website or looking for directions on the mapping app, all session data is supposed to be wiped clean after 30 seconds of inactivity. Bzzt. The mapping app in particular, on a relatively small but seemingly growing number of kiosks, cannot seem to purge its record of what LinkNYC users were looking for. This has obvious risks.

I posted earlier that I thought I saw a pattern forming, in which searches on the LinkNYC mapping app seemed to inevitably look for homeless shelters and pornography. Well, yesterday I found a kiosk in Times Square where the searches were comparatively wholesome. Starbucks, CVS, Dean & DeLuca look like the kind of on-the-go searches made by globetrotting tourists that LinkNYC developers imagined when they put these kiosks out there.

The only laugh I got out of this was from someone looking for a “charging station”, then more specifically a “Charge Point Charging Station.” Whoever made those searches evidently did not know that the LinkNYC kiosk they stood right in front of is a charging station, among other things.

That anecdotal insight helps further substantiate my belief that a lot of people simply do not even know what LinkNYC kiosks are.

You gotta love how these kiosk screens, such as the one above, draw dirt and grime to them like moths to a fire… a Smart City fire.