My FOIL request was foiled. It’s the first time I submitted a FOIL request, but based on the activity logs at the OpenRecords Request portal it looks like a huge majority of requests are either denied or simply ignored. So I am not surprised. I wanted to know how much usage LinkNYC’s “Aunt Bertha” portal gets: How many people use it on average, for how long, and any other metrics available. Aunt Bertha is a social services portal that links people in need to resources they can use. That sounds very digital-divide-bridging but I suspect usage of Aunt Bertha on LinkNYC machines hovers somewhere near zero. We just don’t know. While Intersection is happy to boast of LinkNYC’s millions of WiFi sessions and billions of bytes downloaded they have nothing to say about the success (or failure) of Aunt Bertha on their machines.

The denial came in an email, and has not yet appeared on the OpenRecords website. I so expected to be ignored that an actual reply was somewhat heartening. The response was this:

“A diligent search for records responsive to your request did not locate any such records. Accordingly, your request is denied.”

This either means means that no access_log of any kind is kept for the Aunt Bertha, or if my suspicion is true it might mean the kiosk’s web browser’s User_Agent made page views from the machines invisible. In November the LinkNYC web browser’s User_Agent was changed to nothing more than “LinkKiosk”. This is exactly the kind of User_Agent most web analytics software packages would ignore.

It is hard to believe that no records exist of Aunt Bertha usage, or that no human being at the company has knowledge of where to find them. Numerous other entities across the Internet have deployed co-brands of the Aunt Bertha site, and I’d bet they know how much usage their sites get, not to mention how effectively its usage actually connected people to the resources they needed.

I know of no connection but after receipt of my FOIL rejection I see that the LinkNYC web browser now identifies itself more fully:

“LinkKiosk/1.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4; Nexus 7 Build/KRT16M) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/30.0.1599.92 Safari/537.36”

Maybe this means usage of Aunt Bertha can now be recorded, and I can try my request again.

Aunt Bertha is described by LinkNYC as an app. That is not really what it is, at least not by my estimate. A smartphone Aunt Bertha app for Android and Apple exists but that is not what we find on LinkNYC. Aunt Bertha on LinkNYC is a co-branded version of the Aunt Bertha website such as numerous entities across the country have implemented. You can access LinkNYC’s Aunt Bertha co-brand it here. Calling it an “app” conforms to the trend of appifying what we used to call “software” to make it sound like something hipper and edgier than what it is. The only difference between the main Aunt Bertha site and the LinkNYC co-brand is the link to cities.link.

Any time I look at Aunt Bertha I have to ask why someone chose 90210 as the placeholder zip code. Poverty certainly exists in Beverly Hills but why put a zip code universally associated with wealth in front of people who have none?

Aunt Bertha is extremely difficult to use from a LinkNYC kiosk. On a sunny day the tiny text on the screen is hard to see, and much of the functionality of Aunt Bertha cannot be implemented on the device. Email addresses with mailto: links do nothing, since no email client exists on the tablet.  Telephone numbers for most of the resources appear, but with no +tel: link you must memorize the number, write it down on paper, or use your own cell phone to make a call. Needless to say if you have your own phone you probably have no reason to use Aunt Bertha from a LinkNYC machine. The tap-to-call function does exist in the actual Aunt Bertha app, but not here, where it would be especially handy.

On the plus side web addresses ending in .org and .gov are whitelisted and can be accessed through the tablet’s infamous web browser. That means the websites for a majority of the non-profit programs listed on Aunt Bertha can be accessed, but not without restrictions or dysfunction. Some of these sites use Google Translate to machine-convert the content to languages other than English. You can’t do that from LinkNYC. Other sites use Google’s site search as their search engine. You can’t use that from LinkNYC. The relatively small number of links from Aunt Bertha to sites ending in .com cannot be reached. Aunt Bertha also includes links to social media pages for most of the programs. You can’t get to those from LinkNYC, which is too bad because some of these companies have no other web presence besides social media.

I used to couch my feelings about Aunt Bertha on LinkNYC with the caveat that I might think differently about it if circumstances of my life somehow made it a lifeline. But it’s hard to imagine a scenario so apocalyptic that anyone would be forced to rely solely on LinkNYC for access to social services. We may never know if anyone actually uses Aunt Bertha on LinkNYC. Usage stats remain a secret of the Smart City cloister, locked up in Hudson Yards.