I’ve been watching some of the uncomfortable Twitter Q&A between LinkNYC and the new skeptics inspired by last week’s New York Times op-ed scare piece. I do not worry about LinkNYC. If they monitor my activities with God-like sensors and all-inhaling data vacuum cleaners then so be it. Let us all be watched over by machines of loving grace.
But I take issue with this oft-repeated comment, in which the company states that it does not track website visits.
We inferred his name by seeing his handle on Twitter when he tweeted at us. Also, per our privacy policy: we do not store browsing history or track website visits. https://t.co/KaGXu8e12W
— LinkNYC (@LinkNYC) July 2, 2019
Claiming “we do not … track website visits” might be true for websites accessed on your own device using the free WiFi. This is stated with abundant clarity in the LinkNYC privacy policy, and by my estimate it’s a claim that no commercial ISP would ever make.
They cannot say the same about the tablet. In my experiments with accessing video games like Breakout and Doom via LinkNYC, and then soon after bragging about it on Twitter, I found that LinkNYC shut down my access to those games within hours of me posting about it. I left no clues in the videos, like this one, as to how I got there or what website I accessed. But they knew. They scanned network logs for unusual activity, then blocked access to the site(s) I had used to get to this.
Censorship of tablet traffic shouldn’t concern many of us. You can’t even play Breakout or Doom on these stupid machines anyway.
I’m chuckling as I type this.
I recognize the lunacy.
I sit here on the other side of that new kind of digital divide. That corporate/social media protocol that forbids contact between riffraff like me and the company I actually wanted to work for. I have legitimate questions I’d ask of them, and genuine bugs and vulnerabilities to report.
But my attempts to contact the company behind LinkNYC have always gone ignored.
p.s., you can still get to Doom and Breakout. As I said before, you just can’t play them. The touchscreen interface does not align with what the game emulator expects.