It’s another retina-piercing day on this LinkNYC Smart City kiosk, which for some reason is freaking out on an endless loop of visual noise that could drive anyone insane. Drivers passing by might be severely distracted by this.
It happened to be raining a little when I got this video. I don’t know if rain landing on the kiosks causes the advertising platters to behave this way (I’ve never noticed a pattern) but I have seen, many times, how the tablet screens go bananas when rain lands on them. The touchscreen software seems to equate drops of rain landing on the tablet with somebody tapping their fingers on it. This sends the tablet from one app to another, and as water seeps into the crevices the bugouts come ever more fast and furious, rendering it impossible for a human to use the thing.
The tablet on this particular kiosk happens also to be afflicted with what I find to be an increasingly common and unsettling glitch: Addresses and destinations that people searched for on the mapping app remain available for anyone to browse. The search queries on this kiosk started accumulating 2 weeks ago, and show that people were looking everything from a street address in Allentown, PA, to “Dyyjjvhkjjjjh” to (what else?) “Porno”.
This might seem amusing but it reminds me how hand-signatured library cards used to show the names of whoever borrowed a book and on what date, and how that custom was discontinued for privacy reasons. The American Library Association phased out this process in the 1970s when it was confirmed that the FBI had been snooping through records such as individual checkout cards, as well as coaxing librarians into turning over records of who had checked out what with regard to bomb making references and the like. It’s hard, off the top of my head, to imagine a parallel sort of snooping through these kiosks, but allowing citizens to leave their search histories available for the next LinkNYC user has every potential to intrude on someone’s privacy.
It goes to show that the American Library Association of the 1970s was way ahead of the Smart City when it came to securing records like this.
As a use case scenario I suspect that whoever ended up searching for 12-11 Broadway in Allentown, PA, was probably looking for 12-11 Broadway in Astoria, Queens. Autocomplete, I suspect, helpfully intervened and gave them directions to the same address in Pennsylvania, at which point the kiosk user gave up and asked a passing human being for directions. Just my inference.
Between the mapping app fails and the seizure-inducing advertising billboard I’d say this represents LinkNYC and the Smart City at their finest. Happy Wednesday!