What is CityBridge Doing With My Phone Number?

This is what showed up on my cell phone when I called it from a LinkNYC kiosk:

212-477-3063 is the fake number that shows up on any caller ID capable phone you call from any LinkNYC kiosk. But I’ll have more on that at the end of this story.

Having called my phone from a LinkNYC kiosk guess who now has my cell phone number? That would be CityBridge, or Intersection, or Control Group, or whatever the hell you call the consortium of companies that owns the LinkNYC digital advertising billboards. Once you place a call through a LinkNYC kiosk the number you called is recorded and saved, for how long and for what purposes no one outside the LinkNYC Smart City Cloister would seem to know. While the company’s FAQ makes it clear that no data about web sites visited or content viewed through its free WiFi is recorded nothing is said about phone numbers called and what purpose is served in retaining that data. I also would like to know if the kiosks somehow access caller ID for outgoing calls, and if calling my own phone number entered it and my name into LinkNYC’s unencrypted records.

LinkNYC’s FAQ says their kiosks allow “phone calls to anywhere in the U.S.”, a claim which is not entirely true. As revealed in the wake of last month’s Mr. Softee incidents, in which several kiosks were heard blasting the infamous ice cream truck jingle all at once, the folks at LinkNYC have ready access to what phone numbers are being called and they are perfectly willing to block access to a specific phone number if they don’t want you calling it.

The story, reported by Gothamist.com on May 24, includes a short video in which a slowed-down recording of the ice cream truck jingle was heard blasting out of just one Third Avenue kiosk (it was said to be coming out of 10 kiosks). A follow-up piece in the New York Post quoted a LinkNYC spokesperson who denied their network had been hacked, saying that someone had simply used the kiosk’s phone call app “to reach a number where the jingle was set up to play.” The spokesperson then revealed the company’s genius (not) strategy for dealing with the situation: they determined what phone number had been called, and they blocked it. The Whac-a-Mole-esque futility of this approach became apparent a week later, when another piece at Gothamist.com reported that the jingle was blasting yet again through multiple kiosk loudspeakers, this time on the upper west side.

These incidents got attention mostly on account of the Gothamist articles but for most of this calendar year I’ve seen passing mention on social media of various noises blasting from LinkNYC kiosks.

What is interesting to me about these incidents is not LinkNYC’s inability to prevent them from happening. Surprising to me is the fact that phone numbers called through the kiosks are being harvested in plain text and no one in the privacy world seems to care. The collection and tabulation of these numbers is even cited by LinkNYC as if it is something to brag about. A New York Times “F.Y.I.” column, includes a comment from a LinkNYC representative who was happy to reveal that the most-called number from the kiosks was the New York State food stamps hotline. Will LinkNYC be releasing its top 10 most called phone numbers, along with its bottom ten least called?

The city’s response to a FOIL request from WNBC last year would seem to confirm, unless someone at DoITT was outright lying, that any and all Internet content accessed through the kiosks’ WiFi and tablet devices are not logged or monitored. But would a FOIL request for every phone number called from the kiosks be honored?

Probably not. I browsed through other FOIL requests, not just about about LinkNYC, and found a wasteland of requests left open for years before then being closed with no response. An intriguing request from last week, however, suggests someone possibly did request that phone call records from the kiosks be made public (it wasn’t me). We cannot be certain, since the substance of the request appears to be cut short, and whoever made it is not identified.

The request was promptly closed without comment, and ignored. From what I can make of the other requests it seems media entities and other agents of influence are most likely to get responses from FOIL, so I’m not even going to bother trying.

As I predicted a couple of years ago, the spoofed caller ID number seen at the top of this story has been hijacked by robocallers and telemarketing scammers. According to this article at patch.com the LinkNYC number has even earned the dubious distinction of being the #1 most spoofed caller ID used by robocallers for calls to phone numbers in the 929 area code.

It is interesting that these particular robocalls identify themselves as “LinkNYC ‘Payphone’”. No legitimate call from a LinkNYC kiosk would include the word “payphone” in its caller ID. Why would it? LinkNYC kiosks might be replacing payphones but they are not payphones.

Legitimate calls from these kiosks will either show just the phone number, as in my screengrab above, or it might show something like that phone number along with “LinkNYC Caller” or “LinkNYC”.

Give it enough time and I predict that legitimate calls made from LinkNYC kiosks will be flagged by the big phone carriers as “Scam Likely”, in the way T-Mobile recently started identifying suspicious-looking calls like this one I saw last week: