Milestones for LinkNYC; ongoing concerns about tracking movements

VentureBeat takes a deep dive on LinkNYC as the Wi-fi network passes several milestones.

Two years after the deployment of prototypical kiosks in Manhattan, Intersection ... is ready to declare them a success. The roughly 1,600 Links recently hit three milestones: 1 billion sessions, 5 million users, and 500,000 phone calls a month.

“We have an opportunity to communicate with people as they navigate their day,” Intersection senior consumer marketing manager Amanda Giddon told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “My mandate is to help make Link a part of the community through content and content strategy — really, anything that [makes] New Yorkers feel like tourists in their own city [or] even help tourists feel like New Yorkers through useful, actionable information.”

And in a piece from earlier in September, The Intercept explores if LinkNYC kiosks are tracking your movements.

Since plans for LinkNYC were first unveiled, journalists, residents, and civil liberties experts have raised concerns that the internet kiosks might be storing sensitive data about its users and possibly tracking their movements. For the last two years, the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a small but vocal group of activists — including ReThink LinkNYC, a grassroots anti-surveillance group, and the anonymous Stop LinkNYC coalition — have highlighted the kiosk’s potential to track locations, collect personal information, and fuel mass surveillance.

Now an undergraduate researcher has discovered indications in LinkNYC code — accidentally made public on the internet — that LinkNYC may be actively planning to track users’ locations.