AusLeisure

Visitors to the Gold Coast using the free Wi-Fi being offered during next month's Commonwealth Games will have their data mined by the Gold Coast City Council for tourism marketing.

The Council has spent more than $5 million laying fibre cables so it can offer high-speed internet to visitors in parts of Surfers Paradise, Broadbeach and Southport during the Games.

The data mining, which the Council says is legal, relies on visitors using their Facebook accounts to log into a new high-speed Wi-Fi service.

A second option, which provides slower internet access with less available data, can be accessed by providing a username and email address.

Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate said Council would be using the data collected through Facebook to help future tourism campaigns, telling the ABC “we will be able to monitor the people, where they come from that is the percentage of tourists coming from China, Japan, South-East Asia and locals.”

The Council’s Chief Innovation Officer, Ian Hatton, told the ABC the Council would make limited use of the data, saying it would not be shared with other agencies, although reports based on the data would be shared with the tourism sector.

A Council spokesperson added “the most important information is about country of origin, to better understand the use by overseas tourists, who are one of the primary target groups for the service

“The city will be able to understand patterns of demand and use, including how many people are accessing the service, times of day and the amounts of data used. It will also be very useful for understanding numbers during events and seasonal effects.”

With revelations about the use of Facebook data to influence the 2016 US Presidential election being reported this week, data mining is currently a very sensitive issue.

Sydney University ata privacy expert, Associate Professor Uri Gal, said Facebook would be able to see when visitors used the Wi-Fi service and that the Council would potentially be able to collect a vast amount of information.

He told the ABC “depending on how we define our privacy settings on Facebook, they might be able to gain information on our Facebook friends, how many friends we have, who our friends are, the likes we have on Facebook, photos we have on Facebook and so on.”

Australian Privacy Foundation Chair David Vaile, said anyone seeking to collect data should ethically require the “informed consent” of participants. That meant being upfront about the extent of the data collected, and to ensure people were aware before they logged on.

Vaile advised “the Council has a very high obligation to be transparent. (A full list of data accessed) should be in an information document so people who want to maintain their privacy can choose to opt out.”

In many cases, he said, people are asked to simply “click a button” with little information provided about the consequences.

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15th March 2016 - METRICON STADIUM INTRODUCES STATE-OF-THE-ART WI-FI CONNECTIVITY

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