13 ms·
Yelp Wi-Fi
- doctorless 9y agoThis seems like a clever ploy to recapture some of the ground that Foursquare is taking, in that Foursquare has the deeper intuition on customer preferences linked to social networking data - you have to use some identifying info to connect to the network, plus there’s the possibility these wireless routers may be scanning for nearby phones/computers. It could lead to the Yelp app advertising based on proximity to restaurants that people in similar demographics liked.
- lowglow 9y agoGood move for Yelp. Probably bad news for data privacy advocates. They could track you from venue to venue, without your even connecting to the wifi. They could see how busy a restaurant is at any time based on number of smart devices with wifi, they could infer demographic data based on device id, etc. etc. They could probably correlate this with other data sources to 100% identify who you are and target you. It's good for business owners if they surface this insight to their audience. It's bad for business owners because previously Yelp has been notoriously a bad actor in the space and can't be trusted. It's good for business owners that want a great interface and offer wifi that might also better the experience for their customers.
- dawnerd 9y agoAlso looks like you have to sign in with a social network? Double nope. Also looks like its an app instead of the normal connect screen, but since it's a mockup I'll give that a pass. Thinking about it - not really all that different than the google wifi at Starbucks. Google definitely is mining some data there... how long you're connected, locations visited...
- gruez 9y agoyou can use email, so there's nothing preventing you from using fuck@you.lol
- quadrangle 9y agoexcept if they actually verify the email doesn't bounce and you don't have a cell-data device, then you need the wifi in order to get your 10minutemail address…
- Operyl 9y agosupport@theirdomain.com is always a good bet.
- un_montagnard 9y agoA year ago, I was at Montreal Trudeau Airport waiting for my flight. I tried to connect to the Wifi, it asked for an email address and as usual I entered something in the like of dksqjd@skqdhqsd.com Problem is you first get 10 minutes of wifi to go check your email. Once the email is confirmed, you get unlimited wifi.
- realusername 9y agoI generally use webmaster@their-domain.com or alternatively root@localhost.
- username223 9y agoWhat's the full extent of the Google Wifi surveillance at Starbucks? Browser fingerprinting? Some MITM technique? It seems to bounce you through appspot.com, i.e. GAE, but I can't figure out the tracking mechanism there.
- dawnerd 9y agoJust a thought: custom software on the ap/router that logs your mac address and anything else useful for fingerprinting that they might not get through a browser.
- presto8 9y agoSome operating systems use a "fake" MAC address when not associated and scanning for networks. In theory, this would prevent tracking when a user is not connected to the SSID.
- jeffehobbs 9y agoNope Wifi.
- milofeynman 9y ago"Collect customer information" consensual or not?
- GuiA 9y agoThere’s certainly a small and beautifully designed “I have read the [terms and conditions]” checkbox next to the field where you input your email (and no non tech savvy user/lawyer has ever bothered to click those links)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- yeukhon 9y agoAt first I have the "lol really that's blunt, no way I am gonna use it", then I thought to myself, yeah that's really blunt and should give some credit for being blunt. But it'd be better if Yelp would at least give one or two examples.... Personally, I do find this disturbing. Regardless, I use my 4G.
- techsupporter 9y ago> Your customers connect to your free WiFi with an email address, social media profile, or phone number. [...] Target your customers with email and SMS promotions that are easy to build and keep customers coming back. I'll just keep using my mobile provider's data service that I already pay for anyway. More spam is exactly what I don't need in my life, ESPECIALLY not SMS spam which has no effective filters or controls.
- pcurve 9y agothis would've been a brilliant idea about 6-7 years ago when mobile data was more expensive. Still not too late though. I'm sure squatters that sit at cafes for hours at time would be more than happy to fork over their information for free Wifi
- spike021 9y agoMobile data is still fairly expensive, honestly.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoT-Mobile “Unlimited” doesn’t throttle you until you hit upwards of 50GB in a month in the States, and my understanding is that mobile data is very inexpensive in Europe.
- Larrikin 9y ago50 gigs is nothing unless you're only using it for email and website browsing.
- ikawe 9y agoI’m not sure what to do with your anectodal hyperbole except counter with other anectdotal hyperbole and say that 50gigs/month is more than enough for me under normal circumstances. Granted I don’t watch a ton of streaming video, but I do work mostly online and am on multi party video conference for multiple hours per week.
- claymichaels 9y agoWhat else are you doing at a restaurant or coffee shop?
- scrollaway 9y ago50 gigabytes is enough to stream more 2 hour movies in high definition than anyone would care to watch in a single month. We are talking mobile data here, not FTTH or something. We're talking about activity you'll be doing on your phone or, at best, tablet.
- chenzhekl 9y agoThis is what WeChat has been doing in China for a long time.
- incadenza 9y agoI'd rather use data honestly.
- nafizh 9y agoLike we need more spam in our life. Even when I go to a restaurant, I don't need their special offers to go back again. If I liked the experience, I will return myself, if I didn't, no offer would make me. And unless I am in the airport or out for a long time, I don't use the local wifi if it asks to create an account.
- franciscop 9y agoYou can use Mailinator (or any of the alternatives) in these situations: https://www.mailinator.com/ https://www.mailinator.com/
- BoorishBears 9y agoThe other day I went to a small restaurant and paid for my order with a debit card. A minute or two after leaving I got an email on my personal Gmail thanking me for my patronage, even though I had never been there before, and I hadn't offered my email... Except while I had been next door at a meetup and used their Wi-Fi. I guess they had the hotspot setup to send an email after you left the network. Gave me a bit of a spook thinking a small restaurant would go as far as to look get my email based on my card information, but it was still an unwelcome use of my email. Not only did they send that email, but they subscribed me to their mailing list without any indication on the capture site.
- rahimnathwani 9y agoMaybe you have your email to their payment processor at a different restaurant, in order to get an emailed receipt?
- dade_ 9y agoI assume this is from the Turnstyle acquisition.
- ldom22 9y agoHow is this done? You need to get a router from them? Or is it just software and it works with some routers?
- yurishimo 9y agoIt’s probably a router that you add on to your existing infrastructure and it’s managed remotely via some sort of API.
- dpandya 9y agoZenReach (https://www.zenreach.com/ https://www.zenreach.com/) has done this for quite a bit of time and has grown very fast doing it. It's unclear how Yelp's offering is differentiated from ZenReach's, but Yelp may capture a significant share of the market simply by virtue of the fact that they have excellent reach into brick and mortar businesses.
- whoisjuan 9y ago"Your customers connect to your free WiFi with an email address, social media profile, or phone number"...Yeah, that's gonna be a no for me, dawg.
- chinhodado 9y agoI suppose a burner email address will serve
- frik 9y agoCan you suggest a email provider. It's getting harder, as there are only a few remaining free email provider. And if you don't login, some delete the account after 6 months, or some don't have proper spam protection in case I want to open the inbox and find a registration confirmation mail.
- zanedb 9y agoCheck out Sudo[0]. [0]: https://sudoapp.com https://sudoapp.com
- scrollaway 9y agohttps://10minutemail.com https://10minutemail.com But whenever I have reason to believe I'm being signed up for spam on an email that will not be verified (which is the case for most "free wifi" login prompts), I usually try to find a real email of someone involved, such as sales@terrible-wifi-gateway.com
- warent 9y agoThat is hilarious. Will try myself. You're starting a movement
- peterlk 9y agoA lot of sites will block it, but yopmail does the trick for me. It's a public email repository (anyone can see any email sent to any address), so it's a good place for burner emails
- radec 9y agoGross
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- forkLding 9y agoKnew the guys that were likely the predecessors of Yelp Wifi before they got acquired: Turnstyle Analytics, solid Canadian company, good to seem them being used.
- sigmonsays 9y agoyelp seems pretty thirsty, must to be doing so well. they're (the restaurant) in the wrong business if they care about offering wifi instead of quality service. I have zero interest is being contacted later for promotions or loyalty.
- alaskamiller 9y agoA me-too product in a crowded field. Based on other comments below it appears to be a rebrand of a prior acquire, Turnstyle Analytics in this case. Also, it's pretty clear based on these early comments that HN has a bunch of people that never talked to or sold to a small business owner before and empathize with their needs. When you open up a QSR (quick service restaurant as compared to FSQ full service restaurant) there's really only three strategies to build up your initial customer base, one is using wifi as the honeypot. The default would be to be just broadcast your business account cable or DSL modem and call it a day. The nicer places have a Meraki, set up the captive portal settings, and call it a day. The smart thing to do is to call Facebook and setup a Facebook Wifi service account with them. They set you up an account, you configure your router, then let Facebook lock up your wifi in exchange for a like or to click the tiny dark patterned opt-out link. The store owner wins, they get exposure through Facebook with likes, Facebook wins because they get more data points to track, and the customer wins in that they get data access. It's a simple idea and there are plenty of vendors that offers this to help business owners not have to deal with the as-is software from equipment vendors. ZenReach.com is another solution provider that integrates multiple services to make it so you mix and match to set up your own preferred workflow. Yelp jumping in is to boost up their yelp ratings and reviews which in turn boosts their value and extend their relationship with the store so that they can push and upsell more services like local advertising, profile promotion, or orders lead generation. Lots of the shops will buy in, it's one less hassle out of a lot of hassles they deal with day in and day out, and they might get more Yelp reviews and Yelp stars? Yes, let's go. The lifecycle for a product like this though is only 2 or 3 years. After two or three years the shop owners smarten up and switch back to a custom branded captive portal because after enough likes they don't want to keep feeding the Facebook bottom line. But now they get to maybe boost up Yelp reviews and ratings for awhile.
- thanksgiving 9y agoAre you sure? I'm looking at my email inbox and saw an email from Pizza ranch. When I went there the first time, they simply asked me if I'd like to give them my email address. I gave them my email address. Easy enough. You don't need to offer anything. You can offer free WiFi if you like. You don't have to make it conditional to this crap. Owners and management, if you're reading this: you don't need this.
- joeblau 9y agoOne thing I've noticed about my personal habits is that I use WiFi less and less. WiFi is so horribly unreliable that I turn it off and use LTE. I'm sure there is a segment of people who this would work great for, but after almost every US carrier revamped their cell phone plans earlier this year to offer unlimited data, I struggle to see this product's future.
- bowmessage 9y agoForm based landing pages are the norm for public WiFi here in England. I just always give fake information. I’m not sure how many people give out their real name email and phone?
- zanedb 9y agoYou'd be surprised how many people provide legitimate information when asked.
- stevekemp 9y agoAgreed. Once or twice I gave a "real" email on the basis that I assumed they'd email me a confirmation-code, or similar. Since that has never happened I just enter "example@example.com", or similar, these days.
- thedevguy 9y agoAnyone wants to help me create LTE blocking wallpaper?
- warent 9y agoThis makes a bit of sense. One can't help but wonder what all their engineering resources have been going towards since Yelp and Eat24 are so buggy and seem to be gradually getting worse. At least now there's an answer
- spiznnx 9y agoI interned at Yelp twice and can tell you it was not this.
- swhnorton 9y agoThis is brilliant on Yelp's part. Surprised a POS system didn't already do this, but I guess they have less to gain. I wonder what % of US consumers max out their data plans in a month - that would give you an idea of what adoption might look like.
- confounded 9y agoI imagine what Yelp really want is to track footfall and IRL behaviors via MAC addresses. You do not need to attempt to connect to the wifi for them to obtain this, merely walk/move past the restaurant. This will let them know your movements in meatspace (‘you’ being the derived identifier, until/unless they pay/trade-with a data broker for enrichment). While both Apple and Google have boasted about MAC address randomization for years, it’s always been crap, and still is[1]. [1]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/10/mac_address_randomization/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/10/mac_address_randomi...
- willstrafach 9y agoAdditionally, if this is indeed the case, randomization is irrelevant if you are actually connecting to their Wi-Fi.
- evolve2k 9y agoFacebook wifi for business came to me as soon as I saw this. Fb did this 4 years ago, lots of HN comments at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7018811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7018811
- Animats 9y agoThis backfires since sites and browsers started defaulting to HTTPS. The WiFi can't present its spammy "login" page in response to an HTTPS request. Some WiFi nodes try to MITM HTTPS pages, but that generates forged-site messages that are hard to bypass in newer browsers.
- kevincox 9y ago> Your customers connect to your free WiFi with an email address, social media profile, or phone number. fuckoff@example.com it is!
- gkya 9y agoI've never used public Wi-Fi, and don't see why one would really want to, if they have a data plan. If you don't watch videos outside, 2-4GB suffices monthly (2GB monthly costs me ŧ27/~$6, with an educational discount, and I've never used it all up). If you do video conferences outside, you probably would have the income to buy a larger data plan. It's just not worth the risk. Maybe things like Facebook consume people's data plans quickly so that they're always looking to find free wifi?
- autotune 9y agoIf you work remote just doing things like using ssh, browsing web pages, and using Spotify and the occasional YouTube vid can eat up more than 10 GB a month. It's not hard to set up an OpenVPN server in AWS along with LetsEncrypt and have a custom VPN to use to browse securely over public wifi. Now as for speed and whether they block vpn ports or other ports needed to do your job, is where I draw the line for pub wifi usage... actually probably wouldn't use at DEF CON as well.
- bogomipz 9y agoIf the food and service are good I don't need an email to remind me to come back. You build customer loyalty by providing a consistently good dining experience. We need less phones out at the dinner table not more.
- gf263 9y agoYelp with more unimaginative and useless software
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- scarface74 9y agoHow often do you really need to connect to WiFi these days? The four major wireless providers all offer "unlimited" data. T-mobile even has "unlimited" 3g tethering. I've gone over the prioritization limit plenty of times and not seen a difference.
- JoshMnem 9y agoIt's a terrible idea. One shouldn't need to provide a personal identity to use the Internet.