Critics Hit San Francisco Wi-Fi Plan on Privacy, Interference

Proposal by Google and EarthLink draws fire.

SAN FRANCISCO -- San Francisco's choice of Google and EarthLink to build a citywide Wi-Fi network is likely to interfere with some residents' privacy and many Wi-Fi users' radio signals, critics of the plan said this week.

However, there is still time for public input and changes to the project, said Ron Vinson, chief administrative officer and deputy director of the city's department of telecommunications and information services.

Last week, a city review panel picked the Google-EarthLink plan from a pool of six proposals to provide wireless Internet access throughout most of the city. Google and EarthLink's plan would provide free, citywide Wi-Fi service at about 300 kbps (kilobits per second) and 1 gbps (gigabit per second) service for about $20 per month. The free service would include online ads targeting individual customers based on the Web sites they visited and their physical location at a given time, according to the companies' proposal.


How to Proceed
The department is currently forming a team to negotiate with the companies and hopes to begin talks soon, Vinson said. Aspects of the plan must go before several public agencies, including the city's planning commission and public utilities commission, and details of the plan may change, he said. The city will turn to the second-place finisher if the parties can't reach a deal. The final deal will go to a vote before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which governs the combined city and county.

"We are in the very early stages of the planning process and look forward to collaborating with the City of SF and EarthLink to work out the details of the offering," Google said in a written statement.


Privacy Issues
Still, the companies' proposal has caused some jitters. Even though Google has said that it will erase each user's Web-surfing data after choosing ads based on it, the free service represents a bad trade-off for users, said Chris Hoofnagle, director and senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

"Google wants to provide just a trickle of Internet service in exchange for individuals' privacy," Hoofnagle said. He's concerned about "mission creep" that might take the system beyond its initial use for advertising. He compared it to Google's system for interpreting the content of e-mail messages.

"A technology that can analyze content at that level invites secondary uses, whether it's law enforcement or national security," Hoofnagle said. If data can be used for advertising, a judge might determine that it could be used for official purposes as well, he said.

EPIC hopes to ensure that the network providers must comply with the Cable TV Privacy Act of 1984, because that law would require them to notify a consumer before turning over personally identifiable information to the government. There are some exceptions, such as for emergencies and terrorism investigations, Hoofnagle added. EPIC also wants the companies to commit to erasing user location information, something the companies haven't clearly done, he said.


Quality Issues
Interference may be an even more widespread concern, according to Ralf Muehlen, director of SFLAN, a free, nonprofit Wi-Fi network in the city. The Google/EarthLink network is likely to swamp the city, causing home and office Wi-Fi networks to slow down and cordless phone call quality to suffer, he said.

The companies made this consequence more likely by proposing a network that's almost entirely wireless, including wireless "backhaul" links from access points to the Internet, all running on either the unlicensed 900-MHz radio band or the two bands used for Wi-Fi, Muehlen said. The companies could avoid this problem by reaching the Internet over fiber-optic cable that the city already owns and is far from using to its capacity, he said. Vinson acknowledged that the city owns fiber in the ground.




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