India partners with private company to sell ads to commuters via railway Wi-Fi

An announcement from Indian government-owned telecom company, RailTel, detailing efforts to monetize existing free railway Wi-Fi in partnership with a private company has drawn criticism that it will lead to data collection, breaches, unwanted ads and more. The five-year agreement with a consortium led by IT company 3i …

[Little Mouse]

more than 1.1 million unique users...

“RailTel’s Public Wi-Fi network records more than 1.1 million unique users per day."

But how many of those actually manage to stay connected for more than a few seconds?

And how many of those are genuine interactive connections, as opposed to auto-connects to a known network despite the phone never leaving the users pocket?

My experience of similar Free WiFi on UK public transport is that it's invariably shit and not worth the frustration. How does that compare to India's setup?

[Triggerfish]

Re: more than 1.1 million unique users...

Even if you don't connect for long it's still analytics, you know who rides the train, you have last mile data analytics you can build on.

Crap data protection means you can dig into all sorts of stuff.

[Version 1.0]

Re: more than 1.1 million unique users...

We believe that using WiFi means your data is stolen although posting on Facebook, Twitter etc means your data is sold. Is that any better?

[John Brown (no body)]

What's revolutionary about this?

Isn't this how pretty much all "free" public WiFi works?