Free Public WiFi Hot spots are becoming a common thing in Malaysia, heck even the small road side footstalls might soon have WiFi. But with all the WiFi hotspots around the country some have a darker side to them, one which you may not like.

Jun 11, 2010

Category: Social

Posted by: zentarien

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What I mean when I say everyone wants to data mine? Well it is simple, everyone wants to know more about you. When you go to a place with WiFi spot, they give you free WiFi in exchange for some information about you. For the purpose of this article, I am going to use 2 establishments, which is McDonalds and Starbucks coffee.

When I go McDonalds (or even StarBucks), I am prompted with a Screen where they want to know my name, email, age, salary, gender, occupation, etc. Some people happily fill these up with real information, I wouldn't recommend it. I mean why the hell would places like McDonalds need to know information like my Salary and Occupation? I smells really fishy, it becomes so obvious they are data mining for statistics.

Companies all want these information so that they can keep a record on how many people between such age group visit, are there more males or more females coming, are people coming here earning little or a lot, what are the types of people who come here, and etc. They might even start using this information against you, what happens when they discover everyone who comes here is rich, will they start raising the prices? it will be quite bad. Of course it can be also quite good, like when they discover there is really high percentage of females coming, so they carter to females needs more, and stuff like this. There is both good and bad. But for the most part, I fear that the bad might be more.

What I do is that I normally provide fake information, for everything, I don't want someone keeping a record of all the places I have been, it is creepy. Even when they need an email confirmation, I normally always provide an email which I never use (it is a good practice to have a spare email for junk). Sometimes these type of companies will sell information like this to other companies for money just like that. It is really funny when the information they have about me is something like this:-

Name: SuckMyBalls , Email: dreamon@nochance.com , Salary: above 25,000 , Occupation: Bum

Just my friendly warning to yall. :)

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