the following ad has been occurring regularly on Bay Area Craigslist for the last monh or so:
I applaud their appreciation of the fact that many people’s brains nowadays shut down when they hear words like “environmental”, “solar” and of course “green”. Not being one of such, I cannot help but wonder - what sort of data might these folks be interested in collecting from the city streets? Number of cars passing by? Moving cars’ license plates? Pedestrians’ faces on the sidewalks? Any suggestions?
It says no video or images are recorded, so that rules out cars, license plates, and faces. My bet is it’s either a light meter or a wind detector, or perhaps both, and they want to get data about light or wind levels all over the city over time.
Maybe respond, get one of theri boxes installed, then take it to the local computer guru (it is undoubtedly digital)?
The only time I heard of such a scheme in SF was the latest “We’ll wire the city for wi-fi - FREE!” proponent - the idea is tempting - SF is tiny, but has LOTS of disposable income.
That’s the plus - the problem is always the hills and buildings - any provider would need bunches of repeaters - and that is where it died - the first few operators wanted to mount their boxes on existing utility poles. They gave up when they saw the proposed bill from the utility cos for use of the poles.
Later schemes wanted to get building owners to allow the boxes in return for improved signal strength on their properties.
The last one I recall was 3-5 years ago.
If that is what these boxes do, I cannot understand the deceit re. their nature.
Interesting. It must be connected to the roads somehow, otherwise they wouldn’t care where the balconies are. It said no video or images are recorded, but didn’t mention sound.
My guess would be air quality monitoring and/or noise levels using microphones. (hopefully very directional ones)
If it was solar power, they’d be more concerned to get south-facing balconies than street-facing ones.
Why are they offering a special deal the the first 10 customers? Surely they need more than 10 points to collect data—.Are you, as their customer, one of 10, one of 100 or one of thousands?
It would seem logical that a legit company would provide more details—for example: which streets are they interested in monitoring? And why? (Surely they don’t want to be bothered by 100’s of irrelevant replies from areas that are of no interest to them)
What level does your window/balcony have to be to qualify?–ground floor window, 2nd storey balconey, or higher? And why do they need a window or a balcony …why not just set their little black box on rooftops, or on top of lightpoles?Instead, they want to enter your house and hand you $50 in cash. How about a receipt?
Do they have a contract with the city government, to provide some legitimate engineering services such as noise monitoring? If so, why don’t they identify themselves in the ad and say so?
Is it a private party that is trying to gather data for, say, a class action lawsuit over noise/pollution issues? If so, should you be aware of it, will it affect you?
How will they collect the data “via the internet”?—hook into your private computer in your bedroom?
so, whatever it is…please do keep us updated…this might be an interesting thread
The only thing I can possibly think of is that “they” want to track intra-city driving by using FasTrak toll transponders.
CalTrans already uses FasTrak data to provide real-time traffic flow information on the freeways, but maybe someone thought it would be good to get a rough idea of where people are driving within the city?
I bet you it’s the Movity guys. They’re building a startup to help people rent/buy houses by providing fine grained, detailed information about variables such as noise pollution, weather, crime & a host of other variables.
So why do they restrict their data collectors to “businesses or residences that have balconies or window views of the city streets/sidewalks”?
Is there no pollution, weather, or crime near an apartment that doesn’t face the street?
I was one of the founders of the company that’s doing this, but have since left for moral reasons*.
We were bought out by a Swiss consortium that, I recently discovered, wants to document the percentage of “Les Bagges des Douche”. They’ve repurposed our digital boxes to detect the classic “khaki pants/boat shoes/no socks combo”, the “popped polo shirt collar”, and the “designer suit/no tie/bluetooth earpiece” trifecta.
No one has been able to determine what they plan to do with this information, but we can always hope it will result in an “Au revoir, Douches” scenario.
I felt it would be immoral to turn down 5.5 million Swiss francs…