Security

The relative publicness of You Are Here also meant that more technical safeguards were required. Though our nodes were installed inside businesses, and were thus protected from physical vandalism, “We’re leaving this device in public, so we have to put some safeguards in there so it doesn’t get abused,” says Grant. In order to limit the possibility of ill-intentioned users manipulating the device or its content, “We had to set it up so that it blocked all outgoing traffic except traffic going to [our] server.”

The security concerns of You Are Here are minimal compared to those of a typical Wi-Fi hotspot; one of the benefits of a device with limited internet connectivity is that there is much less harm it can do if it’s compromised. Apart from basic protections—like strong passwords—on the administrative parts of the device’s software, the fact that You Are Here nodes aren’t networked means that they don’t need a complex network security strategy. Without access to the broader internet, You Are Here nodes are unlikely to attract malicious actors trying to capture others’ data, engage in illegal online activity, or just bog down someone else’s network connection. Moreover, since the connections into the device are so limited, their vulnerabilities are too: Anyone wishing to compromise the device would have to be physically near it. And even in New York City, the number of people passing through a public park is tiny compared to the number of malicious actors online.

Our need to host some of the You Are Here content online, however, did create some technical conflicts. For example, because we ended up storing user-contributed stories remotely, we had to determine the best way to provide the limited internet connectivity our setup required. While we could have piggybacked on our hosts’ wireless connections, we didn’t want to expose our audience members’ listening habits to the host organizations’ hosting. Instead Grant decided to use a 3G “data stick,” which supplied a standalone internet connection.