Sunday 2 July 2017

When is free wifi not exactly free?

Last week I had the pleasure of spending a freezing morning in Albury to get my car serviced. The Library and their zippy wifi doesn't open until 10, and I had to drop the car off at 8.30, so I had some time to kill, and after I'd been to OfficeWorks and JBHiFi to look at computers I either couldn't afford or justify, it was time for a coffee so I headed off to the Myer Centre, a small shopping mall with some decent coffee shops, for a coffee and to thaw out before heading over to the library.

Now, the Myer Centre has its own free wifi provided by the eponymous store of that name rather   than Albury City's free wifi. And it used to be that when you logged on to check your email, you did the standard thing of clicking in a browser window to promise to be a good boy, and that was about it.

Not this time. The wifi solution had been outsourced to Lokket, who wanted you to login with either a Google or a Facebook id to get onto the wifi.

Well I decided I'd rather not, and not having a suitable dummy account to hand I closed my laptop, drank my coffee and went elsewhere.

Now, Myer's have a perfect right to do what they want with their free wifi service and if they think that they can get extra sales by targeting their customer base like this that's their business.

Personally it makes me just that little bit less likely to visit the store, and I'm certainly not happy about them having access to my account data ...

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