
Yelp Wi-Fi - valgaze
https://www.yelpwifi.com/
======
nafizh
Like we need more spam in our life.

Even when I go to a restaurant, I don't need their special offers to go back
again. If I liked the experience, I will return myself, if I didn't, no offer
would make me. And unless I am in the airport or out for a long time, I don't
use the local wifi if it asks to create an account.

~~~
BoorishBears
The other day I went to a small restaurant and paid for my order with a debit
card.

A minute or two after leaving I got an email on my personal Gmail thanking me
for my patronage, even though I had never been there before, and I hadn't
offered my email...

Except while I had been next door at a meetup and used their Wi-Fi. I guess
they had the hotspot setup to send an email after you left the network.

Gave me a bit of a spook thinking a small restaurant would go as far as to
look get my email based on my card information, but it was still an unwelcome
use of my email.

Not only did they send that email, but they subscribed me to their mailing
list without any indication on the capture site.

~~~
nothrabannosir
In these cases, please _please_ don’t click unsubscribe. Just mark as spam.
Even if gmail helpfully offers to unsubscribe for you: resist the temptation.
It puts the incentives in the right place. It’s the only way to fight this,
and it’s a damn good one.

I urge everyone to stop clicking unsubscribe, ever, unless you explicitly
subscribed to something. [edit: Even that automatically enabled “subscribe to
our mailing list” nonsense, or “click this to not subscribe”, or whatever
stupid games they play on us these days. No. Don’t let them joke you around.]

Not saying you didn’t, just wanted to take this opportunity for a cheeky PSA
:)

Ironically, conditioning people to respect the unsubscribe button has,
probably, insidiously led to more spam making it into people’s inboxes than
anything else in recent memory.

[edit: to answer the Why not both? ] Because incentives makes our world go
around. Make no mistake: They don’t give a damn about you or your inbox and
will do anything for those sweet sweet engagement and conversion metrics.
Unsubscribe makes them feel the pain (this is the jncentive), and it helps
them not take your inbox for granted.

Making them eat bad spam rep score is the only weapon we have, to make them
treat our inbox with respect. Use it.

~~~
cdancette
What incentive are you talking about ? Why is unsubscribing a good incentive ?

And are you saying when you mark an email as spam, your mail provider will
give them a bad spam reputation score ?

~~~
nothrabannosir
Clicking unsubscribe relies on gentlemanship instead of self motivation to
work. It relies on people respecting you and being kind, rather than doing
what is best for them. This kind of system rewards unscrupulous behaviour (not
respecting the click, subscribing you by default , etc).

It is a common mistake in organising workflows involving humans. It works
beautifully on small groups but collapses under its own weight at scale. You
will always be swimming upstream.

If you will allow me to take some liberty, this is comparable to communism vs
capitalism, in practice. Loosely. :)

And yes: clicking spam makes google lower their reputation , eventually spam
holing all their email directly (= disincentivising bad behaviour ). This
means that now, suddenly, the company and you have the same goal: not to send
you email you would consider unwanted. Currently, they can get away with spam
by calling it a mailing list and adding an unsubscribe button.

~~~
cdancette
I'm not sure which system you're comparing to capitalism and communism to be
honest.

Capitalism reward some dishonest behavior by its nature, because the ultimate
reward is money (thinking of tax evasions, stealing..) . Communism also
rewards some dishonest behavior, but not the same kind (it's more like work
the least to earn the same)

------
whoisjuan
"Your customers connect to your free WiFi with an email address, social media
profile, or phone number"...Yeah, that's gonna be a no for me, dawg.

~~~
chinhodado
I suppose a burner email address will serve

~~~
frik
Can you suggest a email provider.

It's getting harder, as there are only a few remaining free email provider.
And if you don't login, some delete the account after 6 months, or some don't
have proper spam protection in case I want to open the inbox and find a
registration confirmation mail.

~~~
danieldk
Besides burner e-mail services, Fastmail allows you to create addresses on the
fly with subdomain addressing. E.g. if you are using me@mydomain.tld, and have
subdomain addressing enabled, you can use me@foobar.mydomain.tld where foobar
is a random subdomain. I like it for a couple of reasons:

\- You can easily set up rules on subdomains to send e-mails to separate
folders or to discard them.

\- You can find out who is selling your e-mail addresses.

\- It is less trivial for spammers to abuse than plus addressing.

~~~
yladiz
I do something similar with Fastmail, except instead of subdomain, I use the
prefix, e.g. reddit@example.com, hn@example.com. I have a generic one
(hi@example.com) for certain use cases but in general I use the specific ones
so I know who may have sold/"lost" my email address. It's a lot better than
Gmail style plus addressing since some input websites disallow plus emails or
have terrible email systems that can't properly recognize it.

The only thing I wish that would go further would be to be able to flag a
certain email address to be set to "not exist", so that if someone emails it,
it gets bounced back as undeliverable. I set up something similar on my own
server a while back using Postfix and Postgres to deal with holding the
emails/undeliverable emails but it ended up being a hassle to keep up with and
I am glad to pay for Fastmail to not deal with anything but getting my emails.

Additionally, one downside to the burner email services is that some companies
have tracked down the popular ones and mark email addresses from those domains
as invalid, meaning they really want something that isn't a burner email.

------
pcurve
this would've been a brilliant idea about 6-7 years ago when mobile data was
more expensive.

Still not too late though.

I'm sure squatters that sit at cafes for hours at time would be more than
happy to fork over their information for free Wifi

~~~
spike021
Mobile data is still fairly expensive, honestly.

~~~
toomuchtodo
T-Mobile “Unlimited” doesn’t throttle you until you hit upwards of 50GB in a
month in the States, and my understanding is that mobile data is very
inexpensive in Europe.

~~~
Larrikin
50 gigs is nothing unless you're only using it for email and website browsing.

~~~
ikawe
I’m not sure what to do with your anectodal hyperbole except counter with
other anectdotal hyperbole and say that 50gigs/month is more than enough for
me under normal circumstances.

Granted I don’t watch a ton of streaming video, but I do work mostly online
and am on multi party video conference for multiple hours per week.

------
confounded
I imagine what Yelp really want is to track footfall and IRL behaviors via MAC
addresses.

You do not need to attempt to connect to the wifi for them to obtain this,
merely walk/move past the restaurant.

This will let them know your movements in meatspace (‘you’ being the derived
identifier, until/unless they pay/trade-with a data broker for enrichment).

While both Apple and Google have boasted about MAC address randomization for
years, it’s always been crap, and still is[1].

[1]:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/10/mac_address_randomi...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/10/mac_address_randomization/)

~~~
willstrafach
Additionally, if this is indeed the case, randomization is irrelevant if you
are actually connecting to their Wi-Fi.

------
dpandya
ZenReach ([https://www.zenreach.com/](https://www.zenreach.com/)) has done
this for quite a bit of time and has grown very fast doing it.

It's unclear how Yelp's offering is differentiated from ZenReach's, but Yelp
may capture a significant share of the market simply by virtue of the fact
that they have excellent reach into brick and mortar businesses.

------
Animats
This backfires since sites and browsers started defaulting to HTTPS. The WiFi
can't present its spammy "login" page in response to an HTTPS request. Some
WiFi nodes try to MITM HTTPS pages, but that generates forged-site messages
that are hard to bypass in newer browsers.

------
lowglow
Good move for Yelp. Probably bad news for data privacy advocates.

They could track you from venue to venue, without your even connecting to the
wifi. They could see how busy a restaurant is at any time based on number of
smart devices with wifi, they could infer demographic data based on device id,
etc. etc.

They could probably correlate this with other data sources to 100% identify
who you are and target you.

It's good for business owners if they surface this insight to their audience.
It's bad for business owners because previously Yelp has been notoriously a
bad actor in the space and can't be trusted.

It's good for business owners that want a great interface and offer wifi that
might also better the experience for their customers.

~~~
dawnerd
Also looks like you have to sign in with a social network? Double nope. Also
looks like its an app instead of the normal connect screen, but since it's a
mockup I'll give that a pass.

Thinking about it - not really all that different than the google wifi at
Starbucks. Google definitely is mining some data there... how long you're
connected, locations visited...

~~~
gruez
you can use email, so there's nothing preventing you from using fuck@you.lol

~~~
quadrangle
except if they actually verify the email doesn't bounce and you don't have a
cell-data device, then you need the wifi in order to get your 10minutemail
address…

~~~
un_montagnard
A year ago, I was at Montreal Trudeau Airport waiting for my flight. I tried
to connect to the Wifi, it asked for an email address and as usual I entered
something in the like of dksqjd@skqdhqsd.com Problem is you first get 10
minutes of wifi to go check your email. Once the email is confirmed, you get
unlimited wifi.

------
bowmessage
Form based landing pages are the norm for public WiFi here in England. I just
always give fake information. I’m not sure how many people give out their real
name email and phone?

~~~
stevekemp
Agreed. Once or twice I gave a "real" email on the basis that I assumed they'd
email me a confirmation-code, or similar. Since that has never happened I just
enter "example@example.com", or similar, these days.

------
doctorless
This seems like a clever ploy to recapture some of the ground that Foursquare
is taking, in that Foursquare has the deeper intuition on customer preferences
linked to social networking data - you have to use some identifying info to
connect to the network, plus there’s the possibility these wireless routers
may be scanning for nearby phones/computers. It could lead to the Yelp app
advertising based on proximity to restaurants that people in similar
demographics liked.

------
incadenza
I'd rather use data honestly.

------
forkLding
Knew the guys that were likely the predecessors of Yelp Wifi before they got
acquired: Turnstyle Analytics, solid Canadian company, good to seem them being
used.

------
joeblau
One thing I've noticed about my personal habits is that I use WiFi less and
less. WiFi is so horribly unreliable that I turn it off and use LTE. I'm sure
there is a segment of people who this would work great for, but after almost
every US carrier revamped their cell phone plans earlier this year to offer
unlimited data, I struggle to see this product's future.

------
ldom22
How is this done? You need to get a router from them? Or is it just software
and it works with some routers?

~~~
yurishimo
It’s probably a router that you add on to your existing infrastructure and
it’s managed remotely via some sort of API.

------
milofeynman
"Collect customer information" consensual or not?

~~~
GuiA
There’s certainly a small and beautifully designed “I have read the [terms and
conditions]” checkbox next to the field where you input your email (and no non
tech savvy user/lawyer has ever bothered to click those links)

------
warent
This makes a bit of sense. One can't help but wonder what all their
engineering resources have been going towards since Yelp and Eat24 are so
buggy and seem to be gradually getting worse. At least now there's an answer

~~~
spiznnx
I interned at Yelp twice and can tell you it was not this.

------
gkya
I've never used public Wi-Fi, and don't see why one would really want to, if
they have a data plan. If you don't watch videos outside, 2-4GB suffices
monthly (2GB monthly costs me ŧ27/~$6, with an educational discount, and I've
never used it all up). If you do video conferences outside, you probably would
have the income to buy a larger data plan. It's just not worth the risk. Maybe
things like Facebook consume people's data plans quickly so that they're
always looking to find free wifi?

~~~
autotune
If you work remote just doing things like using ssh, browsing web pages, and
using Spotify and the occasional YouTube vid can eat up more than 10 GB a
month. It's not hard to set up an OpenVPN server in AWS along with LetsEncrypt
and have a custom VPN to use to browse securely over public wifi. Now as for
speed and whether they block vpn ports or other ports needed to do your job,
is where I draw the line for pub wifi usage... actually probably wouldn't use
at DEF CON as well.

------
bogomipz
If the food and service are good I don't need an email to remind me to come
back.

You build customer loyalty by providing a consistently good dining experience.

We need less phones out at the dinner table not more.

------
scarface74
How often do you really need to connect to WiFi these days? The four major
wireless providers all offer "unlimited" data. T-mobile even has "unlimited"
3g tethering. I've gone over the prioritization limit plenty of times and not
seen a difference.

------
swhnorton
This is brilliant on Yelp's part. Surprised a POS system didn't already do
this, but I guess they have less to gain. I wonder what % of US consumers max
out their data plans in a month - that would give you an idea of what adoption
might look like.

------
evolve2k
Facebook wifi for business came to me as soon as I saw this.

Fb did this 4 years ago, lots of HN comments at the time:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7018811](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7018811)

------
chenzhekl
This is what WeChat has been doing in China for a long time.

------
gf263
Yelp with more unimaginative and useless software

------
dade_
I assume this is from the Turnstyle acquisition.

------
kevincox
> Your customers connect to your free WiFi with an email address, social media
> profile, or phone number.

fuckoff@example.com it is!

------
JoshMnem
It's a terrible idea. One shouldn't need to provide a personal identity to use
the Internet.

------
jeffehobbs
Nope Wifi.

------
thedevguy
Anyone wants to help me create LTE blocking wallpaper?

------
sigmonsays
yelp seems pretty thirsty, must to be doing so well. they're (the restaurant)
in the wrong business if they care about offering wifi instead of quality
service. I have zero interest is being contacted later for promotions or
loyalty.

------
alaskamiller
A me-too product in a crowded field. Based on other comments below it appears
to be a rebrand of a prior acquire, Turnstyle Analytics in this case.

Also, it's pretty clear based on these early comments that HN has a bunch of
people that never talked to or sold to a small business owner before and
empathize with their needs.

When you open up a QSR (quick service restaurant as compared to FSQ full
service restaurant) there's really only three strategies to build up your
initial customer base, one is using wifi as the honeypot.

The default would be to be just broadcast your business account cable or DSL
modem and call it a day. The nicer places have a Meraki, set up the captive
portal settings, and call it a day. The smart thing to do is to call Facebook
and setup a Facebook Wifi service account with them.

They set you up an account, you configure your router, then let Facebook lock
up your wifi in exchange for a like or to click the tiny dark patterned opt-
out link.

The store owner wins, they get exposure through Facebook with likes, Facebook
wins because they get more data points to track, and the customer wins in that
they get data access.

It's a simple idea and there are plenty of vendors that offers this to help
business owners not have to deal with the as-is software from equipment
vendors.

ZenReach.com is another solution provider that integrates multiple services to
make it so you mix and match to set up your own preferred workflow.

Yelp jumping in is to boost up their yelp ratings and reviews which in turn
boosts their value and extend their relationship with the store so that they
can push and upsell more services like local advertising, profile promotion,
or orders lead generation.

Lots of the shops will buy in, it's one less hassle out of a lot of hassles
they deal with day in and day out, and they might get more Yelp reviews and
Yelp stars? Yes, let's go.

The lifecycle for a product like this though is only 2 or 3 years. After two
or three years the shop owners smarten up and switch back to a custom branded
captive portal because after enough likes they don't want to keep feeding the
Facebook bottom line. But now they get to maybe boost up Yelp reviews and
ratings for awhile.

~~~
thanksgiving
Are you sure? I'm looking at my email inbox and saw an email from Pizza ranch.
When I went there the first time, they simply asked me if I'd like to give
them my email address. I gave them my email address. Easy enough. You don't
need to offer anything.

You can offer free WiFi if you like. You don't have to make it conditional to
this crap. Owners and management, if you're reading this: you don't need this.

------
radec
Gross

------
techsupporter
> Your customers connect to your free WiFi with an email address, social media
> profile, or phone number. [...] Target your customers with email and SMS
> promotions that are easy to build and keep customers coming back.

I'll just keep using my mobile provider's data service that I already pay for
anyway. More spam is exactly what I don't need in my life, ESPECIALLY not SMS
spam which has no effective filters or controls.

~~~
nafizh
This. The first thing that came to my mind. Most of the time, if a local wifi
login screen asks me to create an account, I just close it.

