Just a Quarter of New York’s Wi-Fi Kiosks Are Up. Guess Where.

Yet the city has not verified that CityBridge is complying with the privacy piece of its franchise agreement. At a public hearing about the state’s proposed consumer privacy bill on Nov. 22, Assemblywoman Linda B. Rosenthal, a Democrat from Manhattan, asked Michael Pastor, general counsel of the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which oversees LinkNYC, about the kiosks. He said the city had not conducted a privacy audit of CityBridge, but that it would.

“It was kind of surprising,” Ms. Rosenthal said in an interview. “They had come there to say how important New Yorkers’ privacy and security was, but this could be a hole in that safety net.”

Daniel Schwarz, a privacy and technology expert for the New York Civil Liberties Union, said: “The LinkNYC model still lacks any adequate level of transparency and auditing. The public has a right to know more about the scale of data collection and how it will be used or shared once in the company’s hands.”

Of course, many companies openly harvest and sell user data. The difference, according to Schuyler Duveen, a programmer and a member of Rethink Link, is that in the LinkNYC project “the city is complicit.” Mr. Duveen called it a “Faustian bargain” if New Yorkers are “paying with their data” for free services.

It is not clear that New Yorkers are paying for Wi-Fi with their data. But LinkNYC deserves special attention before more kiosks come to immigrant neighborhoods and communities of color, said Ms. Gonzalez, the organizer. “We want more public oversight,” she said, “if they’re going to be on public streets.”

And what is clear is that the promise that brought kiosks into existence has not been fulfilled. Pay phones, which were to be replaced by kiosks, still litter the landscape, almost all of them unusable and stuffed with trash. And we still do not have municipal Wi-Fi.

Instead, around the city, I watched ads for “Frozen 2” and Dagne Dover handbags playing to empty streets in wealthy neighborhoods where the kiosks were barely noticed. Occasionally, I saw someone sleeping under one, or stooping over, speaking to a loved one far away in the glow of a screen.