Some cafes have the shitty practice of imposing a captive portal for Internet access. Sometimes they demand personal information, and sometimes the captive portal discriminates against people with older phones.
Currently these cafes have the field “Internet access: customers”. That’s misleading and unjustly described. Some of them should be tagged with “Internet access: only for customers with new phones”. It’s not really fair to say it’s for all customers when they use exclusive technology.
Yeah, it would not be trivial to establish a thorough criteria that covers all variables which mappers would then pay attention to. It would be more sensible to simply have a flag that says “dysfunctional for old phones” and if any device cannot connect due to being too old, it should be sufficient to set the flag.
There are countless ways incompetent IT folks can fuck up Internet service for the general public. It would be unsurmountable to catalog all such foolish/elitist implementations. But some of the info can be automated. A mapper who is at a location could run a tool that does a wifi scan. The mapper could select the relevant SSID for the establishment, and some basic info could be captured just from that: WEP/WPA/open… and if open then presence of a captive portal could be auto detected.
If such an tool were made to improve maps, it could also double as enriching a DB for navigation use (for those who navigate offline and/or refuse Google location tracking).
No. Thanks for reminding me. I was planning to crosspost there.