Building a Smart City? Consider Porn and Privacy

New York City’s experiment to let people browse the internet from public terminals on city streets has ended, at least for now. The operator of the terminals said Sept. 14 it was removing their web browsing capabilities, saying people were monopolizing the kiosks and using them to look at content that wasn’t appropriate for public viewing.

The setback speaks to how difficult it is to create a new form of privately run digital infrastructure in the country’s biggest city.

View of Lower Manhattan in aerial photographs in New York, U.S., on Friday, June 19, 2015.

Photographer: Craig Warga/Bloomberg

The project, known as LinkNYC, began four years ago when the city government asked for proposals to re-imagine its pay phones. Demand had dropped, and many of the phones had been ...