AUSTIN, Texas — A charitable marketing program that paid homeless people to carry Wi-Fi signals at the tech-and-entertainment conference South by Southwest has drawn widespread debate. BBH Labs gave 13 people from Austin’s Front Steps Shelter mobile Wi-Fi devices and T-shirts that announced “I’m a 4G hotspot.” The company paid them $20 upfront and a minimum of $50 a day for about six hours’ work, said Emma Cookson, chairwoman of BBH New York.
She called the experiment a modernized version of homeless people selling newspapers on the street. But many have called the program exploitative. wrote that it “sounds like something out of a darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia.” Technology blog ReadWriteWeb called it a “blunt display of unselfconscious gall.” The topic became one of the most popular in the country on Twitter by Tuesday.
