Marriot Serves Unsavory WiFi Dish Garnished With Own Ads

Justin Watt, a Web developer,  while staying at the Times Square Marriot Courtyard discovered to his chagrin, that the hotel’s Internet service, for which incidentally he was paying $16.95, was secretly inserting lines of code, using JavaScript injection, into every page he visited.

This could potentially allow them to serve ads into any of the websites that he and other guests to the hotel visited. Watt, himself a computer expert, with a background in developing Web advertizing tools, felt that it was an unethical practice. What made them even more unethical was that they would be there without the knowledge of the person visiting the site, nor the page’s creator.

Mr. Watt wrote about it in his blog and that generated a discussion that questioned the ethics of such a technique. One participant described it as “icky” whilst another questioned, “Why aren’t they putting ads in my pillow?”

Mr. Watt strongly expressed suspicions and said in an interview that he had never seen an Internet provider modifying Web pages that a person visits. “Imagine the U.S.P.S., or FedEx, for that matter, opening your Amazon boxes and injecting ads into the packages,” he said.

Online critics say that it was the principle of the whole thing that was disturbing. It would not only deny the content creators revenue, their own ads could even be blocked, to make space for ads that they wanted to show. Mr. Watt said, “Imagine the hotel delivering complimentary issues of The New York Times to every room, except some articles have been accidentally blacked out, all the ads have been cut out, and on every page there’s a new ad that’s been stuck on top.”

In an attempt to diffuse an embarrassing situation, Marriott International said they had disabled the feature at two New York hotels, the Courtyard Marriott on W.40^th Street as well as the Residence Inn on the Avenue of the Americas.

The company claimed ignorance of the ad-serving practice and stressed that the security of people’s data was not at risk. They said that investigations that they had immediately initiated revealed that “unbeknownst to the hotel, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) was utilizing functionality that allowed advertising to be pushed to the end user.”

It appears that the ISP was culpable for using a tool from RG Nets called a “Revenue Extraction Gateway,” which is specifically designed to generate income from showing ads to users of free Wi-Fi access points. The ISP has assured the hotel that the service has been disabled.

Marriot reiterated that this was done without their knowledge and that they do not condone such practices. The company assured that they would continue to look into the matter. Moreover, they would apprise their hotels of the hotel’s high-speed Internet policies.

The discovery and subsequent withdrawal of the service, gives the benefit of the doubt to the hotel. However, since the service was not free, the hotel is guilty of providing a service, knowingly or unknowingly, that could generate it revenue. The visitor is entitled to an unencumbered browsing experience. It would certainly be unethical or off-center to deny him that right.