Summer is coming and festivals for food, beer, music and more are starting. During a festival, people are willing to share their emotions and their experiences through social media and update their friends about the concert, the food, the movie or whatever.

Providing a free Wi-Fi connection is a great opportunity for you to get a higher visibility on social media, promote services and future events  and to increase your database. It is also a very good opportunity for the festival’s sponsor to promote their own products!

Usually, people are enthusiast about the festival, and so they are highly motivated to share contents with their friends on social media. By providing free access to a Wi-Fi network, you are sure to answer the needs of hundreds of people and to take full advantage of this audience.
The best option when deploying a WLAN for a festival is to enable the social login for users, to allow them to authenticate directly through their social media profile.
Faster and easier than fulfilling a form, the social login will also allow you to collect a lot of data about Wi-Fi users such as name, surname, age, gender, location and so on. Moreover, if you enable the Facebook login, you will also collect verified email addresses.

Below, you can see a simple login page will social login: Tanaza enables social login through the most famous applications like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter that are, according to us, the most useful for this kind of event.

You may also consider using the login page to promote services and products. For example, you could add a link to a taxi application and incentivize  people to download and use it (Uber, Heetch, Taxi Blu…).

If it’s relevant to the event, you can also display advertisements before and/or during the login process from the festival itself or from its sponsors.. Ads can be images of videos, for example you could  add rotating logos of the festival sponsors, names of the artists….possibilities are many, and results are huge!

If it’s a music event, you may even embed a Spotify widget within the login page, or a link to a music downloading platform like iTunes or Google music.

Consider that more than 85% of the public might access your free Wi-Fi network during the event, which represents an important amount of new leads and contacts.

Benefits of Wi-Fi for festivals are:

• Increase your visibility on social media by asking a Like or a Check-in on the festival Facebook Page
• Take advantage of the word of mouth thanks to shared contents on social media and get more and more visitors the next time and awareness about the event
• Create targeted email campaign by sending newsletters about similar future events

You can analyze this data thanks to the Tanaza dashboard and its intuitive graphics. It allows you to segment and filter your contacts, create lists of contacts and export them to the Mailchimp connector integrated to Tanaza. With Mailchimp, you will be able to easily create newsletters and send automatic email to your lists.

If you are an event organizer, a marketing agency or a Wi-Fi solution provider, consider that customers attending summer event may consider Wi-Fi a needed facility in the venue. One example is the Coachella festival in the United-States that deployed a big Wi-Fi area for its visitors, offered by Netflix.

Let’s find out in this article the most common liabilities public hotspot providers face on their open Wi-Fi networks and how to prevent them effectively.

Nowadays, an increasing number of businesses located in public areas, such as restaurants, hotels, coffee shops and shopping centers, provide free Wi-Fi as a way to attract more customers and increase their revenues. In doing so, it is important to be aware of the legal risks network admins run when operating open networks, and how to limit or prevent them.

1. Copyright infringement

Till not long ago, copyright violations have been the most frequent issues Wi-Fi hotspot providers could face. Indeed, it is very common for users to download movies, videos, music and other copyrighted material on their personal devices, violating in this way the online copyright laws. Until recently, as it is in general very hard to detect the person responsible for an infringement, it was much more likely that copyright holders tracked and took actions directly against the Wi-Fi hotspot provider offering internet connection to customers. Nevertheless, things changed at least at European level, following the 2010 German case that saw Tobias Mc Fadden, who provided public Wi-Fi in his shop, being sued by Sony for a copyright infringement committed on his free Wi-Fi network. In the end, the Federal Court of Justice agreed that Wi-Fi hotspot providers are not liable for copyright infringements run on their open networks by third parties. A valuable strategy to prevent copyright infringements is to deploy a web content filter, a software tool that screens content and restricts the range of websites and domains users can access while browsing the internet. The cloud-based content filter provided by Tanaza, for instance, allows Wi-Fi hotspot providers to easily block inappropriate content by selecting a list of blocked websites or customizing their own one. In this way, the risk of copyright violations can be successfully reduced.

2. Cybercrimes

Many are the illegal activities that nowadays expose Wi-Fi hotspot providers to more severe legal risks than copyright infringement. For instance, hackers could leak information about systems while connected to your network, at the same time, malicious users could use your network to access prohibited materials, such as child pornography, to purchase illegal drugs online or to sell items of contraband. Even in this case, you can effectively protect your open Wi-Fi network by setting up the Tanaza’s content filtering tool. In fact, the Tanaza built-in web content filter not only monitors and controls user traffic in local public areas with Wi-Fi, but it also blocks countries at risk of viruses and hacker threats to ensure a better protection. Furthermore, it avoids access to prohibited sites and blocks illegal as well as unwanted websites. In this way, for instance, users won’t be able to access pornography nor violent content from Google search results.

3. Personal data disclosure

Wi-Fi hotspot providers collect personal data for statistics or to run personalized marketing campaigns every time users connect to their networks. In general, indeed, it is necessary to provide some information in order to access a public network, i.e. email address, telephone number, birthday, etc. In doing so, public hotspot providers are required to use user personal information in compliance with the law, respecting the principles of the Data Protection Act 1998 regarding privacy and data disclosure. For this purpose, in order to operate their open networks respecting the law, Wi-Fi hotspot providers in EU should include terms and conditions on their login page, which explain what data will be collected and how it will be used. For instance, Tanaza features flexible terms and conditions on its built-in captive portal, by allowing network admins to make the acceptance of some parts compulsory – i.e. terms and conditions related to Wi-Fi usage – and other optional – i.e. terms and conditions to agree on receiving promotional materials or newsletters. If you want to know how to configure the flexible terms and conditions provided by Tanaza appropriately, read these instructions.