Is it helpful to use the homeless as a walking broadband connection?

Among the attendees of South by Southwest in Austin are a smattering of homeless people wearing T-shirts that proclaim “I am a 4G hotspot,” and for a user donation one of them will stand next to you while you check your email or do whatever else you need with the connection.

Read Write Web has a good story outlining the “social experiment” by BBH-Labs. I ran across one of these personal hot spots and, like the folks in the RWW story, couldn’t imagine it was real. So when I ran across these stories this morning, I was struck by a bolt of recognition and disgust. I don’t care if it’s a “social experiment,” as BBH claims, or akin to the sales of street newspapers in cities such as Seattle or San Francisco; it strikes me as exploitive. As a social experiment to render the homeless less invisible, it succeeded, but most of the attention will be directed to the agency that created this program as opposed to the problem of homelessness in Austin. Plus, given the lack of obvious planning and spending from the agency ahead of this “experiment,” it seems more like a stunt, albeit well-intentioned, than like anything that rises to the level of an experiment.