I found this in the Fulton St Subway station attached on an entrance terminal.
I believe it’s an NFC reader so that you’d be able to use the metro card right from your phone. I think it exists for ease of our use from our phones that we’re addicted to, so now instead of fumbling through our pocket to swipe and missing the swipe the first couple of times, you could just tap your phone and keep walking, the other reason is it’s one less thing that we’d waste. It’s digital so they’d be able to print a lot less metro cards so that’s great.
This was a vending machine in one of the school buildings. On its keypad it had “waiting for cell connection” and that had tempted me to look into it more. I think I found a cell antenna on top of it that’s used for the payment connection. I was actually really surprised that it said cell connection and not connected to a local WiFi network. That may be because of the security concerns? I believe this exists so we can start moving to be cardess, as carrying cash isn’t as big of a thing as it used to be. I think there’d be better less wasteful ways to achieve this and I’m not convinced we actually need it.
The last one I found was in my friends apartment it was their keypad to ring me up. It sent a live video feed of me up and then they could let me into the apartment without coming down. I thought this was interesting internet connected device because most apartments don’t have that. It exists to make us even more lazy to let the food delivery person in or our friends. 
