Great execution, completely unethical
Density.io
31–40 of 189 posts
Re: Density.io
#32Risky. MAC address tracking is definitely a legal 'grey area' at the moment. I can imagine mining/fingerprinting in this way could easily become illegal in the not-to-distant future. In the UK, City of London already banned the wifi-enabled bins that were tracking MAC addresses. It would be really easy to tie a name to MAC address (from point of purchase with a credit card), then see exactly where that person went vi…
They didn't really "ban" anything. They just instructed the company that was hosting them to stop doing so, in the face of a media shitstorm. And since that company was also a licensee of the City, they saw it fit to do as told. A shop owner in the City can still do as they like. [source: I was doing other work for the bin company (renew) and saw the whole car crash from the inside]
You are of course quite right. It wasn't a ban in any legal sense. Though I do think it highlights that the method is already frowned upon... and as and when the public becomes more aware of the fact they are walking around broadcasting their location there will be more pressure to restrict the collection of the data.
That said. CCTV does not appear to be going anywhere, and there is very little difference between processing video footage to track people and tracking a MAC address. The only difference in this particular case is that 'sharing' of the data between retailers is touted as a feature (which of course it is).
Re: Density.io
#33Met these this last week, they're absolutely incredible and they understand their market really well. They take privacy incredibly seriously and they've built a product that can change the industry.
"They take privacy incredibly seriously" What does that even mean? They're tracking not only the number of people in a location, but where they go ... then sharing that with their customers. From their own website: Understand your business in the context of others: 1. Who you share customers with. 2. Where else your loyal customers love to go. 3. Where foot traffic in the city is trending. How is that respecting my p…
Definitely understand your concerns. In the system you're an anonymous datapoint. The information can't be used to determine who a specific individual is.
Re: Density.io
#34This is creepy. I will actively avoid stores that use this.
How will you know?
Re: Density.io
#35Met these this last week, they're absolutely incredible and they understand their market really well. They take privacy incredibly seriously and they've built a product that can change the industry.
"They take privacy incredibly seriously" What does that even mean? They're tracking not only the number of people in a location, but where they go ... then sharing that with their customers. From their own website: Understand your business in the context of others: 1. Who you share customers with. 2. Where else your loyal customers love to go. 3. Where foot traffic in the city is trending. How is that respecting my p…
You're just an anonymous datapoint in their system, and they've actually done a lot to make sure this always stays the case.
Re: Density.io
#36Definitely creepy.
Re: Density.io
#37Re: Density.io
#38If you have Wifi disabled on your device will they still be able to pull your MAC?
Re: Density.io
#39Re: Density.io
#40This is a privacy nightmare. Perhaps wifi devices should no longer provide constant MAC addresses....
What's the advantage to a constant MAC address anyway? There must be a reason for it, but my first reaction to this article was to see if I could change mine.
At the link level, your MAC is your unique address.
First: You do not want a MAC collision. I have worked with hardware that sometimes picked a non-unique MAC and your life gets really weird and sucks away a lot of debugging time to find out why impossible things are happening.
Continuing – It made ethernet easy to implement. They could have added some complicated address negotiation protocol and then handled address collisions when partitioned networks healed, but it was "olden times" and something that complicated would not have gained traction.
Fast forward to Wi-Fi. The reason you have Wi-Fi instead of any number of other wireless ideas that died is because it looks like ethernet so people didn't have to think much about it, so you inherit that baggage.
If you really want to change your MAC address then you will want to make sure you aren't going to collide with anyone else. The odds are tiny, but it would be rude to ruin their day. Fortunately, there is a locally administered range of MAC addresses. If your first octet's last digit is 2, 6, a, or e then you are a locally administered unicast address. Assuming your network segment doesn't have an administrator actively handing out local addresses, drop 56 random bits in the remaining octets, cross your fingers, and bring up your network stacks.