131–140 of 189 posts
This is a privacy nightmare. Perhaps wifi devices should no longer provide constant MAC addresses....
Or rename "Airplane mode" to "Shopping mode"
But would that even be the end of it? With Wifi off the phone is still broadcasting on cellular channels. Could a device be built that listened to those signals and uniquely identify them?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
... or you could just alter your MAC address to something non personally identifiable (00:00:00....) ... possibly rotating random ones, or whatever. The point is, this is trivially defeated without turning wifi off.
Relevant: http://xkcd.com/1105/
Why are posts allowed that just have the site's URL as the entire post title?
The post title is the same as the page title, which is what you're expected to submit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
City of Houston does MAC address tracking on the freeways and surface streets to power their traffic tracking measures. It's probably used in hundreds of other places you haven't thought about. If you're concerned about your privacy just turn wifi off. http://traffic.houstontranstar.org/layers/
Does this still work when you disable wifi on your phone?
This is a privacy nightmare. Perhaps wifi devices should no longer provide constant MAC addresses....
Risky. 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…
City of Houston does MAC address tracking on the freeways and surface streets to power their traffic tracking measures. It's probably used in hundreds of other places you haven't thought about. If you're concerned about your privacy just turn wifi off. http://traffic.houstontranstar.org/layers/
This is a privacy nightmare. Perhaps wifi devices should no longer provide constant MAC addresses....
I'm confused why it's a privacy nightmare. They could just as easily sit someone there and count how many people are in a store and write it down. Your face is an identifier. I don't get why people think that anything technological anymore is instantly privacy nightmare. For an often technological website there is so much technophobia.
Also in terms of cost, there's a difference between tracking which imposes a marginal human cost of production versus tracking which can be fully automated by machine, even if there is still a per-machine cost.
A relevant example is the Supreme Court ruling on needing a warrant for using a GPS tracker on a car versus just tailing them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only value they offer is violating people's privacy. I don't think reading a value being freely broadcast by a person in your building is an invasion of privacy, how is this any different from having security cameras with audio or anything else. Saying you have privacy to something you are broadcasting in public, even more specifically in this case a privately owned building is a little daft. Do you think it's…
If I enter Starbucks I indeed expect that everyone around knows about it. I don't expect that some system will store this information and will be able to associate it with my other activities.