A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)
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Re: A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)
#2> A probe packet contains the MAC address as well as the list of all the past Wi-fi networks that your device has tried to join before, which can reveal a lot about you!
Generally, most modern devices send broadcast/wildcard probes precisely to avoid leaking the PNL. From what I know, directed probes are only sent for hidden APs.
Re: A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)
#3Surprisingly milquetoast list given the title
Re: A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)
#4> A probe packet contains the MAC address as well as the list of all the past Wi-fi networks that your device has tried to join before, which can reveal a lot about you! Generally, most modern devices send broadcast/wildcard probes precisely to avoid leaking the PNL. From what I know, directed probes are only sent for hidden APs.
Correct. All major OSes stopped broadcasting the preferred SSID list by 2017, with Android and Linux being the last. Apple stopped in 2014. Windows by 2009.
Re: A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)
#5Surprisingly milquetoast list given the title
They clearly have an agenda, but also openly acknowledge that public surveillance is a two sided coin, balancing public safety and convenience with privacy. Some of the risks they identify are real, but others are unabashedly exaggerated.
Re: A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)
#6[deleted]
Re: A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)
#7> A probe packet contains the MAC address as well as the list of all the past Wi-fi networks that your device has tried to join before, which can reveal a lot about you! Generally, most modern devices send broadcast/wildcard probes precisely to avoid leaking the PNL. From what I know, directed probes are only sent for hidden APs.
And most modern devices randomize MAC addresses ("Wi-Fi addresses" in Apple-ese, for probably obvious reasons) between networks, and even between broadcasts/connections to the same network.
Re: A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)
#8Based on context on their site, this looks like it was generated in ~2019 from data gathered before that, and some stuff in it is out of date as other comments mention.
Re: A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)
#9[dead]
Re: A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)
#10I wonder what they mean by this?
> The camera can have different ways of seeing encoded in it, including kinds of gazes that enforce social agreements about what kinds of behavior and people are considered “normal”
The phrase "kinds of gazes" strikes me as the sort of thing that's only going to make sense to people trained in a very particular and idiosyncratic flavor of ethical critique. What a normal person sees here is, "These cameras can detect if people are acting bizarre and dangerous," which is probably something most people would appreciate. In Seattle, the problem, of course, is that the streets are full of people acting bizarre and dangerous, it doesn't take a camera network to find them, and the police seem to be under strict orders not to do anything about it.