171–180 of 189 posts
What is the percentage of people who always leave wifi enabled? I turn mine off every time I finish using it.
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I am confused where you are linking MAC addresses of phones with MAC addresses of home wireless routers.
Your devices broadcast the names of networks it has seen recently in frequent intervals. "Yo HomeWiFI you there" essentially. Anybody listening can then correlate them with Googles database to find out detailed information about the user. Usually people have a huge list of connected networks which will be announced and give huge information about the user. "MIT" SSID? Probably a student then.
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…
CSEC (Canada's NSA) caused a huge controvery for tracking MAC addresses of individuals from Airports to Coffee Shops/Libraries/any public wifi http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/csec-used-airport-wi-fi-to-t... They used the wifi purchase at the airport to ID the user. They are likely already vacuuming up MAC addresses everywhere they can.
Without wishing to belittle the privacy concerns of my fellow HNers, I wonder how long it will take for people to just be ok with being tracked in this way? This seems like one of those social changes that feels strange and uncomfortable at first, but over time becomes the accepted norm.
Commercial Wifi routers already do retail traffic analysis. https://meraki.cisco.com/blog/2013/12/get-a-visual-on-your-b... So people are probably already being tracked... and no one has noticed.
What do I need to do to build my own version of this device? Can I do it with any router? A Raspberry Pi?
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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/
I live in Houston and never knew how it worked. I assumed they only used the toll tags. It's actually not wifi, but rather bluetooth: http://traffic.houstontranstar.org/bluetooth/transtar_blueto... . I am not sure if the bluetooth radio on the phones uses a different MAC than the wifi radio.
What makes WiFi (currently) more relevant is more people leave it on. Likely to even out over time as more bluetooth devices are made commonplace.
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> The idea that MACs should be somehow private because someone found a novel use for them doesn't even pass the laugh test. IP addresses are not "private". Your face out in a public area is not "private" I think you might be misunderstanding the part of this I have a problem with, or perhaps my language wasn't explanatory enough. I have a problem with the company linking back this info to a specific person , not the…
>I think this activity should be regulated and should be an opt-in thing for users. I think any possible regulatory hurdles that could be imagined will make life for anyone who does anything neat with wifi or some other combination of information miserable. The credit card thing makes me wonder.. like what exactly are they grabbing? Just the fact that a card swipe was recorded at the same time that X wifi radio was i…
The goal is not individual (person) tracking. The goal is identifying and operationalizing trends at an location-specific and network level.
We encourage users worried about privacy to opt out. But realistically, they're not individuals to the system. They're part of a trend.
As long as we get a statistically relevant percentage of movement (15-20%) we believe we can still be useful to the business. Worst case: a lot of people opt out, we drop from our current 60-70% capture to 20-30% capture and we simply extrapolate the remainder.
It's an inexact science but, we believe, very useful.
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>I think this activity should be regulated and should be an opt-in thing for users. I think any possible regulatory hurdles that could be imagined will make life for anyone who does anything neat with wifi or some other combination of information miserable. The credit card thing makes me wonder.. like what exactly are they grabbing? Just the fact that a card swipe was recorded at the same time that X wifi radio was i…
To be clear, we're not collecting credit card data / swipes. Just anonymous movement. There's been some discussion about eventually using in-store payment systems with open API's to marry purchasing behavior to foot traffic >> but this wouldn't be tied to the individual. The goal is not individual (person) tracking. The goal is identifying and operationalizing trends at an location-specific and network level. We enco…
Best of luck!