Name and email, you say? Check out the form you need to fill in to use free wifi at Brazilian airports: http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Wi-Fi_and_Internet_se... They want your: name sex marital status nationality place of birth profession identity document type identity document number street address city state country cellular phone number name of cellular provider landline phone number email address barcode…
So they'd learn my name is Al Kapone, my nationality is the proud citizen of the glorious nation of Kazakhstan, my place of birth is the South Pole, my profession is a lion tamer and I live in 666 Fake Street, Garbadedataville. What they're going to do with this information?
unless Apple also decided to stop sending out the SSID list..
This only occurs for 'hidden' networks. If you do not have any hidden networks in your known network list than you will not be broadcasting SSIDs. This is yet another reason to avoid setting your AP to hidden.
>This only occurs for 'hidden' networks.
Incorrect, this occurs for all networks! I've had some fun with Wifi Pineapples before.
If this becomes the trend (which in my opinon would be nice) it will become a big problem for companies that specialise in customer tracking e.g. for supermarkets and big department stores. Previously it was quite easy to track a customer, how long he or she spends time in the store, which floors he or she visits, etc. by putting up dummy WiFI-networks that the customers phones find by giving out their MAC-addresses.
It's disturbingly creepy to think that stores would even think of doing this, but on the other hand it's also an indication of how clueless the general population is about the amount of identifiable data they're unconsciously "leaking" through personal, (nearly) always-on devices. My laptop is setup with a random MAC precisely to prevent this sort of tracking. Interestingly, the unbranded Android phones I have (one l…
It doesn't make much sense and looks utterly paranoid. To me, all this "privacy" thing looks more like a hype than something of real importance, and the companies like Apple are taking advantage of such a mentality. Suppose you operate a store, what would you want to do? Obviously collecting information to improve user experience is only natural. Put it this way: If, at the end of the shopping, somebody from the mall approaches you and asks you to fill out a survey about your shopping experience and what could be improved, would you comply? Probably one half of us will. Then why, a method which is not intrusive, does not take your precious time, and doesn't waste human resource on the part of the mall, would get such a strong reaction of yours? Is it really the "rationality" you boast? I totally doubt it. It's more likely pretensive overreaction.
> does that mean if one is to use a locally administered address a device is free to take whatever they please? I think those have traditionally been set by network admins, not randomly chosen by devices, but pretty much: nobody apart from local admin coordinates addresses with the local bit set. > What would be advantage of paying to the IEEE for a universally administered block? The promise that no device built by…
Legit devices have had duplicate Mac addresses even though they're not supposed to. In practice a totally random MAC is probably safer than the one assigned to a cheap network card.
Speaking of practice, I've found recently this: "Five thin client machines with same MAC Address?" ( http://superuser.com/q/760238/2357 )