Time to build a device that pollutes the databases with useless data.
Density.io
61–70 of 189 posts
Re: Density.io
#62I'm seeing people talking about MAC address issues. But how does this device work exactly? Is every phone throwing around a mac address, even if it's not trying to connect to wifi? For example I have my phone set to use 3G expect on my home network. Would I count?
If wifi is enabled, your device is still constantly searching for your home AP. That reveals your MAC address.
Re: Density.io
#63I'm seeing people talking about MAC address issues. But how does this device work exactly? Is every phone throwing around a mac address, even if it's not trying to connect to wifi? For example I have my phone set to use 3G expect on my home network. Would I count?
I'm making an assumption about your phone, but it is probably broadcasting packets every now and then saying "Hello, is mrfusion's home network in range?" - and that packet has your MAC on it, and can be picked up by other devices.
Re: Density.io
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
I can confirm. Working with a bunch of Chinese hardware with non-unique MAC addresses is painful. It was easier to buy new NICs with real serial numbers than to work out how to fix them.
Re: Density.io
#65Risky. 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.
Re: Density.io
#66Keep in mind that these "anonymous" data points aren't. Your phones MAC address exposes your home wifi network thanks to Google's databases. They also expose where you work, where your friends houses are, what your favorite coffee shop is. This is beyond dangerous, it's completely unacceptable.
Re: Density.io
#67I'm OK with the measuring traffic volumes using this method but I'm uncomfortable with the identifying information being stored without permission.
If they provided incentives to install an app/visit a website to register for rewards or be entered into a prize in return for allowing density.io to track you that would be acceptable.
Re: Density.io
#68Did I miss something with the video? It plays an interview between pg and Calacanis that's 2 hours long.
#t=4198s
Re: Density.io
#69Shouldn't something like Leap Motion be able to do this (for one store at least) and without the privacy concerns?
Re: Density.io
#70This idea is cool, but there are some issues with their privacy claim. They say they are hashing the MAC address (presumably on the device). However, they can't be salting the hash (else they wouldn't be able to match across different stores). Since there is no salt (or a fixed salt), it is trivial to de-anonymise a specific MAC address (just hash it and see if any server has it). Worse, there are only 46 bits that a…
why not salt and store the salt with the hash?