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Londoners Tracked By Advertising Firm's Trash Cans
schwit1 asks "How can I automatically have my wi-fi turn off when I leave the house unless I specifically turn it back on?" and provides this excerpt from Wired to illustrate why that would be useful: "Hundreds of thousands of pedestrians walking past 12 locations unknowingly had the unique MAC address of their smartphones recorded by Renew London. Data including the "movement, type, direction, and speed of unique devices" was recorded from smartphones that had their Wi-Fi on. First reported by Quartz, the data gathering appears to be a Minority Report-esque proof-of-concept project, demonstrating the possibility for targeted personal advertising. 'It provides an unparalleled insight into the past behavior of unique devices — entry/exit points, dwell times, places of work, places of interest, and affinity to other devices — and should provide a compelling reach data base for predictive analytics (likely places to eat, drink, personal habits etc.),' reads a blog post on the company's site. In tests running between 21-24 May and 2-9 June, over 4 million events were captured, with over 530,000 unique devices captured. Further testing is taking place at sites including Liverpool Street Station." (The name sounds a bit like a government project, but Renew London is actually an advertising / marketing firm.)
The 802.11 protocol does not require cell phones to broadcast their MAC addresses. Phones do it so that they can discover nearby networks faster, but it is completely optional.
There needs to be an update to iOS and Android that gives users the option to disable this feature (I can't remember the official name). Users should understand that it will take longer to find access points, but in exchange, they get vastly increased privacy.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Former is free and can do what you need, latter costs a few bucks but is apparently far more versatile.
This is for Android, of course.
If you're carrying a cell phone around, you might as well surrender any idea that your movements are not being tracked by 3rd parties without your knowledge or consent. Retailers like Target are installing ANPR systems in surveillance cameras, their wifi routers are already watching for probe attempts from cell phones as a way of monitoring where you are in the store (how long did you spend in the women's section? Where on the floor did you stop to look at advertising?) and modules are also installed to track cell phone transmissions and ESNs to uniquely identify customers at checkout (you use a credit card, and now your ESN is linked to your name)...
Trash cans are watching you. Buses are equipped with similar sensors. If you are carrying a cell phone, someone, somewhere, knows exactly where you are and is going to sell this information. You are not carrying a cell phone these days: You're carrying a tracking beacon with two-way communication capability.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Isnt there something like aircracks airbase that could be run nearby that would make this data useless? Something that just spits out mac addresses at random for the system to pickup?
The 802.11 protocol does not require cell phones to broadcast their MAC addresses. Phones do it so that they can discover nearby networks faster, but it is completely optional.
Except, of course, that it does. In order to associate to an access point, you have to send your MAC address. It's sortof how packet-switched networks operate: It needs a source and destination. What you're talking about is a Probe request, a special type of packet when a station needs to obtain information from another station. This other station is typically an AP, but not necessarily.
Any connection made over wifi needs to broadcast a probe frame, and these are by definition unencrypted. Any station on the same channel can see them. Thus the only way to prevent broadcasting your MAC address is to disable wifi entirely. It is in no way "optional" for connecting to another wifi network, and many cell phone users want this functionality because auto-connecting to unsecured wifi allows for data transmission without incurring fees from their provider. The iPhone, for example, can receive OTA updates via open wifi, as can Android.
They aren't doing it solely to "discover nearby networks faster"; It actually saves the user money.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
How ARE those Dockers working out for you?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
If you have Android, Tasker works great for this sort of thing. Simply set it up to trigger a profile based on your GPS location.
What he meant was "The 802.11 protocol does not require cell phones to broadcast their MAC addresses when disconnected from an AP" Sure you need to send the MAC address to connect - he knows that. You don't need to send anything if you don't want to connect. It's not hard to write an app that turns off wifi outside of particular physical area. That addresses the concern they're talking about. They don't care about background data usage on the phone when they're not using it.
If you want to screw with them, do it the legal way.
1. Get netbook.
2. Harvest the MAC addresses of phones nearby as you travel.
3. Broadcast the usual queries, but spoofing the harvested MACs and ESSID lists.
Thus their marketting database is swiftly polluted and becomes much less valuable.
Saying people want to auto-connect to unsecured wifi networks is like saying people want to be able to drive at 150 mph. Yeah everyone would like to do it, but they realize it's such a stupid thing to do that almost nobody willingly does so. A random unsecured wifi net in a public area is the perfect setup for a man-in-the-middle attack to harvest your email and bank login and passwords. At a minimum, automatically connecting to them should be disabled by default on all devices, and preferably there should be no way to enable such a "feature".
If you want to connect to an unsecured wifi network, you should have to make a conscious decision and take a deliberate action to do it. Auto-connecting to them is colossally stupid. So there is no need for your phone to be automatically scanning wifi nets in a manner which exposes its MAC address. If you find yourself in a random location and would like to manually connect to an open wifi net which you feel you can trust, then the phone should give up its MAC address.
If a probe request to identify nearby wifi nets requires a MAC address, that's a deficiency in the wifi handshaking standard IMHO. The phone should generate a random one just for that probe request to bypass that deficiency.
I use Tasker for this. My profile is set up so that when I'm paired with any of the cell towers near my house it will enable WiFi and try to connect to my home network. Tasker costs $3 and setting up this sort of config shouldn't take more than an hour.
The app also has a billion other uses. When I'm at work my phone will automatically be silenced, and when I plug in headphones my music player opens and my volume is set properly.
Talkie Toaster: I have a third question; a sensible question. A question that will tax your new IQ to its very limits and stretch the sinews of your intellect to bursting point.
Holly: This is going to be about waffles, isn't it?
Talkie Toaster: Certainly not. And I resent the implication that I am a one-dimensional, bread-obsessed, electrical appliance.
Holly: I apologize Toaster. What is your question?
Talkie Toaster: OK, here is my question: Given that God is infinite, and the universe is also infinite, would you like a toasted teacake?
Captcha: appetite
one in wallet / car to turn wifi off
one by front door / hall table to wifi on
The 802.11 protocol does not require cell phones to broadcast their MAC addresses. Phones do it so that they can discover nearby networks faster, but it is completely optional.
Except, of course, that it does. In order to associate to an access point, you have to send your MAC address. [...]
To discover a nearby access point 802.11 only requires that you listen for the broadcast.
To connect to it, yes, you need to exchange MAC addresses - but this is only required if you actually want to connect to the AP.
The GP is correct, actively throwing your MAC address around to networks you have no desire to connect to is not required by the protocol and should be disabled by default.
Now, if your phone wants to go whoring around with every open AP just to save on wireless data transfer, that's a different problem...
Probably also something that should be disabled by default.
Several airports in Europe are using the same non-associating probe technique to figure out if enough security lines are open. By knowing the time from pre to post security location of a MAC address, they can tell how well traffic is flowing. Since people beyond security, on average, spend several Euros per minute, it is better for the airport to minimize the security delay. Good for passengers too.
Saying people want to auto-connect to unsecured wifi networks is like saying people want to be able to drive at 150 mph. Yeah everyone would like to do it, but they realize it's such a stupid thing to do that almost nobody willingly does so.
Driving at 150 MPH is legal in many areas. The Autobahn, Montana during the day... And it's not stupid. As well, they're going considerably faster than 150 MPH with their phones; They're going at 670,616,629 mph.
A random unsecured wifi net in a public area is the perfect setup for a man-in-the-middle attack to harvest your email and bank login and passwords.
Find me a bank or online retailer that allows financial accounting data to be submitted over insecure connections instead of SSL. I can wait.
Auto-connecting to them is colossally stupid.
So is carrying a cell phone in public, according to some. People don't have to use military-grade encryption to browse wikipedia; There's plenty of things that open wifi is good for, even if it can be monitored. And if you're that worried about it, download Tor for Android (Orbit) or the iPhone and proxy everything through that.
Plenty of people want to make internet available to the general public for free; You know, that whole "Share and share alike" thing that we learned as kindergarners and then promptly forgot as adults as we all adopted the "what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable" stance.
If a probe request to identify nearby wifi nets requires a MAC address, that's a deficiency in the wifi handshaking
standard IMHO.
I think I'll stick with what the IEEE working group came up with, which included Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, and dozens of independent network engineers over your "humble opinion", thanks. But if you can figure out a way to transfer data over a packet-based network without a source and destination in the header, I am quite certain the IEEE would give you a free membership and plane rides and hotel rooms for all their meetings to explain your new protocol.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The Globally-Unique MAC addresses seem to be a pretty blatant security and tracking problem. I've been increasingly wondering why we don't simply start randomizing the MAC address every time the device is turned on, or perhaps even randomizing it for each new connection.
Yes, in principle this could result in a random address collision between two devices. However MACs are 48 bits... this means you'd need to have over 16 million devices simultaneously connected to the same access point before there's a substantial chance of two of them randomly colliding. I'd call that a rather pretty negligible trade off to obtain some privacy and security. And if one device does detect a MAC collision it could simply re-randomize.
As for additional "security risks" of randomizing MAC addresses, not really. It's already trivially easy for someone to deliberately fake your MAC address on their own device. So no new threat there. If anything, I think randomizing (and regularly re-randomizing) the MAC address would be a security benefit. If someone does deliberately fake your MAC address, the target lock is neutralized when your device re-randomizes.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Thus their marketting database is swiftly polluted and becomes much less valuable.
Cache poisoning is hardly a new thing... the problem is very few people have the money or resources to do it along with the technical expertise and desire. Since so few people do it, this would accomplish next to nothing; In just a few days, several million entries were gathered from these devices. You travelling around might hit .01% of the available contact points. Now, if I could clone a thousand of you and randomly space them about in the target area, maybe it'd be enough to render the data integrity suspect. But I highly doubt that there's a thousand people willing to buy netbooks and engage in such activity in any given geographically bound area that size. I doubt there's even 20 people in these neighborhoods that have the technical expertise to understand and impliment such a tactic.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Most people "need" less access to the internet and start paying attention to reality.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Montana now has a day time speed limit (and has since 1999):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_States#No_speed_limit
Thank you for understand exactly what I was trying to say. However, it's not necessary to disable wifi completely. Instead, the phone should just not send any probe requests, and it should not automatically connect to an insecure network that it has never seen before.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Germany here. You have to be stupid to drive 250 km/h on a public road. Take your toys to a racetrack, not the autobahn. Sorry for your small penis.
It doesn't even have to go that far if you don't want. Just passively listen for known APs and only connect to those. Then add something friendly like a "look for WiFi" button to send out a probe when the user actively wants to connect to something and no known APs are broadcasting beacons.
I love how ignorant slashmods keep marking this as 'troll' while others who actually understand networking keep marking it informative. Sadly, the technical proficiency of people on this site continues to track lower month over month since the Dice takeover.
Now people who suggest that the people who designed the internet might have known what they are doing are moderated down while the paranoid tin foil hat crowd gets modded up for suggesting that changing the protocol is a simple handwave and people with decades of experience in this sort of thing are incompetent...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
No protocols have to be changed, and none of your posts are informative (at least not on this article). It's so simple and obvious that you don't have to broadcast to listen.
Amazingly though, in order to find out if the network can actually route to the internet, which is what the station is trying to find out... you have to associate to the AP. As well, many people disable SSID broadcasting, necessitating probes to determine if that network is actually present.
It's so simple and obvious!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Obviously risk increases with speed but this can and is mitigated by preparations like other travellers expecting it and the driver, the car and road being fit for purpose.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
You're both right, a little at least. It's perfectly safe to connect to whatever random wifi you run across and use it in the sense it's intended, in the case that you are absolutely certain anything important is actually being encrypted at the application layer where it should be.
For most people, in the real world, they have no idea. Application programmers seem to do a really lousy job of it (as in usually dont even try) so it's certainly not safe to assume. Probably smarter in many cases simply to set your phone to only connect to networks you program it specifically to connect to. And encrypt them, so they cannot be trivially spoofed.
IF they are actually broadcasting their MAC when NOT attempting to connect to a network, that would be a bug to stomp. But I am pretty sure that part was just GPs ignorance.
And, btw, you SHOULD use encryption to browse wikipedia. You should, in fact, use HTTPS Everywhere and attempt to encrypt every single piece of data that is sent out, redundantly. This is because if you only encrypt things that you are worried about being seen, the encryption is suspicious in and of itself, and anyone investigating you for any reason (even just 'because your traffic passed our sniffer') is going to at least see exactly the data they are looking for, they will see the endpoints even if they cannot break the encryption. That 'meta data' may be more valuable than the encrypted message itself.
So if you want digital privacy, dont just encrypt important documents. Encrypt every single thing you can, and encourage others to do the same. An internet where only super-sekrit documents are sent encrypted is a fertile environment for snoops. One where the amount of traffic that is encrypted at the application level already nears 100% may be the only way to regain the privacy that we have lost in the digital era - and it certainly cannot hurt.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Just use Llama if you have an Android phone:
Llama - Location Profiles
It's totally amazing. I use it to turn off WiFi when I leave the house and turn it back on when arrive at work.
It listens for the network SSID. Silently, in some cases.
Have gnu, will travel.
Find me a bank or online retailer that allows financial accounting data to be submitted over insecure connections instead of SSL. I can wait.
It doesn't matter what the bank or retailer gets the data over, it matters what your phone sends it over. All too often people start browsing from an insecure entry point and only later move to a secure part of a site. This allows the MITM to change links or redirects in the insecure part and hence get the user to either enter their authentication details unencrypted or get them to enter them encrypted but to a domain the attacker controls (and therefore has a "legitimate" certificate for).
Plus ssl isn't as secure as people might like to think, for example apparently there were CAs out there who would still sign certs using md5 after md5 collision attacks became feasible allowing attackers to get themselves a cert with CA powers that was trusted by browsers*. There have also been recent attacks on SSL itself, and attacks on the way browsers combine compression with ssl.
* http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I'd love to see activists "recycle' some iron oxide and aluminum powder in these fuckers.
I'm about ready for some real action in response to the marketing-scum and paranoid guberments sweeping away our right to privacy *frowns*
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
Are you actually using the GPS, or you just have it switched on? On my Android phone, there is no difference in battery usage whether it is switched on or off. I know this, because Android disabled the ability for applications to switch the GPS on/off in an update, to prevent tracking behind your back, so the rules I had set up to disable GPS unless I was in my car stopped working, and battery life was surprisingly not affected. Since then, I haven't bothered turning it off. But run a navigation app, which is actually using the GPS actively, and the battery goes way down. Partly this is due to the 3D graphics, but the battery drains faster than any game drains it so the GPS is contributing a good amount.
You can go further and (as some phones do) prompt the user with "wifi base stations available; do you want to try to connect" when you see unknown APs. This can still be implemented without sending out any signal.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
That these speeds are an everyday event doesn't mean the people doing 250km/h on public roads aren't idiots. The Autobahn is designed for 130km/h and even a tiny bump can send you flying off if you drive 250km/h. There's no warning and no way to see a bump like that in time. So yes, obviously the risk increases, and that means you should take your toys to the racetrack, which is a road "fit for purpose" and, more importantly, not full of people who are endangered by your reckless behavior. Personally I think that someone who believes that 250km/h is acceptable on a public road lacks the necessary judgment and is unfit to drive at any speed.
"I'd buy that for a dollar".
Llama for Android is even free.
bickerdyke
This article actually starts as a question, but there are only a few posts addressing practical ways to deal with it. I for one use Smart Wifi Toggler on Android. It decides when to switch on Wifi based on cell tower locations. I use it mainly because it saves some battery.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Driving at 150 MPH is legal in many areas. The Autobahn, Montana during the day... And it's not stupid.
Sorry, unless you are a professional racing driver with lightning reactions, driving at 150MPH is always stupid. And even if you are a racing driver, on public roads you can never anticipate what unexpected thing the driver next to you may do. At 150 MPH your safe margin of error is zero. Happy to put your life in their hands? Happy to risk the life of everyone about you?
But back on topic; the idea of not automatically connecting to every network available is sound. Even if you aren't logging into your bank website. For reasons that TFA suggests; it helps stop random companies you have no dealings with slurping up information about you, your movements and your behaviour. You may think what you browse on Wikipedia doesn't require security, but would you think the same if you discovered some company you've never even heard of has a complete record of your interests, and is selling it to others?
The distinction between secure and unsecure logins to websites is also lost on most people. They think it all the same. So a man-in-the-middle attack on an unsecure login can open the door to who-knows-what information.
Those with no problem connecting to any open connection they find should ask themselves this; if you were offered open wifi access, but specifically told that this access will be intercepted, probed and exploited in every way possible by persons unknown, would you still connect to it, placing all your trust in SSL and your own device's security? Or would you think; why take the risk? So why treat any other random open wifi differently?
And lastly; if your device is in the habit of connecting to whatever wifi it comes across, unless you are equally in the habit of always checking which connection you have active, you will sooner or later accidentally perform on the open wifi some operation you'd normally reserve for a secured connection. Guaranteed.
The speed limit in neighbouring countries is usually around 120kph. Taking that as an average for traffic on German roads someone doing 250kph would be passing them by at 130kph. The vast disparity in speed alone is dangerous.
Human beings find it really hard to react that fast. That's why even in Formula 1 they keep making changes to limit the top speed to around 300kph (on a specialized racing track). On an ordinary road it's dumb.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Most of those cameras are privately owned, and are governed by the Data Protection Act.