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Swarm Mobile's Offer: Free Wi-Fi In Exchange For Some Privacy
cagraham writes "Startup Swarm Mobile intends to help physical retailers counter online shopping habits by collecting data on their customer's actions. Swarm's platform integrates with store's Wifi networks in order to monitor what exactly customers are doing while shopping. In exchange for collecting analytics, shoppers get access to free internet. Swarm then send reports to the store owners, detailing how many customers checked prices online, or compared rival products on their phones. Their platform also allows stores to directly send discount codes or coupons to shopper's phones."
Your stupid mind control techniques don't need more information from spying on us, they need to go away forever.
Whose who would exchange privacy for a little internet access deserve neither.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
If I'm using a phone, what the heck do I need free Wi-Fi for? The darn phone already has an internet connection.
So I can use this to connect to a VPN and get free internet access without any invasion of my privacy? I like it.
It's things like this why the wifi on my phone is disabled when I'm not using it, and why I don't have a data plan.
Measure that bitches. Because I'm sure as hell not providing you with the information.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Privacy extensions like Ghostery and NoScript are your friend.
I've got Google and Facebook blocked wherever I can. I'm not here to provide them with information about what I do on the internet. Some things are blocked at the firewall, and simply can't be resolved in my house.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ironically, this is exactly what this service is offering the retailer -- better snooping into exactly that sort of browsing. The retailer wants to know which of their products are getting surfed for alternative buying.
Finally! We're getting a little love!
The NSA
Exactly.
All my email or other uses of their wifi is encrypted already, and the only thing left for them to sniff is unencrypted pages from third party sellers. Even my google searches are encrypted, so they get nothing from that either.
You can't proxy ssl. And I suspect all this service really does is route everything through Swarm Mobile's transparent proxy. Most stores simply don't have the expertise to deal with basic traffic analysis let alone deep packet inspection, so they hire Swarm.
But as more an more shopping sites use HTTPS, this becomes less and less useful except for mining price checks on non-ssl sites.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Privacy extensions like Ghostery and NoScript are your friend.
I've got Google and Facebook blocked wherever I can. I'm not here to provide them with information about what I do on the internet. Some things are blocked at the firewall, and simply can't be resolved in my house.
They're not my friend. I'm not losing one second of sleep about being tracked. I went all-in a couple of years ago, and the thought police haven't descended from their black helicopters yet. I'm content to be the product that Google offers it's customers. I get a pretty good return on these services. I'm happy to be able to comment on some forum random forum quickly with my Facebook account. I'm happy to have Google give me a preemptive traffic update because it knows my schedule. I'm pleased that my games keep my scores and friends cross-platform and through device upgrades.
When my ISP started serving up ads when I mistyped a URL, I even switched to 8.8.8.8 for my DNS.
Screw it. Google can have my data. I wasn't using it anyway.
VPNs should be a matter of course for anyone using Wi-Fi (barring their home/work networks, of course.) FireSheep type attacks are not as big an attack as in the past, but there are still things one can do, be it Phorm-like modification of HTTP streams in flight (perhaps injecting malware) to DNS hijacking (and there are people who will completely ignore the obvious SSL warnings and proceed no matter what, even stashing the bogus key in their root cert pool.)
VPNs are not perfect. However, having traffic slowed or stopped is a less of an issue than having it modified in flight or just plain snooped.
Observed Traffic Pattern: Candy Crush level 263
Analyzing . . .
User Profile: Addictive personality, drug seeking.
Marketing Plan: Serve coupon for free fries with McHog Burger purchase.
Then they'll send you free coupons for psychiatric care.
The retailer wants to know which of their products are getting surfed for alternative buying.
Uhh... all of them?
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
To use our service, please install our "accelerator" package that also adds our certificate to your phone. Boom. I can now proxy SSL. I wouldn't install such a thing, you probably wouldn't do it either, most people here on /. wouldn't do it, but how many "normals" would, with the promise of "Free Wifi at thousands of locations!" not understanding that their mobile device's whole security model is now compromised?
You can proxy SSL. BlueCoat sells devices which do exactly that.
Of course, the root key will be different, but of all the users using a Wi-fi service, how many will stop what they are doing, versus click on the "bah, toss the key into the trusted root keystore regardless of security and let me proceed" button.
I don't think this is what Swarm Mobile is doing, but if someone did try MITM-ing SSL streams, I would not be surprised if they had some success.
Their network arteries are too congested..