If police announced that they were looking for a guy in an orange jacket, you could put on an orange jacket and run around town generating lots of false reports

If police announced that they were looking for a guy in an orange jacket, you could put on an orange jacket and run around town generating lots of false reports. But why would you do that? That would be incredibly antisocial. As usual, the tech angle to this story doesn't make the story particularly novel, but some tech-oriented people seem to have trouble perceiving that. E.g. people commenting that MAC addresses aren't unique, as if other forms of police descriptions of suspects (like height, hair color, or clothing) are unique...