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What about MAC addresses that are usually permanent? Are they not available without pairing? The a lot of cities in my country already have WiFi access points

What about MAC addresses that are usually permanent? Are they not available without pairing? The a lot of cities in my country already have WiFi access points on almost every street crossroads, making it trivial to implement WiFi MAC tracking surveillance. Apart from that, we also recently received APs on trains and one might argue they are used for statistics of train passengers. Does anyone know of any proven IRL example of this?

KennyBlanken 5y ago
Ethernet and wifi MAC addresses are not permanent. On linux machines you've been able to change ethernet mac addresses for something like two decades. MacOS X has easily accessed MAC address configuration, also been possible for many many years. Ditto for wifi cards. iOS 14 and above uses a randomized wifi mac address on a network unless you specifically turn it off. iOS 8 or 9 introduced MAC address randomization for broadcast stuff like network probes. Android 10 does the same (it was available in 9 under dev options.) For Bluetooth, it sounds like BTLE allows for some forms of mac address randomization that was intended to improve privacy, but it's been defeated: https://9to5mac.com/2019/07/18/bluetooth-flaw/ https://9to5mac.com/2019/07/18/bluetooth-flaw/ Bluetooth smart watches, headphones, car audio, sports sensors (heartrate, running gait sensors) have made it completely trivial to track someone's whereabouts. Assume that almost any major retailer has long since associated MAC addresses with a customer profile on you. There's a reason Amazon makes it impossible to use Prime at Whole Foods without your cell phone running the app or having the website up with a live connection; the QR codes are valid for barely a few minutes.
GhettoComputers 5y ago
The real MAC address only reveals itself when connected to WiFi, so yes only to paired APs. The WiFi access points will get the data but on the street they’re randomized. Looks like iOS 14 and up changes the WiFi MAC per AP > iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and watchOS 7 introduce a new Wi-Fi privacy feature: When an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Apple Watch connects to a Wi-Fi network, it identifies itself with a unique (random) MAC address per network.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

Ethernet and wifi MAC addresses are not permanent. On linux machines you've been able to change ethernet mac addresses for something like two decades. MacOS X has easily accessed MAC address configuration, also been possible for many many years. Ditto for wifi cards. iOS 14 and above uses a randomized wifi mac address on a network unless you specifically turn it off. iOS 8 or 9 introduced MAC address randomization for broadcast stuff like network probes. Android 10 does the same (it was available in 9 under dev options.) For Bluetooth, it sounds like BTLE allows for some forms of mac address randomization that was intended to improve privacy, but it's been defeated: https://9to5mac.com/2019/07/18/bluetooth-flaw/ https://9to5mac.com/2019/07/18/bluetooth-flaw/ Bluetooth smart watches, headphones, car audio, sports sensors (heartrate, running gait sensors) have made it completely trivial to track someone's whereabouts. Assume that almost any major retailer has long since associated MAC addresses with a customer profile on you. There's a reason Amazon makes it impossible to use Prime at Whole Foods without your cell phone running the app or having the website up with a live connection; the QR codes are valid for barely a few minutes.

GhettoComputers 5y ago

The real MAC address only reveals itself when connected to WiFi, so yes only to paired APs. The WiFi access points will get the data but on the street they’re randomized. Looks like iOS 14 and up changes the WiFi MAC per AP > iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and watchOS 7 introduce a new Wi-Fi privacy feature: When an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Apple Watch connects to a Wi-Fi network, it identifies itself with a unique (random) MAC address per network.