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There are two problems with the MAC approach: 1) The amount of Mac addresses for each vendor is very limited. Blacklisting a few Mac addresses would therefore
by gst 15y ago
There are two problems with the MAC approach:
1) The amount of Mac addresses for each vendor is very limited. Blacklisting a few Mac addresses would therefore blacklist lots of routers. Combining this with the SSID doesn't really help that much, as many users will stick to the default SSID. (And if you require that users change their SSID to a non-default one you can as well require that they just add a given suffix).
2) In the EU there have not only been complaints about Google offering the data, but also about Google processing the data. So I guess they want to make sure that their streetview cars that log this data don't log opt-opt routers at all. It's simple to do if the SSID has such a suffix. It'd be much harder if the software system in the card would need to query a central opt-out database before processing a router's data.
- dpark 15y ago>The amount of Mac addresses for each vendor is very limited. Blacklisting a few Mac addresses would therefore blacklist lots of routers. MAC addresses should be globally unique. If your hardware vendor is shipping lots of routers with a shared MAC, they've messed up really badly.
- gst 15y agoThey should, but in practice it seems they aren't. In the past (working at an ISP) I've seen collisions on Ethernet hardware (two Ethernet cards with the same MAC address). So if that even happens in a relatively small Ethernet, I assume that this will be fairly common if your address space includes each active WiFi router.
- lotu 15y agoThat has to mac address cloning where, the router clones a computer's Mac address; then that computer is given to someone else who connects it to the network.
- dpark 15y agoI think lotu's probably right. I'd suspect users causing these collissions before I'd suspect that network hardware manufacturers don't know to allocate unique MAC addresses to each card. You can generally trust than a hardware-embedded MAC is unique. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/11/71307.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/11/71307...