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On one of the forums I am on, the debate has moved to whether a MAC address is an identifying piece of information. Especially given the high likelihood that a
by buro9 13y ago
On one of the forums I am on, the debate has moved to whether a MAC address is an identifying piece of information. Especially given the high likelihood that a phone is not a shared device.
They're also using the MAC address to identify the device, and I suspect from that to estimate the demographic: http://new.pitchengine.com/pitches/60f7865a-f3ac-4167-920c-52faeea0564a http://new.pitchengine.com/pitches/60f7865a-f3ac-4167-920c-5...
This seems to be echoed by some legal people:
http://www.huntonprivacyblog.com/2011/05/articles/article-29-working-party-opines-on-geolocation-services/ http://www.huntonprivacyblog.com/2011/05/articles/article-29...
> Unique identifiers (such as MAC addresses) should only be stored for a maximum period of 24 hours, and should subsequently be deleted or anonymized.
And they have an opt-out page:
http://www.presenceorb.com/optout.aspx http://www.presenceorb.com/optout.aspx
But how many people would opt-out of something they didn't know was tracking them?
- voltagex_ 13y agoI wonder how long it would take you to POST all the possible iPhone and Android MAC addresses to that opt out page.
- buro9 13y agoAnd to do it in a random order to ensure they couldn't just ignore the opt-outs based on sequence.
- baruch 13y agoYou'd also need to do it from multiple ips to avoid hellbanned or effectively filtered later on (presumably they log from which IP the request came from).
- Karunamon 13y agoGet on Tor, send a random number of requests between 1 and 3, wait a few seconds, regenerate the tor circuit, do it again.
- sjtgraham 13y ago…and make yourself into Weev II.
- krichman 13y agoYeah, there is no way you'd be able to do that in the US without getting charged with wire fraud at least.
- cheald 13y agoGiven that this is about London, being tracked in public is already a forgone conclusion.
- buro9 13y agoI never really buy into the idea that just because there is some tracking (for any definition of `some`) that we should accept all other tracking. Anyone with a credit/debit card has been tracked since the day they got it, but it doesn't mean that every subsequent intrusion should blithely accepted.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cheald 13y agoMy comment posted as a reply to the wrong comment. Oops. Anyhow, I agree. My reply was in response to another comment which seemed to imply that this program was the difference between being tracked or not, which is a silly sentiment in London. I agree in principle that this kind of tracking isn't okay. I'm just not sure that the implications are worse than the status quo in this case.