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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

> Users that didn't receive this month's Android security patch should only connect to trusted Wi-Fi networks

Turning off Wi-Fi before leaving home and office helps. Apparently few people do that. A customer in the tracking industry (beacons estimating people in stores) told me that about 80% leave Wi-Fi always on.

I hope I'll get that patch soon. The last update for my Sony phone was the security update of May. Nothing on June. I guess that most Androids didn't and won't get anything.

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>told me that about 80% leave Wi-Fi always on

which means 20% don't, which is suspiciously high considering how much of a hassle it is to turn wifi on/off. then again, they could have unlimited data on their phones.

> how much of a hassle it is to turn wifi on/off

It's not a hassle at all. Pull down the notification shade, touch the wifi icon.

And then forget to ever turn it back on. And that only works on some phones anyway. On mine I have to go into settings.

Is this an iPhone thing? Android phones have had access to all the important settings from the pull down menu for years, and most recently you've been able to add many of the less common settings like casting and NFC.

I have a two year old android that doesn't have that either. I think it's just a Samsung feature. Or at least it varies by manufacturer.

All of my Sony phones (Xperia Z and Z5) have had it as well as all of the Nexus phones I've tested on. I think maybe Samsung was the first to include it, but its standard now as far as I can tell on Android.

It was a Samsung feature for a long time but Google adopted it in Android 6.

Windows Phone has a "turn back on in X hours" option. Best microsoft idea ever...

Maybe they just randomise broadcast packets MAC addr?

MAC address randomization must be implemented properly to be effective. This is not always the case (http://papers.mathyvanhoef.com/asiaccs2016.pdf)

I'm involved in the tracking industry. Where it used to be 70% of people trackable with WiFi we are now seeing >90%. This is in large cities in wealthy European countries.

Most powerusers run tasker or similar apps to automate these sort of stuff on android, so no hassle at all.

You are actively encouraged to leave wifi on, on ios at least, to improve location accuracy.

Same on Android. In fact Android has a Location-feature called "Scanning" that allows apps and services to detect wifi networks at any time, even if you have your wifi disabled. Meaning you can turn wifi off but it will randomly turn it back on to help increase location accuracy. This feature is on by default.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/3nrfa0/psa_wifi_sc...

I'm not one hundred percent certain, but I'm not aware of any Sony phones using Broadcom chipsets? Every Sony phone I'm aware of uses Qualcomm or the like.

Every American phone (except the iphone) uses a Qualcomm SOC due to some anticompetitive practices on their part. That might be why it seems that way. I'm quite certain Sony makes a phone that doesn't but it's only sold in Europe or so.

Interesting - I didn't know that. Can you elaborate?

Llama may be useful for that on Android - able to perform actions including turning wifi on and off by location.

... and IFTTT, Tasker, and any number of of automation apps that require the user to both be aware of and be bothered to set up correctly.

Developer preview 3 of Android O includes a great option in WiFi settings to automatically turn WiFi back on when you are in a location where you've connected to a 'high quality' WiFi network before (such as home or work), though I've not dug deep enough to find out what constitutes high quality, and it doesn't appear to be paired with a converse option to turn it off elsewhere.

I thought about mentioning Tasker and others, but those feel to me more like programming options with which you can achieve the goal, where Llama and some other apps are a bit more focused just on the question of wifi.

It's also a huge waste of battery to leave on.... not sure why more people don't disable Wi-Fi.

Because it's yet another thing to remember to turn on and off... I already have to turn off location so Google isn't tracking me all the time.

Huge?

For tiny values of huge

Is this true? I'd always been under the (unsourced) assumption that the Wi-Fi radio was more power-efficient and it was better to use that than 3G/4G/LTE.

When you are using 3G/4G, and not connected to Wifi, your phone still checks all the Wifi accesspoints continuously. When you know for yourself you don't connect to an accesspoint on that location, there is no point in having your phone search for one. You can save on battery there.

A personal experience from me (anecdotal)... I was using Wifi from my cable provider that is available all over town. But that means when going into town, I am jumping from one accesspoint to another, sometimes with good and bad connections. My experience was that a battery charge didn't last that long. Disabling that accesspoint on my phone made the batterycharge last much longer.

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