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Comment by jitix | Hacker News Reader

A bit tangential but here's another reason to disable wifi: even if you don't join a wifi network your phone can be tracked via the packets that it sends out to find wifi networks. That can be used is triangulate people's location within closed spaces like department stores. Source: I work at a company where we sell this tech to department stores and such. We are still not allowed to join that data with our shadow profiles of the users but that might happen in the future.

I've become extremely privacy oriented ever since I started working here and saw how creepily companies track users.

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I don't really get the concern. Retailers also install video cameras and track everywhere you go in their stores.

Installing cameras to discourage/punish theft is different from using them to learn people habits and use that information either to make money or to gain advantage against someone.

Cameras are also used for analytics. And they're way more accurate than wifi scan triangulation.

Yea but cameras won't show them what you bought last week, your credit, your social network, your criminal records.

Man the possibilities for fascism only get more and more exciting for future dictators.

Facial recognition is getting better; cameras may well be enough to do this soon.

> Source: I work at a company where we sell this tech to department stores and such.

Are you based in Germany? I interviewed at a German company doing exactly that.

This is interesting, can you name the company? I’d like to report them to the Landes- and Bundesbeauftragen für Datenschutz.

Collecting this data requires specific opt-in, and the user can not give that by entering a store, but only if they sign a form, or agree with a specific checkbox in an app.

Due to that, I’d assume this would end up in court.

Please provide an anonymous tip to the Landesbeauftragten für Datenschutz in your state. Alternatively, send it to the https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/ (they’re responsible for SH, but properly deal with PGP encrypted email, and can redirect them to the responsible agencies)

Why does the phone need to send packets to discover WiFi networks? Can't it do this receive only?

That is a good question. According to this presentation titled "Wi-Fi told me everything about you" [1], active discovery uses less power, so it's preferred over passive discovery. Can anyone else here explain why?

1: http://confiance-numerique.clermont-universite.fr/Slides/M-C...

Does this data really provide a monetary benefit to companies?

Of course. eg it can be used to measure how people are influenced by a clothing display, what brands/seasons they're looking for, the effectiveness of different "Sale!" signs, which products are dead inventory wasting floorspace, etc

On the other hand, personally I would immediately stop shopping at stores that spied on customers like that.

The devices are quite inconspicuous and the company has other competitors doing similar things so I stopped having my wifi and Bluetooth on except I know I want to use them. But there's tech being developed that can use cell signals as well but as I understand it's more difficult to read those packets.

Leave your phone in the car.

Also your smart watch, i guess.

yeah the tech works with smart watches, tablets and any other wifi enabled device

The stores can see correlations between products and how many people do "window shopping" in a section. Basically it's being marketed as giving e-commerce type insights into customer behavior for brick and mortar stores. But the tech can be used in many other scenarios.

Not tangential, they call this out in section 2.1 of the paper. I'd paste it but the formatting does not copy/paste well.

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