Hacker News Reader

Comment by _vuqm | Hacker News Reader

My wife manages a retail store and they use this tech to track sales conversions by the hour. Gross sales / Number of people walking in the store broken out by hour. Each conversion rate for each hour is tied back to the manager on duty for that hour so they can see how effectively the store is managed. They also take weather into account since that has a strong effect on foot traffic for an outdoor mall.

View on HN

I'm now considering building a battery powered RasPi device that'll rapidly switch the MAC address on the WiFi adaptor and masquerade as extremely busy periods as I walk through a shopping mall...

>rapidly switch the MAC address on the WiFi adaptor //

Seems like you wouldn't need to do that, just do something akin to a DoS where the traffic is spoofed to contain a different MAC? I guess you'd need driver level access to the adaptor though.

Or, maybe you can just send data whilst flipping random bits in the MAC address memory address location?

Sounds like a fun project!

> Pry-Fi comes with a War mode, which when enabled tries to make your Android device appear like dozens of people. Just wandering around an area under Wi-Fi location surveillance for a few minutes can ruin the tracking data for the period of your stay.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.chainfire.p...

Then people will do Probe Request scanning, which circumvents most MAC randomizations.

Forgive me, but that sounds awful. Does she like this system? Genuinely curious if it works or if it just results in a pushy manager trying to get her numbers up?

Metric-driven automated employee tracking is everywhere. If you're a software engineer or similar at a tech company, be aware that you have a very cushy, unmonitored job by most comparisons.

It isn't "just" Amazon warehouse employees and other low-paid folks.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/telegraph-workplace-sen...

Manna is a short story about the future of metric-driven employment culture.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

That's a great piece of sci-fi.

One thing that most people don't realize at big tech companies is how much your time actually is monitored. The amount of tickets you close out, the amount of code reviews you publish, how many code reviews of other employees you're doing. There's a lot of metrics that are not openly discussed but are being tracked and watched to make sure you're performing at the same level as your peers.

About 15 years ago, as a contractor, I did a field trip with the whole executive committee of a retail company, visiting several stores.

We entered/exited the store several times to check out the general store appearance.

After about ten exits/entrances, the clerks approached me to ask me to stop doing so as I was wrecking their purchase/visitor ratio.

If you pay attention in a mall, you'll see employees crounching to avoid triggering the sensors (they're usually at 1.5m height)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com