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Comment by huffmsa | Hacker News Reader

Casinos have been doing this for a long time.

You've also got a GPS becon in your pocket, and are probably paying with a card attached to your name and government ID number.

So unless you're paying in cash and not carrying a phone, you're already a big red dot.

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I live in Texas, and I've seen awkward moments at dinner parties where pro-gun people say the government must not ever have a registry of owners or civilization will collapse. I bet that the next day, to let off a little steam, they bought bullets on their iPhone and had Google maps take them to the range...

Why is it awkward? Because only you recognize the extent of their privacy loss? Enlighten them.

This is not a case of consistent logic through ignorance. The same friends who will literally go out guns blazing before letting law enforcement take their AR15, believe Snowden was a traitor and the intelligence agencies would never abuse their power ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This.

Why are we allowing people to go around society being this ignorant of what's going on?

Take the opportunity to gently inform the guy of all the information the government has on him.

Are you saying they're hypocrites because you imagined it so?

I understood GP post more like "They are afraid of government registry, yet willingly give their sensitive data to corporations."

"Willingly" might be overstating things - Google is expert at misleading privacy notifications, and just like they wouldn't expect the local baker to keep logs of what they buy and when, and sell them to data collectors, maybe they have a naive idea that buying something on their phone is similar. They're just not aware how deeply hostile and backstabbing the entities they're dealing with are - like most humans, they're adapted to dealing with neighbors and people they know, not amoral international conglomerates.

Almost everyone works for a company that does marketing, so it's weird to please ignorance.

Which we now know, courtesy of Edward Snowden, that it is not much different from giving sensitive data directly to the government.

That was known long before Snowden did anything.

"The cascade of reports following the June 2013 government surveillance revelations by NSA contractor Edward Snowden have brought new attention to debates about how best to preserve Americans’ privacy in the digital age."

Pew, 2015

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/05/20/americans-at...

Unfortunately time-series data on perceptions and sentiments is difficult to find. But the very fact we're discussing this on the grounds of it being or not being an Edward Snowden-related awareness speaks to Snowden's impact. As does the the fact that the matter hasn't been considered notable enough to warrant tracking over time as part of a sentiment study.

Writing as someone who has been long aware of the issue, well before Snowden. But who has also noted that the nature and tenor of discussions with others since has changed markedly.

Indeed.... Who needs a registry when you have real-time data!

It is certainly not with "give up" and "it is already too late" attitudes that things will change

> You've also got a GPS beacon in your pocket

I don't. My phones are rooted. GPS access is limited to a few apps and only on demand. So is app-access to IMEI and other identifying markers.

Not by design but I also get a new SIM each month ($18 unlmtd talk/text+10GB).

These measures are all technologically & economically cheap, btw.

But they're locked away from consumers because the compulsion to control end users is a sickness that corporations can't regulate on their own.

There's still commercial products that will track your wifi/bluetooth MAC, and probably ISMI as well. You're not preventing this sort of thing with that sort of behavior and just making things awkward for yourself. If I can find the home addresses of people walking past my house using reverse lookups of ESSID probes, you can be damn sure that everybody else is doing it too.

> If I can find the home addresses of people walking past my house using reverse lookups of ESSID probes

Can you tell me more about this?

When your device is trying to find networks its seen previously, it for some reason broadcasts the ESSID, the human readable name of the networks it knows about. A lot of these are globally unique, as many routers come with a default name which is based on their MAC address.

You walk past my house, I see you have connected to direct-roku-845-7e16d8. Great! I can go do a reverse lookup of that (say, based on information collected by SkyHooks or WiGLE), and I now know that you've at least authenticated to a network in downtown SF one time.

With a good sampling of these (many pieces of software send the last 4+ networks), I can get an idea of where you live, where you work, and where you've traveled. From your device details I can tell what brand of device you have, from the times of day I see you I can work out what your patterns and behaviors are, from your bluetooth connections I can get an idea of what sort of devices you own. I can even match this with real time video and directional antennas to match this with a picture of your face.

This is all things that an individual can do right now with off the shelf software, not something you need to be a company or a government agency to pull off. This is absolutely receive only, and does not interact with anybodies devices in any way. It is not illegal and you can not detect that someone is doing this sort of attack. Your only defense against this is to have as bland and as generic of a wifi point name as possible.

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