Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

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-5...

This seems to be echoed by some legal people: 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

But how many people would opt-out of something they didn't know was tracking them?

I wonder how long it would take you to POST all the possible iPhone and Android MAC addresses to that opt out page.

And to do it in a random order to ensure they couldn't just ignore the opt-outs based on sequence.

You'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).

Get on Tor, send a random number of requests between 1 and 3, wait a few seconds, regenerate the tor circuit, do it again.

…and make yourself into Weev II.

Yeah, there is no way you'd be able to do that in the US without getting charged with wire fraud at least.

Given that this is about London, being tracked in public is already a forgone conclusion.

I 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.

My 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.

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