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Comment by spindritf | Hacker News Reader

Do you wear an ID around your neck? Do you walk into an establishment, introduce yourself, tell the keeper where you came from, when was the last time you visited, check in with an inter-business tracking device, and then ask them to forget all that?

This is what a browser with (or more appropriately, on) DNT is doing. Long way from camouflage.

And offline, we should also employ techniques like randomizing MAC addresses in mobile devices. Just like you lock your car even though it's illegal to jack it.

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I don't think that's particularly fair.

The browser shows where you are coming from, similar to you walking from one store that sent you to a second store. The browser's identifying marks are more like the color and type of your vehicle. The ID around your neck? That really is more like a company that would use facial recognition, or tagging your phone and tracking that.

What websites do is exactly what the parent described, like to a T. Often stores track you inside the premises though for marketing and display purpsoes, or so I've been told.

Browser fingerprints are largely unique, so it's far more identifying than just the color of your car.

They are unique the same way your gender + birthdate + zip code are unique. That is to say, a combination of ordinary parameters that make it unique, and only identifiable if you go to the trouble to do something with the information.

I haven't seen many physical stores tracking license plates in a similar fashion.

No, that stuff only happens when I pay with my credit card, I guess.

And use a frequent shopper card.

And fill out those surveys on the back of the receipt where you would win $1,000 in gift cards.

> Do you wear an ID around your neck? Do you walk into an establishment, introduce yourself, tell the keeper where you came from, when was the last time you visited, check in with an inter-business tracking device, and then ask them to forget all that?

Don't worry, there's a startup that's "fixing" that[0].

Nomi uses the MAC address of your phone to identify the brick-and-mortar venues you visit. It's opt-out for consumers, and the only way to opt-out is to register your MAC address with them[1].

[0] http://getnomi.com/

[1] http://nomi.com/privacy/

This actually gets killed by an upcoming iOS 8 update (which randomizes you MAC every time it searches for wifi networks). Big pro-privacy change from Apple. While it is problematic that this is iOS only (for now, at least), the large number of iOS device will introduce a ton of noise and make the tracking much less interesting for any company, even if they can theoretically still track Android devices.

Luckily there's a simple solution to that: randomized MAC addresses. My laptop assigns itself a random MAC address on boot. About the only downside is that some captive portals require me to re-sign-in on boot.

Another downside on some (private) networks is that it breaks MAC-based DHCP reservations.

Actually, I don't lock my car because the crime rate in my area is pretty low. In fact the front door of my parents' house is unlocked during the day when they're not home. They've never been burgled.

Hmm... what if I re-post a legal-sounding statement as my status that refuses to give Facebook permission to use my information? That would work, right?

http://www.snopes.com/computer/facebook/privacy.asp

> Do you walk into an establishment, introduce yourself, tell the keeper where you came from, when was the last time you visited, check in with an inter-business tracking device, and then ask them to forget all that?

If the shopkeeper kept a logbook that recorded all of that, and then he published said logbook to other companies, you might feel that this was going a bit further than the social contract between you and the shopkeeper allows.

Though not a perfect analogy, the shopkeeper and you having small talk -- without anyone writing things and keeping the records forever -- would be tantamount to the server keeping the values in a transient fashion (i.e. for the duration of the request or session and then dropping them).

>Do you wear an ID around your neck?

Yeah; it's called my face.

Can I follow you anywhere and photograph/record you doing everything? This is usually called stalking and it's illegal, unless it's done by the government, when it's called protecting from terrorists.

I agree with you 100%. There's no technical solution.

If you're in a car, yes you do. A license plate - and these scanners are all over the place.

Check out Pry-Fi by Chainfire for Mobile MAC address randomization.

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