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How does turning on wifi enable better phone location tracking?

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tszaboo:

--- Quote from: Beamin on December 07, 2020, 09:13:34 pm ---When those google cars drove (I think they are constantly driving around updating) around they had wifi antennas on them. They would take note of the MAC addresses and when there was four they can triangulate, I would also imagine they collect IP's with the MAC and link to peoples google accounts reveling a database of peoples home addresses/names and who your physical friends/family are. Simple algorithms can figure all this out. Scary stuff



https://youtu.be/VFns39RXPrU

--- End quote ---
Nah, probably every Android phone with switched on GPS takes note about the available Wifi networks and MAC addresses. And here is something that you wouldn't like: Even if you opt out, use a ipohne or a windows phone, etc: Your neighbor's phone will still report where you are. Google knows exactly, where you are, who is your friend, and what episode you are watching on your TV, even if you dont use any of their product.

amyk:
Some of the no-name Chinese Android phones have an interesting feature: the MAC address changes randomly every time you turn WiFi on and off again.

The feature was simply accomplished by leaving the EEPROM that usually stores the MAC blank, which causes the firmware to generate a random one by default.

NiHaoMike:

--- Quote from: NANDBlog on January 01, 2021, 10:19:45 pm ---Your neighbor's phone will still report where you are. Google knows exactly, where you are, who is your friend, and what episode you are watching on your TV, even if you dont use any of their product.

--- End quote ---
The most that you can get by sniffing encrypted Wifi traffic is possibly if you're home or not, but even that is not completely reliable. They see MAC address X disappear around time A and reappear around time B most days, so assume it's tied to the user of device X. What if you had another device with MAC address Y automatically turn off around time C and turn back on around time D most days? Would they assume that's the schedule of the (nonexistent) user of device Y? In the absence of other information, how would they tell whether X or Y is "you"?

Trying to tell exactly what you're doing on your encrypted network is close to impossible. You could see bursts of activity, but how would you know what content it is? Don't forget all the background activity that would make detecting bitrate signatures unreliable, if that was even viable in the first place thanks to the somewhat unpredictable nature of buffering. Or just download the video and the only activity that's visible is a near constant data stream, so now the only information they have is a rough estimation of file size, with nothing to tell if it's a short 4K video or a longer 1080p video.

Finding out which friends visit you is likely the easiest of those examples only because they're probably not as paranoid as you are so their location data tells it all.

And on top of that, they would spend resources figuring out what you do but it turns out they can't really use that data for anything because you block ads so ad targeting is worthless. Most likely they'll focus their efforts on easier targets.

tszaboo:
I'm not talking about someone very paranoid, but here is a mac address lookup table:
https://gist.github.com/aallan/b4bb86db86079509e6159810ae9bd3e4

Also, watch an episode of some well known television series. Or try ding the me on Netflix or Amazon, and search on your android phone "reddit xy series ". The search suggesting that pops up will be exactly the episode that you are watching.
It would take a lot of effort to go completely off their grid, and they have a lot of second hand information from you. It's very noticable.

janoc:

--- Quote from: amyk on January 02, 2021, 01:14:42 am ---Some of the no-name Chinese Android phones have an interesting feature: the MAC address changes randomly every time you turn WiFi on and off again.

The feature was simply accomplished by leaving the EEPROM that usually stores the MAC blank, which causes the firmware to generate a random one by default.

--- End quote ---

That is a standard Android feature since Android 8:

https://source.android.com/devices/tech/connect/wifi-mac-randomization

Nothing to do with any EEPROMs left blank, the entire thing is under software control of the Linux kernel in the Android device. Linux has supported this since a long time.

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