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A comment on Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?. Parent comment

Re:Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking f... by mindslight on Thursday January 21, 2016 @11:37PM (#10950770)
Actually I was thinking of prisoners of the Japanese in WWII. As I said, the Nazis were hardly the only ones to number prisoners, and I suspect the phenomenon has more to do with technology than with the supreme evil tidily ascribed to losers of wars.

I'm making a general point about identifiers and protocols. The same thing applies to client MACs, which are obviously being used to track phone users with wifi on. Obviously MAC addresses can be cycled, but that takes active diligence. If the protocol had simply been designed to eschew and hide such identifiers in the first place, the entire issue wouldn't even exist.

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Re:Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking f... by simoncion on Thursday January 21, 2016 @11:56PM (#10950822)
> Actually I was thinking of prisoners of the Japanese in WWII.

I've never heard of this, and have family that served in the Pacific during WWII. I'm also having difficulty discovering any sources that mention the practice, let alone reliable ones.

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Re:Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking f... by mindslight on Friday January 22, 2016 @12:05AM (#10950864)
Maybe I have my family history wrong? I certainly see plenty of references to "POW number" for various conflicts.
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Re:Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking f... by simoncion on Friday January 22, 2016 @12:16AM (#10950906)
> I certainly see plenty of references to "POW number" for various conflicts.

AFAIK, it was never policy of the Allied forces to tattoo anything on captured POWs. I would be very surprised if captured Axis soldiers were not given some sort of uniform, unique tracking number.

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