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A comment on Seattle Surveillance Technologies Up for Public Review. Parent comment

Re:Seattle Surveillance Technologies Up for Public Review by clairity on Wednesday February 06, 2019 @04:29PM (#19100188)
this is one of the reasons why the wifi button in the ios control center slide-in sheet is so infuriating. at the very least, that button should be tri-mode, so i can turn the wifi radio off rather than just disconnecting from the current wifi ap. otherwise, it leaks location data all over the place.
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Re:Seattle Surveillance Technologies Up for Public Review by Klonoar on Wednesday February 06, 2019 @06:08PM (#19101094)
In this particular case, I believe you don't need to worry too much. iOS (since iOS8, I think?) randomizes WiFI MAC addresses to avoid this kind of tracking.

Android doesn't.

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Re:Seattle Surveillance Technologies Up for Public Review by charleslmunger on Thursday February 07, 2019 @01:11AM (#19103393)
https://source.android.com/devices/tech/connect/wifi-mac-ran...
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Re:Seattle Surveillance Technologies Up for Public Review by Klonoar on Thursday February 07, 2019 @03:33AM (#19103878)
Very cool! I feel like the behavior that'd match iOS is the developer switch variant, no?

Still happy to be corrected. :)

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Re:Seattle Surveillance Technologies Up for Public Review by rfoo on Thursday February 07, 2019 @04:42AM (#19104117)
No. It matches iOS without the developer switch. iOS never use randomized MAC address when joining network.

Using randomized MAC address per SSID may break some well-established authentication scheme base on client MAC address. And it is not marginally stronger than only randomize when scanning, because the randomized MAC address is pinned to ESSID instead of BSSID.

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Re:Seattle Surveillance Technologies Up for Public Review by clairity on Wednesday February 06, 2019 @07:23PM (#19101727)
ah yes, i dimly remember hearing about that but forgot. do you know the parameters around this feature? for instance, how often the mac is rotated and what triggers rotation?
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Re:Seattle Surveillance Technologies Up for Public Review by Klonoar on Wednesday February 06, 2019 @07:55PM (#19101925)
It's automatic for every WiFi connection, I believe.

Someone pointed out to me on Twitter that there's probably still more fingerprinting happening behind the scenes here, so worth noting as well.

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