When a couple have gone up, it will no longer be cost effective.
I really don't like the idea of tracking such things. It's bad enough in the internet but being stalked outside is not acceptable.
Of course firebombing the cans is probably very more illegal than just dumping a can of lighter fluid into it and throwing in a match... I mean, even that is arson, nothing to sneeze at. You would have to balance the possibility of being caught with the punishment if you are caught.
Want the privacy the sane way? Go make vendors to introduce security features (like short-lived euphemeral MACs), so communicating party names won't be meaningful to others.
The mobile network already locates you well enough for the spooks to find out who you're meeting. I live in Melbourne; half our mobile network is owned by Singapore, and god knows how much was made in China. The spooks are scary, but the network has become essential.
No doubt computers accelerate threats to life and freedom, as they do to everything else. It got that way a long time ago, when IBM tabulating machines powered the holocaust. The problems are Singapore and China, which are being solved, and Australia, where parts of the solution are failing. Those solutions are human instead of technical.
I'd suggest taking some bits from a discarded microwave oven, assembling said bits into a directed microwave transmitter and blasting the business end of the bin with a few hundred watts of microwave energy. For extra brownie points you could modulate the signal so it looks like an 802.11 transceiver on steroids.
Now you only need to 3D-print a box for it/connect it in some way to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and you'll be lauded on hackaday.com!
While I doubt it's legal to get your ham license and pump 1500 watts into your least favorite Wifi network, I'd certainly enjoy reading about the resulting court cases. Federal jurisdiction, local jurisdiction... always entertaining.
Renew London is not registered with the ICO, nor is any company with a similar name at their postcode [1].
So either they believe that they're exempt, or that it's under a different name.
The ICO has a self-assessment tool [2] to work out whether an organisation is required to register. I'd suggest that the big question is: "Are you processing personal information?". The definition is:
‘Processing’ means doing any of the following with the information:
obtaining it
recording it
storing it
updating it
sharing it
So based on that, they're processing personal information and are legally required to register and comply. The ICO is not seen as an overly strong regulator, but they might be convinced to investigate after the inevitable headlines in the papers.
[1] http://www.ico.org.uk/esdwebpages/search. Postcode is E1 6DY from their website in the press release [2] http://www.ico.org.uk/for_organisations/data_protection/regi...
[1] http://www.ico.org.uk/upload/documents/library/data_protecti...
The video makes a comparison between their bins and cookies, describing this as "cookies in real life".
It seems difficult to compare their tech to cookies (which have EU wide regulation) and to show information collected about an individual and to then claim exemption from UK data protection laws.
It is possible to harvest this information covertly. Up until iOS 7, it's possible for any iphone app to get your mac address. So if you also provide your personal information, an app could covertly associate them.
Share "anonymous" data with vendors who provide wifi access, and suddenly Sephora knows where you live and where you work and can remind you that you're almost out of La Prairie Crème Cellulaire Platine Rare when you bin your cup of coffee outside the office.
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?
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.
It's a shame the recent NSA fiasco will scare people away now and set this back another 5 years.
There are some phenomenal experiences possible.
I find it is about bullshitting people as much as you can, change my view please.
Closing in on a million free apps available at both Apple and Android marketplaces. Brought to you free by advertising.
Skype. How many poor families scattered across the world has Skype helped?
Those are significant, life changing experiences - not bullshit.
Those are experiences.
Free to the world, paid for by advertising.
So I never was much of a network analyst, forgive me - is there any way to guard against this while still leaving your wifi on, without something like cycling MACs? I wasn't aware that when you scan for Networks, that you're actually exchanging some packets with those networks - I thought you were just picking up on a broadcast one way. Shouldn't there be some sort of "stealth mode" where you're not leaking packets everywhere?
It actually seems like if this was the case, I'm surprised it hasn't been used in other ways. Say a burglar breaks into my house with his iPhone in his pocket. Could I later prove it was him by pulling up some log on my router that was picking up MAC addresses going by? And why isn't there some software (to my knowledge) that does the same thing for surveillance - logging all the MAC addresses and creating alerts if a new one comes into the area?
No -- the adaptor's MAC is an essential part of the transaction, while cycling MACs would be a dead giveaway and would increase attention paid to that system and its travels.
Turning off the adaptor is the only meaningful way to avoid tracking.
> Say a burglar breaks into my house with his iPhone in his pocket. Could I later prove it was him by pulling up some log on my router that was picking up MAC addresses going by?
Yes, but only in a society that would allow this kind of tracking of people, each of whom is presumed to be innocent. Usually a person is first identified as a suspect, after which a technical track can be made. But a person who is not already regarded as a suspect can't be (legally) subjected to this kind of surveillance.
> And why isn't there some software (to my knowledge) that does the same thing for surveillance - logging all the MAC addresses and creating alerts if a new one comes into the area?
Because this is privileged information having to do with privacy, and violating it would confront certain well-established civil rights that vary from country to country.
And just because an app like that may violate privacy rights, I mean, you still see things like Firesheep, packet sniffing, network surveillance tools, all published with the caveat to just use for "testing".
It seems to me that the laws are somewhat murky, as evidenced by this article, and I would be surprised if there was any law in the US against me keeping track of MACs that came into the range of my router. With your argument I couldn't set up a surveillance camera outside my house either.
Nordstrom stores in the US were caught tracking shoppers via their phones' MAC addresses earlier this year. All the more reason to turn off WiFi if you're not actively using it.
He adds, "as some of the technology we will be testing will be on the boundaries of what is regulated and discussed it is our intention to discuss it publicly and especially collaborate with privacy groups like EFF to make sure we lead the charge on [adding necessary protections] as we are with the implementation of the technology"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196981
I tend to disagree, I don't think tracking my habits to more effectively manipulate and target me is an enhanced experience.
They changed the font colour of the word "Mac", but not the actual address. Plus, Mac should be MAC.
McFail.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194160 (arstechnica.com)
In addition, here are some other sources for the same story:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6181893 (qz.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183485 (qz.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6184423 (theatlanticcities.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6187750 (vice.com)
These bins are quite strategically placed (1) in the heart of the square mile - the prime financial district and tourist hub of London city (2) especially around bus stops and city squares in this area - which have some form or other of free city wide wifi networks - where one would be waiting for enough time (consuming lunch, waiting for bus, meeting a friend, shopping...) to be an ideal consumer for targeted advertisement.
They also have an extremely amusing design which makes them look slick - but extremely unlike waste bins - infact you have to look at them closely to find where you need to dispose off your waste. This was one thing that amused me extremely when I first saw them - the strange inconspicuous design - but things make much more sense in the light of this article.
As someone who's targeted more than once a day by these things, I see this as a breach of privacy and expect to be informed that data about me is being collected and stored and maybe used for commercial purposes in the future (irrespective of the ICO technicalities and loop holes).
As a human, its a fundamental breach of trust and I would personally not see these things with the same inconspicuousness they have been designed with to deceptively integrate and blend into our daily environment.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.gpo.greenp...
Make a deal with JC Decaux, or some similar out-of-home advertising company to place cameras (strategically) around the City of London.
Nominally to provide personally tailored advertising, the significant secondary purpose is to use face recognition to identify individuals-of-interest: specific traders, fund managers and so on.
This enables us to analyse facial expression, gait, maybe body temperature to determine mood, then look for correlations in the stocks and markets that these individuals trade.
I think that this will be legal, since all the information that you are using is (nominally, at least) legal, and gained in a public place.
After all, if it is OK for the authorities to place the whole population under close surveillance, they cannot possibly object if we turn around and do the same thing to their paymasters, can they?
However, might be a good idea to write a mobile app that changes your MAC address periodically (not sure how hard it is)
EDIT: That may not have been my own picture in that tweet. But still ISTR having snapped a similar one.