I am so happy to live in Sweden. All open WiFi networks here are free to use and requires no email or account (VPN recommended as always, though). Even at grocery stores.
It was very easy to get free WiFi in the US compared to most EU countries I’ve been in. But here in the EU at least I have cheap data so it’s not all bad.
That's great, unless the store you're in is a giant concrete bunker.
Mobile data barely works in my neighbourhood supermarket; even text-based communication is frequently dicey, but you want to send someone a photo of something as a "should I buy this"? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Why open yourself up to all the nasty of public WiFi for that?
Either you’re buying something cheap, so just do it. Or it’s something expensive, and in that case a simple quick message isn’t really enough. Go out to the parking lot and talk about it, or come back later.
I created an account while in the store with an email of [email protected] and a basic password and surprisingly didn’t have to verify the email. Then turned on a VPN to my house.
I plan on just creating a new account every time I go in just to fill up their database with nonsense.
You do realize that they are actually tracking the device itself by the hardware MAC address and other device fingerprints.
The email is just a bonus to let them legally spam you. Anti-spam laws have an exemption. If there’s a prior business relationship like shopping in their stores, they can put you on their spam list unless you opt out.
Bogus email only helps for spam but doesn’t do anything about tracking.
EDIT: For Android when there’s a Captive Portal like the screen shot. devices will use Persistent randomization which while not the hardware MAC will remain the same for the same network where they can track your visits.
When there’s a Captive Portal like the screenshot, many devices use a random but persistent mac for that network avoid reauthorization after any network drop. This will make your access to the specific network trackable.
It’s not at the packet level - by default on gOS (and a dev option on stock pixels), every time you connect to a network, even ones you have connected to prior, you get a new random MAC. The standard aosp/pixels do one random but persistent MAC randomization. This only helps marginally from a privacy standpoint. Per-connection makes this data point useless, thereby increasing privacy.
randomize the MAC address everytime they connect to a network
+1, had issues using Android devices for presence detection because of this very useful privacy feature. Even on your home network, the MAC address and device hostname get randomized, unless disabled in the settings
The more real it appears the harder it is to distinguish garbage data. Also a personal VPN with aguard home running. If I end up choosing a real existing email, well I’m just helping muddy the profile of someone else.
No shopping apps ever, loyalty cards in a fake name with email aliases to a central junk mailbox.
To hell with the lot of them and their business model.
They can profile the device and get hardware info depending on make and software etc but the gold is their app which sucks up everything including your phone number and what you visit on their network. I wouldn’t dream of connecting without a vpn unless it was an emergency situation.
That being said data is always preferable when you have the option.
People that make systems like these are not scared of those that stop using em. What they fear is getting information wrong or spam. Using these facts you can then adjust to the changes.
Imo, this is part of the problem with lack of privacy in today’s world.
People will accept this more than not, without a second thought. This leads to the taking of a little bit more until one day you are left wondering where your privacy went.
From personal experience I've found that an OpenVPN connection routed over port 53 (same as DNS) bypasses their signin screen entirely.
Of course it's been months since I last tried since I rarely go into the store and don't have reception issues when I do. Could be they've patched it since. Still worth a shot.
Many people here suggesting a throwaway email and/or VPN. While this does migitate the impact somewhat, the only proper response is to not use their “service” and deactivate the WiFi fo your phone (else they might be tracking your MAC address).
tethering is far superior if you have the data plan anyway. but even apple lets you randomize your Mac these days, and on android it’s trivial to if you get root access.
Android has allowed you to randomize your mac for a long time, and is currently the default setting. In developer options you can even toggle a setting to enable non-persistent randomization.
Walmart has an interesting app where if you're connected to their wifi then the app "transforms" to tell you what's in stock in the store you're connected to. I wish they'd just do something like Home Depot where the site just tells you if X location has an item or not, but alas.
Wait, do they not do that anymore? I used to be able to search on their website for an item and it wold tell me if it's in stock at the store I selected and the aisle it's in if they have it.
“If you are an angry man of 30, and it is Friday evening, it may offer you a bottle of whiskey,” said Ekaterina Savchenko, the company’s head of > marketing.
I feel personally attacked.
I’ve started using a faraday pouch for everything, from my phone to my car key fob. if you use a device with a masked MAC address in a privacy protecting OS, and don’t auto connect to networks otherwise, perhaps it’s better.
yeah I just switched my wallet and that is why I never used that feature. I literally just found out maybe 3 days ago I have a tap card when the cashier told me. I was horrified. I feel like the time you save tapping as opposed to swiping or inserting isn’t worth the security and privacy risks.
these engineers keep making new stuff that’s kind of interesting at best but we don’t even need that we end up being inconvenienced by. tap cards save .07 seconds but you end up having to protect your card from thieves and extreme tracking by retailers, and it’s disgusting. it’s time to go back to cash.
At least they're telling you. There's also a lot of hidden surveillance in stores - they've done it with Bluetooth and cameras for some time. Things like monitoring how long you look at products and evaluating your reactions to displays.
That's why I always introduce a good bit of entropy to my shopping patterns:
-Enter and go straight to produce
-Spend 20 minutes examining eggplants
-Walk up and down 5 aisles pausing exactly the square of the aisle number in seconds.
-Grab a box of tampons
-Grab what I need as quickly as possible
-Return tampons
-Checkout and leave
Somewhere a marketing team is spending hours trying to figure out how to improve the conversion rates for tampons and eggplants for customers in my demo.
Don’t forget to flick and knock on various fruits and vegetables. Randomize how many flicks/knocks per item, and throw in a few on produce items that normally don’t get that kind of test e.g. grapes or potatoes.
I believe the idea is to allow you to roughly evaluate the density of the produce, to avoid e.g. mushy grainy watermelon or weird squashes that don’t have their expected hollowness.
Try luck with throwaway email + VPN. Although it’s possible they’ll still be able to identity you if you’re the only one using that VPN on your local Walmart. At least they won’t be able to see your traffic.
That data isn’t nothing, either. Over ten years ago, Target was able to use shoppers habits to determine when women were pregnant, sometimes even before the women knew.
Not really. With https luckily being the default, at most they could get the sites you were going to (I don’t think dnss is dead, but it’s been very slow to grow unfortunately).
They could probably see if you’re checking Amazon or Google, but wouldn’t be able to see what you’re looking at exactly. Theoretically they could use cameras and or triangulation to see what you’re in front of when you use the Internet, but a VPN would still show traffic so they’d know you’re looking up something.
The big thing this would do is act like a loyalty card… They give you some amount of benefit in exchange for tracking your purchases in ever higher detail. Mostly it’s just like that, except they’d also be able to see how long you are in the store, and ideally they can link it to your purchases so they can infer more about it
FWIW, I wouldn’t only consider giving them a disposable email
I remember febreeze coming out and being like, that would be cool but you can’t trust ads and it sounds like total BS. I knew they added a scent, but I had not idea about the subtle social manipulation that they used to shift people’s habits.
Speaking of habits, this is the first time I have heard about all the science involved in studying and breaking them.
Thank you for that link. Definitely going to save it.
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