In the EU they already had a complaint, because it violates GDPR, but in any case I would never use a public WiFi without a VPN, and even less in places with these conditions, there is also free WiFi in some Rstaurants (even in most McDonalds), public Libraries and others. Fuck surveillance advertising
AFAIK it does not exist in Europe, but I meant that these conditions in the EU would not be tolerated. Maybe because of this there isn’t a Walmart in the EU, there are a lot of Malls from other companies and none of these use this practices in their restaurants, mostly with free WiFi for their visitors. Offering free WiFi is already enough of a benefit for them, because it attracts customers, they do not need to intrude on their privacy with an obvious attempt to spam them and make money with their data.
The provisions of the EU GDPR have been incorporated directly into UK law as the UK GDPR. It’s ok to not know this stuff but it only takes like 10 seconds to google before you comment about something you don’t know.
I have seen it on Europe… maybe there was some way to circumvent it hidden away, not sure. But you could type a random email and that’s it, like they don’t send anything to confirm the email or anything once you submit you have access to internet.
In the 6 years I’ve ran mine, I’ve not had any issues and I run a blocklist with over 1 million domains on it.
If I was to run into something that’s blocked that I do want loaded, I can just open the pihole interface and either whitelist the blocked domain or disable blocking for a short time, each with just a couple clicks.
I used to before but my family was extremely bothered that they couldn’t click on ad links. If I remember correctly, it’s pretty easy to set up if you want to just try it.
Obviously the first ad links in google don’t work any more, which drives the wife crazy ;-) Also nowadays more and more websites complain about me using an adblocker.
There’s just no reason to unless you are really skimping on phone data. Random wifi hotspots are one of the most dangerous things for an average joe in terms of infosec.
Went to a Walmart the other day and my phone automatically connected to a wifi that was apparently hosted by my cell carrier. Immediately turned on my VPN because wtf. I disconnected at first then realized I didn’t have any service at all which was probably why it existed. Thankfully didn’t need to log in but that’s why I have Firefox relay.
Not sure about this Walmart case but most you can write any email like random letters [email protected] or not even the Gmail part as long as it’s a valid looking mail and then works like you don’t even have to confirm the email or anything.
If he was lucky or early enough to get a single name email then I’m sure they can handle some spam emails or get an email full of numbers like the rest of us
Sometimes these login portals accept any old bogus email or burner account. They were logging your IP anyway so realistically doesnt add any more compromised dafa
I’m gonna assume that by IP you mean MAC address because your IP is something that gets negotiated with the AP when you connect, changes every time you connect and can’t really be linked back to your device at a public AP. In that case, the right move is to enable MAC randomization and connect through a VPN if you need to hide who you’re talking to or just rely on TLS if you don’t care that they know who you’re talking to and only need to hide what was said.
Yeah, you can pretty much assume that any random Wi-Fi asking for that information is already doing that. My local mall has one that will accept any old email but it certainly looks like this one wants you to create an actual Walmart account.
It’s a good thing I don’t have any socials for them to trace me back to. And since I work there, I’m always looking at shit that will prolly throw them off.
Never trust an open network. Even if the company providing isn’t doing anything shady, the easy at which MITM (man in the middle) attacked, can be performed means that many insecure (and some secure) networks can be spoofed with a small amount of know-how.
Always make sure your connecting to a safe, secure wifi network, in a place where you expect that network to exist at.
If your phone connects in a place you wouldn’t expect it to connect, double check what it’s connecting to, and if necessary, disable your wifi.
That mechanism only happens after you connect to it, you have to connect to the wifi in order to download the certificate to connect. And it doesn’t apply to all open WI-FI. A someone can still spoof the wifi. The fun part is when they set up their own false “I agree to the usage” pop up page that just steals your data - standardised systems like this are easily spoofed, especially when it comes to open and insecure wifi. They could even send you a bogus certificate that routes all the traffic through their gateway, allowing them to spy on the secure connections.
It sounds to me like they are developing some tools to help map things inside the store. So they can give you directions to things you are looking for maybe. Also with this information they could do something similar to those Amazon stores where you just pick things up and walk out and it charges you automatically.
Not saying you all want to share the info with them. It is invasive. But as an engineer I can see so many cool features I could build with this information.
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