Trusted
You are being watched...
Retailers, crooks, the government, and others shady individuals are tracking your movements. Even when your Wi-Fi is turned off, your phone may be broadcasting information to whomever is in range which can be used both to track repeated visits to as well as your exact movements in an area under surveillance.
It's not a big step to couple this to personal information - a retailer for example, could track your trip to the register and correlate with your payment information. Now the tracking hardware and software vendors, the store (or chain) owner, their business partners, they can now all track where you are every time you come into range of one of their systems, and fully profile who you are, what you do, your financials, and your daily patterns!
That is just one example, but there are many uses for tracking you. Make no mistake, this is happening in the real world today.
Pry-Fi
One solution is shutting off Wi-Fi completely (including the background network scanning, a setting most people don't know about), but you would lose benefits like automatically connecting to known Wi-Fi networks and improved location awareness for your apps. It also does nothing to help the situation for others.
Pry-Fi will prevent your device from announcing all the networks it knows to the outside world, but it will still allow background scanning and automatically connecting to Wi-Fi networks. While you are not connected to a Wi-Fi network, the MAC address will constantly be pseudo-randomized, following a pattern that still makes the trackers think you are a real person, but they will not encounter your MAC address again. This will slowly poison their tracking database with useless information.
When you do connect to a Wi-Fi network, unless you specify otherwise, your MAC address will also be randomized - the same MAC address will not be used the next time you connect to this or any other network.
source
Retired Mod
Biddle Corp
Administrator
ID Verified
