Is it just an impression or is UK indeed the most enthusiastic of all Western countries when it comes to performing mass surveillance on its citizens?<p>Seems like it runs way deeper and broader than in US
Note that iOS "grey" color for WiFi does NOT mean disabled - you can still be tracked. A diagonal line across the WiFi symbol = off.<p>Use "Settings" to turn WiFi completely off, or disable WiFi via Control Center <i>before</i> turning off Airplane Mode.<p>This stateful & confusing button behavior was added in recent iOS releases. If Apple cares about privacy, they can enable the original iOS behavior via permanent opt-in setting and MDM policy.
For someone living in Asia, it's crazy that people in Western countries have to always fiddle with their phone to search and connect to Wi-Fi, because their plans are expensive or the tunnels don't have coverage.
As a curious data point, when I bought a new phone and then signed up for a new SIM-only plan with a UK provider not so long ago, they made a big deal about how I now had access to free WiFi on the Underground. This was not mentioned at all during the sign-up process and not something I requested or opted into.<p>TfL do say they won't identify individuals, but for the purposes of data protection law anything that <i>could</i> be used to identify a specific individual is in scope, so these kinds of systems (and similar ones that have been used in places like shopping centres for a while) might be skating on thin ice if there are also, for example, sufficient CCTV cameras around and recording for an individual to be identified from those and then matched against their phone.<p>It looks like TfL have been cagey about exactly what precautions are being taken here, and they certainly have other mechanisms that could potentially be used to identify individuals such as CCTV and data from payments and entry/exit barriers, so given the scale of the Underground network and the number of people likely to be affected, it wouldn't surprise me if these kinds of stealthy phone-tracking systems started to come under greater regulatory scrutiny before long.
I use the aptly named Wi-Fi Privacy Police, from F-Droid:<p><i>Prevents your smartphone or tablet from leaking privacy sensitive information via Wi-Fi networks. It does this in two ways:<p>It prevents your smartphone from sending out the names of Wi-Fi networks it wants to connect to over the air. This makes sure that other people in your surroundings can not see the networks you’ve connecte to, and the places you’ve visited.<p>If your smartphone encounters an unknown access point with a known name (for example, a malicious access point pretending to be your home network), it asks whether you trust this access point before connecting. This makes sure that other people are not able to steal your data.</i><p>Link: <a href="https://f-droid.org/es/packages/be.uhasselt.privacypolice/" rel="nofollow">https://f-droid.org/es/packages/be.uhasselt.privacypolice/</a><p>Does it work? Am I being naive?<p>edit: Formatting, grammar
I don't believe its purely for advertising. Wifi tracking and IMSI catching are already done at airports, makes sense its expanding to other travel locations. It's sad that London is becoming a total surveillance state and everyone seems to be ok with it.
It's not just the UK. Prospect Council in Adelaide Australia have "Prospect Fast WiFi" <a href="https://networkprospect.com.au/prospect-fast-wifi/" rel="nofollow">https://networkprospect.com.au/prospect-fast-wifi/</a>. It costs a little to provide, but they get back actionable metrics for assessing how much foot traffic there is and then evaluate policy effectiveness for their main street. A much richer data source for next to nothing compared to other methods of tracking visitors to the area. Still I'm surprised that TfL wants that level of detail as they already log people in and out of the (transport) system, so can easily measure how well things work (or not).
I'd like to know how any educated and rational person ever formed the belief that they were going to go about in public, on the tube, with a radio transmitter in their pants, and nobody is allowed to notice. It's a very public and very not private activity.
I wonder how this is legal. I work for a Danish municipality and we once used WiFi tracking to help us build a better inner city. The data were wiped of any identifying features, because we really didn’t care who went were, we just wanted to track the flow of citizens in general.<p>It was still deemed illegal under the government adapted GDPR laws because we didn’t have consent. So how on earth is London getting away with this, and I guess you could say the same about their CCTV footage?
Wondering if these changes will finally make the data service more robust for users.<p>The main issue seems to be that it's so hit and miss about correctly recognising you, failing with messages about being logged in in too many other locations, so you get blocked from about half the stations as you travel across the network on a typical commute
Having actual WiFi coverage in the tunnels would be a good start. Now it only works at the stations, maybe for 15 seconds at a time, on each stop. It's awful
from what I remember of the pilot, they actually did a good job of anonymising the data.<p>Basically every mac address/SSID group was md5'd with a salt that was rotated daily. I _think_ that each station had a different salt too. But this was to track user movement though one station, not across the network.<p>There is of course, no guarantee that they will do this again