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Ask HN: How to Make Collection of Cell Data via Wifi Useless?

6 pointsby thezachover 11 years ago
So the city I live in is putting devices on lightpoles to track mobile devices throughout the city. They say its to help gather foot traffic patterns to better plan data. I don&#x27;t like it. I can&#x27;t remove it. But I want to make the data useless.<p>How do I generate false data to make this completley useless.

2 comments

runjakeover 11 years ago
Let me answer your question from an adversarial viewpoint:<p>&quot;Hey boss, I&#x27;m looking at our stats and I see a bunch of unusual stuff. &quot;<p>&quot;Like what?&quot;<p>&quot;Well, I see about 100,000 times more MAC addresses than normal. Nothing makes sense.&quot;<p>&quot;Here, let me see... Hmm yes, it looks like someone is trying to taint our data.&quot;<p>&quot;What do we do, boss?&quot;<p>&quot;Well, let&#x27;s look at the logs files. It looks like someone sat under the sensor on the corner of Main and 4th between 11am and 12pm with a Linux laptop dumping a bunch of bogus packets. This guy isn&#x27;t out here sabotaging stuff 24&#x2F;7. Let&#x27;s just correlate the MAC addresses on this sensor and see if they appear on the others. If not, we&#x27;ll delete those rows.&quot;<p>&quot;Good idea as usual boss. Let&#x27;s be glad this attacker didn&#x27;t have a drone that flew sorties over or sensors while sniffing nearby 802.11 and retransmitting bogus packets.&quot;
wmfover 11 years ago
Try changing your MAC address regularly.