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Ask HN: How to Make Collection of Cell Data via Wifi Useless?
6 points by thezach on Jan 5, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
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't like it. I can't remove it. But I want to make the data useless.

How do I generate false data to make this completley useless.




Let me answer your question from an adversarial viewpoint:

"Hey boss, I'm looking at our stats and I see a bunch of unusual stuff. "

"Like what?"

"Well, I see about 100,000 times more MAC addresses than normal. Nothing makes sense."

"Here, let me see... Hmm yes, it looks like someone is trying to taint our data."

"What do we do, boss?"

"Well, let'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't out here sabotaging stuff 24/7. Let's just correlate the MAC addresses on this sensor and see if they appear on the others. If not, we'll delete those rows."

"Good idea as usual boss. Let's be glad this attacker didn't have a drone that flew sorties over or sensors while sniffing nearby 802.11 and retransmitting bogus packets."


Try changing your MAC address regularly.




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