> Do you wear an ID around your neck? Do you walk into an establishment, introduce yourself, tell the keeper where you came from, when was the last time you visited, check in with an inter-business tracking device, and then ask them to forget all that?
Don't worry, there's a startup that's "fixing" that[0].
Nomi uses the MAC address of your phone to identify the brick-and-mortar venues you visit. It's opt-out for consumers, and the only way to opt-out is to register your MAC address with them[1].
This actually gets killed by an upcoming iOS 8 update (which randomizes you MAC every time it searches for wifi networks). Big pro-privacy change from Apple. While it is problematic that this is iOS only (for now, at least), the large number of iOS device will introduce a ton of noise and make the tracking much less interesting for any company, even if they can theoretically still track Android devices.
Luckily there's a simple solution to that: randomized MAC addresses. My laptop assigns itself a random MAC address on boot. About the only downside is that some captive portals require me to re-sign-in on boot.
Don't worry, there's a startup that's "fixing" that[0].
Nomi uses the MAC address of your phone to identify the brick-and-mortar venues you visit. It's opt-out for consumers, and the only way to opt-out is to register your MAC address with them[1].
[0] http://getnomi.com/
[1] http://nomi.com/privacy/