Quote:
Originally Posted by vienna
say you have an app from some big box store or other and you walk into the store with WiFi off; the store's system will detect your presence and reestablish contact.
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That was new to me, and I would be seriously pissed if I get attacked like this, for an attack it definitely is. I rate this as a criminal violation, because if I turn off WLAN, I have declared my will and expressed clearly a certain prohibition regarding the way others may approach me, and when someboy else without my consent forces my device to switch in on again, it is a a non-consensual and unlegitimised intrusion of my privacy, comparable to a stranger all of a sudden standing in my flat. Such an intruder has expect nothing good from me. A store doing like you described is like an attacker kicking in my locked appartment door by force. Or sneaking in through a window in the basement.
Can something like this also be done by identifying the presence of a smartphone due to the mobile phone cell it is currently situated in, even if its WLAN and mobile internet connections are turned off? One needs to remember all the time that a smartphone perate in three different radio circuits, minimum: phone, mobil internet, WLAN.
I once have red somewhere that the NSA even has methods to turn on a smartphone that was completely switched off, although this, as I remember it, needed a quite targetted an deliberate effort. At least for the time being.
And are RFID chips - in plastic cards - really blocked from getting passively read by a close-by detector if you put aluminium metal foil around it?
Tin foil hats - that joke maybe already has lost it legitimacy, eh?