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Comment by hamandchris | Hacker News Reader

Phones don't broadcast previously-seen SSIDs. Where did you get that idea?

You are so wrong. Your phone is constantly broadcasting ALL the SSIDs it was ever connected to (and you did not remove).

I show this live when I do general security presentations. Live on stage with nothing more then a Raspi and a Wifi USB dongle.

It freaks people out to see there home, holiday, local bar, family in law and other historic SSIDs scroll by.

I suggest you Google "phones broadcast ssids". And then go get a stiff drink.

You can read up on it here:

https://robertheaton.com/2019/01/15/a-brief-history-of-wi-fi...

Looks like more recent phones are better about this, but there are still a lot of older phones out there! And there are still leakages that allow tracking.

Note that with "real computers", just keeping the software up to date is enough to get you the latest in MAC randomization and whatnot; with phones, you may or may not be able to upgrade your software. -.-

Set a wifi chip in monitor mode, fire up wireshark, then see for yourself. Rather easy to do and once you do, you’ll learn to keep wifi off when you aren’t intentionally wanting it.

On Android there are apps to manage this automatically. I'm using Smarter WiFi Manager myself, and it does work pretty well.

On iOS they have Shortcuts that can do something like that too.

It's real limited in what it does, but it can turn wifi / bluetooth / other stuff on depending on time, location, the usual stuff.

I would love to have a real "Tasker" type app for iOS, but I doubt that will happen anytime soon.

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