Never Commit a Crime When Your Phone Is Connected to a Wi-Fi Network | Hacker News Reader

Never Commit a Crime When Your Phone Is Connected to a Wi-Fi Network

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18 pointssmacktoward7 comments

A family members home was broken into, we checked the routers DHCP logs to determine what phones connected that day.

We were able to determine the person AND the time it happened since an IP is only held on for 24 hours before being released. The person ended up being a friend that had connected to the WiFi in the past! (Yes, that friendship is very over.)

It was a real life CSI moment, and yes, criminals are generally oblivious to their phone identifying them! Good thing for my family member!

Changing my ssid to xfinitywifi.

You can log 802.11 probe request packets. That will give you information about most phones nearby even if they don't connect to your network.

Very useful in case of a theft. You can get a list of WiFi access points the thief normally connects to, which can give you clues where they live or work.

Legality of such logging is dubious. The packets were technically sent directed to everyone nearby, unencrypted, with the intent that your router would receive them. But the information they contain is typically pretty private, and it's unlikely the human sender knows they are sending you this info, let alone that you are storing it.

I was struck recently by how my phone is (a) conspicuously monitoring my speed in Google Maps and comparing with what it thinks the speed limit is, and (b) spontaneously warning me of "speed traps" (I'm not sure if they are real). It makes me feel nervous to think of the immensity of the database Google has on people doing technically illegal things, but it also makes me feel nervous if Google is actually preventing people from getting caught in speed traps, because it underlines how much power they have.

Speed trap data likely to be coming from waze, crowdsourced.

No comment on the rest of the comment you made.

If Google Maps is being integrated with Waze, I think that is a new thing, because they've been separate.

If they plan to integrate them at all, I wonder why not combine them completely?

No idea. Found this:

https://bgr.com/2019/01/21/google-maps-vs-waze-speed-limit-f...

Also disclaimer: im a current google employee. Opinions my own.

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