Target? psssht you’ve gotta aim higher then that if you wanna get ahead my friend. Entire municipalities are doing exactly that. From outside your car too. Welcome to the world of tomorrow.

https://www.denverpost.com/2017/12/16/loveland-cell-phone-traffic-monitoring-privacy-concerns/

Every building with a wifi network can generally track where your phone is.

Exclusive: Here's What 3 Big Museums Learn By Tracking Your Phone

That’s why they put cell jammers in box stores to make you use their “free” WiFi

Is this true ? Legal? I thought jammers were banned?

Lol, it’s pretty funny that every big box store (Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, etc,) you inexplicably lose cell service completely which forces you to go on the WiFi network if you use your phone. It’s a guess, not a definite, I do know for sure that they use jammers at my work (fed govt) but I’m sure I signed on to that one.

Also, the reason I think jammers is bc the way your phone works (or ceases to work) in a big box store is the same exact way it happens at my job where I know they jam signals for security.

This isn't true.

Best Buy (for instance) has no reason to block your cellphone signal for one. Second of all, the amount of wattage and devices needed to block a cellphone signal is incredibly expensive to buy and costly to maintain over such a large area. There are multiple bands of signals that you would have to keep track of times however many stores you own.

The reason your signal drops when you walk into a steel and brick and structure with a metal roof is because the building is a giant Faraday cage. Walk outside and see how badly your signal is "jammed"

It isn't profitable to jam cellphone signals.

some places that have reinforced concrete walls, or prefab concrete walls, can block phone signal inside them.

Does this hold true with your WiFi switched off or on but not connected to their network?

I'd imagine with wifi turned off that most would lose the ability to track you around a store, but those who are really interested can do it by GPS at any point

My concern is our phones say they've turned off the WiFi chip but are still broadcasting a search for signal with our info on the search.

How would the GPS in our phones talk to the store? Man in the middle intercept of the GPS read signals? I thought GPS was passive, receive only?

Valid concern with the wifi, I honestly don't know enough about it...

As for the GPS, it's not something stores would be doing most likely, but corporations (apple, google, FB, etc.) can and do as they see fit. Not an expert but I think they get inside the software to leave the "GPS door" open, so to speak. Pardon the laymen terminology.

Ah, the permanent interlopers...I'd forgot about them in this context. Damn, these scroungers are everywhere!

iOS has had mac randomization implemented by default, since iOS 8 in 2014. (Android by toggled setting) Every time it pings the AP the device self-reports a different mac. The process was recently cracked (reverse engineered) by security researchers. The entire thing is hardly clandestine. Stores use it for exactly what you think they would use it for. Generating traffic maps for maximizing store layout and basic information about how people flow inside an area and of course, wifi coverage. To actually link your personal information to the device (assuming they went thru the trouble of decrypting the spoofed mac generated by your device) they would have to have access to the manufacturer's database of WIFI macs and assigned devices then the would have to contact the wireless carrier to see which WLAN MAC is assigned to what user. Even after all of that information gathering you would still only have the account owner's information. Not to mention all of the corporate cellular accounts and multi-line accounts that exist.

So, Target could conceptually do this to attempt to get the information of a person who wants to remain anonymous. OR, simply use all of the data people voluntarily give them thru; their app, location data they purchase from companies that you willingly allow your location to be tracked by, and of course, devices that actually opt into connecting to their wifi (unmasking your MAC.)

The best wifi systems can only potentially gather this information. You still have to compile and analyze all of it with major back-end computing/programming with the resources of a mid range retail store.

Not impossible, but the efficacy score on this is close to zero considering the way they can legally and far more efficiently collect this information thru other means.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researchers-break-mac-address-randomization-and-track-100-percent-of-test-devices/

I've heard the mall of omerica uses facial recog.

Wtf? That's insane. Which baseball stadiums are doing this? I'm gonna guess the Mets and Yankees.

Facial recognition isn't that complicated. I live in bumfuck nowhere and local police departments are using it. They take your picture, run it through a database and it shows people whose faces possibly match (mugshots/DL photos). Some retailers are testing it for loss prevention purposes.

Easy solution: Turn off Wifi . The Mac Address is only available if the wifi radio is on.

They could be running their own StingRay to capture your cell signal, but I doubt it.

Nfc and Bluetooth. Although I don't know how far a reader can read your nfc radio though. Assume less than six feet.

NFC works no more than a foot or so away with mobile phones. Apple devices only use it during the Apple Pay process. Android is open for it to be used for anything.

This is completely unrelated, but I was having trouble actually turning my iPhone WiFi off the other day, its turns out Apple bamboozles people into thinking WiFi is off even though the circuit is still powered and the codepath all the way of to OS is still pinging routers just like in the thread.

Anyway didnt mean to offtopic the thread hth someone else.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/ios-11-apple-iphone-ipad-bluetooth-wifi-switching-off-turn-toggle-control-center-a7959301.html

I'm Gobsmacked... WTH

When my girlfriend gets in my car, Sync 3.0 somehow automatically turns Bluetooth on her iPhone on, because it will seamlessly connect to my car's infotainment system if my S8 doesn't have it on.

The AirDrop quote is slightly misleading and out of content. As of iOS 11, the wifi switch on iPhones in the control center only disconnects wifi but leaves it on in the background for protocols such as airdrop to work. If you go into settings and manually switch off wifi it actually turns off and things like airdrop don't work anymore.

Great example of why I won't buy apple.

So how does one determine if there is a stingray in the area?

Came to say this!

About a year ago I bought a couple of things from the Target Outdoor/Garden section. Afterwards on my phone I was getting advertisements for, not just Target, but Targets Outdoor/Garden section.

You probably used a card. Target sends its ads to its customers that make purchases there.

I worked 32 out of a 36 hour stretch part of this weekend. Was pretty beat, and my feet were a bit for the worse. My phone browser is now awash in foot nerve pain solutions. Have never seen those before. Had other semi relevant ones tho.

Target is ridiculous. They also track the RFID chips in your credit cards and ID.

They actually don't. I was a store manager. They do use RFID handheld scanners to scan inventory once a week, typically in the morning before the store opens. I used to do it all the time. The antennas sticking out of some older store ceilings that aren't for wifi are a different comm protocol for their older handheld PDAs - they aren't RFID.

Was your store a part of the DHS program that turns Targets into espionage centers?

That's actually kind of neat.

wtf. Are you 11 years old?

They've been mining people for a while

Your "Smart" phone is a corporate/government monitoring device 24/7.

You're probably right. I had a somewhat unsettling experience yesterday.

Most of us have read the stories about phones allegedly listening to our conversations and serving ads based on them.

I'm using an application on my android phone ("Network Cell Info Lite" for the curious) that serves ads at the bottom of the gui (because it's a "free" version), and yesterday it served me an ad for a specific company showing two specific products which I had looked at on this companys website (I had also placed an order for a different set of products from the same company the same day).

I don't know how they were able to link that information to my phone, because

1. I've never browsed this companys website from my phone, only my main computer
2. I've never used the facebook application on my phone
3. The Google account linked on my phone is different from the one I use on my main computer

The only two facts that I believe might have helped "them" link this information to my phone is

1. I spoke the company name in a voice memo I recorded a few hours before seeing the ad
2. I use wifi on my phone while at home, so outgoing connections from my phone are coming from the same IP address as my main computer

At the specific moment when the ad got served, I was away from home and using a cellular data connection.

Someone needs to get the bottom of why these things happen. There appears to be a mind-bogglingly large amount of data mining going on behind the scenes that we probably can't even begin to comprehend the extent of.

Yeah... Even without it being a smart phone. They can and track plan old phone connections off the towers.

We volunteer and pay for the status of being monitored.

Trust has never been earned in this dynamic, it was merely assumed.

See and be seen.

While the targeted ads after you don’t come back in are a little unsettling, I think this has to be a part of the revamped target security following the hack a few years back. It’s probably much easier to stop treats or at least minimize them while everyone has a specific ID for their access to store internet.

Also as for how much google or Facebook have collected, does nobody read TOS or even a little bit?

A few years ago when everyone was starting to install the Facebook messenger app, and it has the clause in there about “everything you type on your keyboard will be logged and tracked. Everything you ever have or will type will be tracked.” Same sort of thing with all those gif or sticker apps.

What the hell did people think they wrote in the 3k pages of TOS?

It explicitly says it not so many words “if you agree to this you can use it but we know everything”. Oh hell no.

Every time I go to or near a target I get a pin email for "suspicious login" from my Microsoft Live account. It's the only wifi I connect to that I get that email from.

Get rid of your phone.

How about no?

Good luck with that!

VPN, no GAPPS on android, encryption, PGP, tor, and starting a private match in CoD then shooting your messages on the wall.

But then I gotta return this carrier pigeon :(

Using their wifi has to change the website prices to their instore prices too. I have tried to price match Target's site to find the price is now the same once there??? I have taken pictures of the product/price before getting within range and forgetting to turn off my wifi.

On a lighter note; I can't remember the last time I saw a commercial. Ever since giving up TV, I've really picked up on just how intrusive advertising as whole really is. Prior to dropping TV, I never gave it any thought, but once I did, I started to notice the other ways that companies attempt to influence your decision-making and choices in general.

I think this might be a reason why we're beginning to see this kind of approach in the general marketplace. Ever since I stopped watching TV, I've come across more and more people who don't watch broadcast TV or even cable TV. Why deal with intrusive TV ads when you Netflix or stream content cheaper and on-demand. As a result, companies had to adapt to how the consumer perceives advertising as the ads they'd usually watch are no longer effective. The average person already views advertising in a poor light to begin with so any measure that is surreptitious or subtle enough to go generally unnoticed while still having an effect equal or even greater to previous methods is something they will seize on.

Here, take $ 1 off a comedy DVD from the rack near where you stood for 2 minutes last month!

No one buys DVDs anymore. They haven't for years.

Solution: root phone, use macchanger, you might need to write your own app

This is to track your sales habits and where you are travelling in the store so they can merchandise things using human data to try to sell more (I work for a place that does this and it was disclosed at a meeting)

MacID? Are you talking about Mac addresses or Apple IDs? Im confused.

He is referring to the Mac address that is broadcast by your wifi adapter.

Yep, just never heard it called a MacID before.

That is the generic term for hardware identifiers- Media Access Control ID. Apple thought they'd be cute and use that as the name for their unlocky thing IRRC, but have since stopped because that was confusing and dumb.

Ah ok makes sense. Thanks.

I don't have a problem with stores doing this. It helps me because it gives them data that will be used to create a service that I am more preferable to. It helps them because it increases how likely I am to buy something there.

They've always done this. Employees used to pay attention and offer suggestions to management. Now that process is automated, faster, and more accurate.

You are ridiculously naive and a huge part of the problem. Reply if you must, but I won't debate someone with your mindset and limited knowledge of the real world.

If you're going to throw around big words like that, you should probably back them up with why you think that.

There's always one.

Next time I'll have to spend more time standing around the beer aisle

Lol for real, apparently I'm to quick in the liquor store

The neurosis of the sale.

Turn off your phone or leave it at home. Easy solution ya fuckin' peasants.

Fight on your feet or die on your backs.

No shit. If people think the banks aren't doing this with their debit or credit card history too they are being naive

Why you shopping at target?

Stop downloading these apps?

This is sort of true. They can’t which product but while aisle but more importantly which path.

I’ve worked on several projects and the path you took was important. That way they knew were to put impulse and higher margin items.

Now it’s not your MAC they track. I believe Apple removed that from the API. They track you by the APP or another ID. I’d have to go look at my notes to what they use in Apple vs Android.

Turn wifi and bluetooth off when you aren't using them. It's good for your privacy and your battery.

Is this true ? Legal? I thought jammers were banned?