Kill the WiFi tracking!

One of these days I shall have to post my observations on retail store Wi-Fi customer tracking systems… For now though, here is what you can do about them if you have a rooted Android device.

Pry-Fi is a fun little toy for this purpose. It does a couple of things; one, it can turn background scanning on and off.

Your device always scans for networks when Wi-Fi is on but not connected by dropping a Wi-Fi probe request on each channel. This probe request contains your device’s unique hardware MAC address. This MAC address is what the tracking systems use to identify you – their business end is a number of wireless access points that allow monitoring and relay the probe requests on to a mystery server. Here’s what they look like in the wigle.net wardriving app:

image

Note that 78 of them replied to my probe requests!!

Pry-Fi can usually (hardware dependent) change the MAC address to fool these things into thinking they’ve never seen you before.

image
Wal-Spam!

Best yet, it has a war mode, so when you know you’d otherwise be tracked, it can flood them with randomized probes!

image

It’s just kind of awesome. It won’t be able to do anything on a device without root, of course, but if it has access and the WiFi driver lets it change MAC, it can work its magic.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.