On Saturday, August 15, 2015 07:05:17 Marc Juul wrote:
I am afraid by telling your mesh users that you switched to an IP based mesh protocol you lure them into a false sense of 'non-traceability'. It kind of feels like a debate we had almost a decade ago when WiFi came to the masses. People had the feeling to use WiFi they had to learn what this cumbersome SSL thing is. Because WiFi is insecure as the waves leave your home and the neighbors can eavesdrop on you .. Countless hours had to be invested into educating our mesh users that SSL always is a good thing.
Personally, I rotate my MAC address on a daily basis. That works not only with batman-adv but everywhere. Obviously, that won't help you against the countless ad networks, Google, Facebook, etc, etc
I hear you.
The biggest danger I feel is that associating to one of our access points once with your phone would then allow anyone, even a technically semi-literate stalker, to track you and find out where you live and work using something we built. My fear would be that someone could use this data to put up a public web app where any idiot can put in a MAC address and instantly get a nice map of movement activity.
I think we are at a point in our discussion where we just repeat what was already said. batman-adv certainly can be improved to provide better anonymity by default. Even with such a mechanism in place people can be tracked in your network (with IP mesh routing or without). Tracking without connecting to your network is even easier than that.
Therefore, I favor education over a technology arms race. The latter you won't be able to win as you eventually will have to battle people's desire for the 'least effort route'.
Hopefully these tracking services you mention are not quite so easy to access and use for something like this by an unlicensed individual (but maybe they are?) though even if others are making these types of services available, I'd rather not make it easy for them to use our network for their nefarious purposes.
These systems are built for absolutely non-technical users. For those who prefer videos over boring texts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCGiGaRp7-U
I recommend to pay close attention to the section they call 'loyal customers' (around 1:30min into the video). Note that this was just the first search result that came up. There are many more.
Cheers, Marek