logging wifi mac-addresses to help catch shoplifters and unpaid tabs.

[MikeMakesWhiskey]

Anyone hear of such a thing? What a great plugin/program to have. Yes, there might be hundreds of addresses at any given moment in time, but with a little work, you could narrow it down to a dozen and alert if they came back in the future for a positive visual ID...

 

[TonyR]

I wonder though how many people (percentage-wise) have their Wi-Fi enabled at all times and have previously logged onto the premise's Wi-Fi.

 

[wittaj]

I wonder though how many people (percentage-wise) have their Wi-Fi enabled at all times and have previously logged onto the premise's Wi-Fi.

There are a lot of stupid people out there that don't know or care about security

Public Wi-Fi Statistics: How do we use it and is it safe?

Almost half of Americans use public Wi-Fi regularly.

www.highspeedinternet.com

 

[SpacemanSpiff]

The feature exists on quite a few commercial managed wireless systems. The one's I've seen leverage the use of bluetooth (BT) which has its own MAC address. The shorter range of BT signal is a benefit when it comes to determining a more precise location of the device. Triangulating location is directly influenced on how many AP's are in the building as well as their placement. Not sure if these systems allow you to flag a BT MAC to push an alert when they arrive on-site again.
The biggest problem an operator would face is proving the individual posesses the mobile device you are tracking at the time of confrontation. Highly likely your not going to get them to present their device to you, let alone unlock it so you can confirm the MAC address.

 

[MikeMakesWhiskey]

Yes, bluetooth would provide more granularity, and I can use it also, and I am sure if someone implemented an interface to BI, it would be as easy to do one as the other... The issue is sensors... WiFi AP's are ubiquitous.. I am a Cisco CCIE and have worked with Wireless location for many years, but think a more consumer grade system that just stores visible wifi hardware addresses for a couple weeks and has a system to 'correlate' things and coordinate with the BI video to pick out anomalies or incidents would be useful...

 

[ARAMP1]

I set my phone to have a randomized MAC address. Pretty sure that was the default setting of the phone too.

 

[achalmersman]

Randomized MAC address just creates a randomized MAC Address for that specific SSID / network profile. When you return / reconnect to that same SSID your phone will still be using the same Randomized MAC unless you manually force it to generate a new one.