Comment Re: Cell phones must stop broadcasting MAC address (Score 1) 189
No protocols have to be changed, and none of your posts are informative (at least not on this article). It's so simple and obvious that you don't have to broadcast to listen.
I think you are talking at cross purposes. You are asking for a protocol which allows you to connect automatically to open wifi and stay anonymous. As you say, that's impossible with a fixed MAC address. The posters you are discussing with wants to have their phones connect automatically to chosen WiFi access points without giving away the MAC address but to otherwise require manual intervention. What they ask for is possible simply through listening, though only as long as you never connect to a hidden access point.
Amazingly though, in order to find out if the network can actually route to the internet, which is what the station is trying to find out... you have to associate to the AP. As well, many people disable SSID broadcasting, necessitating probes to determine if that network is actually present.
It's so simple and obvious!
The interesting thing here is that cellphone networks have a bunch of interesting work done on the privacy here. They use random temporary identities and tunnelling of data back to the home network which should allow hiding of your identity from local passive attackers. The implementations are not perfect (an active attacker can use flaws in the GSM protocol for man in the middle attacks ; the crypto is/was a bit poor ; 3G phones are subject to fall back attacks etc.) but someone who is just listening to a GSM/3GPP phone should not see enough information to do tracking and someone who forces out enough information to do tracking should be clearly breaking the law (both computer hacking and radio frequency laws).
If the MAC address was a large random number which changed regularly and the standard was to start a VPN tunnel (back to the TOR network?) then untrackable connectivity would be possible. Of course it's not an accident that this is not the way things work.