[elarkin]

Without being too specific, you should assume that Large stores already do this. Any store claiming to have "in store wifi" is almost guaranteed to be tracking you through your mac address.

The system that I'm familiar with only tracks where you're going. It didn't (as of a couple months ago) have any way of linking your mac back to a consumer profile.

[meepmorp]

I was in a shopping mall recently, where the free wifi required your name and an email address before letting you use it.

Fuck that.

[alister]

Name and email, you say? Check out the form you need to fill in to use free wifi at Brazilian airports:

http://brazilsense.com/index.php?title=Wi-Fi_and_Internet_se...

They want your:

  name
  sex
  marital status
  nationality
  place of birth
  profession
  identity document type
  identity document number
  street address
  city
  state
  country
  cellular phone number
  name of cellular provider
  landline phone number
  email address
  barcode from your boarding pass

If you think that this is an April Fool's joke, I can assure you that it's real. Some of the above are optional on the form that's shown, but other airport ISPs in Brazil do insist that you fill in a lot of fields like the above.

I'm happy to say that the trend in the United States and Canada has been toward less or zero information for using wifi. Less than 10 years ago, it was quite common to see all sorts of questions to use wifi. And Internet cafes used to demand ID in the United States and Canada (and they still do in Brazil).

[chemicaloliver]

At Beijing airport if you're not Chinese they require a scan of your passport photo page at a special kiosk where they then give you a unique access code....

[schoen]

I remember filling out that form. :-(

I also remember checking into a Brazilian hotel, where they wanted Brazilian guests, at least, to specify their highest level of formal education (!), as well as profession, date of birth, and the city from which the guest arrived and the city to which the guest planned to travel next.

I wonder if the last two are specifically meant to aid law enforcement investigations.

[smsm42]

So they'd learn my name is Al Kapone, my nationality is the proud citizen of the glorious nation of Kazakhstan, my place of birth is the South Pole, my profession is a lion tamer and I live in 666 Fake Street, Garbadedataville. What they're going to do with this information?

[meepmorp]

What's lion taming like as a career?

[nnnnni]

Hello, my name is Guy Incognito. My email address is [e-mail].

Unless it requires you to click a confirmation link or something similar to that, just use a fake address at one of the example.TLD domains.

If they DO require confirmation, use mailinator or a similar service.

[sbierwagen]

Catch 22 there: you have to be able to access mailinator.com in order to generate a throwaway email.

[refurb]

Not with mailinator. You just choose a username and it gets sent there. No need to go to mailinator.com first.

[userbinator]

Requiring email confirmation assumes the fact that the user can already connect to the Internet to access his/her email to read the message, throwaway account or not, so that wouldn't work too well...

[nnnnni]

Connect with your phone long enough to confirm?

[smsm42]

Possible, but never seen free wifi actually do that.

[lucaspiller]

That's pretty standard for all free wifi in the UK.

[chrj]

If you don't give your name or other identification, how would they hold you responsible if you abused the connection?

[mobiplayer]

It's not that, trust me. They make good money with your data. Take it as a way of payment for the "free" wifi.

It helps the same purpose as the loyalty cards, especially the ones that outgrow the original business (I'm looking at you both Tesco ClubCard and Nectar Card). Getting "points" by using those at other businesses like petrol stations helps them profiling you for "better" advertising. They also keep you a bit more loyal to their associated brands, but we already knew that bit :)

[smsm42]

I wonder when that better advertising would actually come along. They keep collecting the data but so far all the ads I've seen is either utterly irrelevant crap or "you visited shoe store so our network would show you the same shoe store's ads for the next 3 months, because it can't be that you don't need buy new shoes every day".

[sitkack]

Non-Disadvantage Cards.