By cherry picking a few Republican priorities designed to spite big tech and totally ignoring the big enforcement efforts that the Biden administration has pursued through the FTC and the DOJ Antitrust Division, in both tech and non-tech industries.

The communication that kicked off this whole thing was saying something positive about Trump and something negative about Democrats in direct comparison, on an issue that the Democrats are actually way better on.

It’s not just saying something positive about a political official or party. It’s actively saying “this party is better than that party.” And he was wrong on the merits of the statement.

And then amplifying the message using an official account is where it went off the rails. CEOs are allowed to have opinions as individuals. But when the official account backs up the CEO, then we can rightly be skeptical that the platform itself will be administered in a fair way.

These fuckers act like they’ve never heard of Lina Khan. Let’s see if Republicans try to replace her with someone with a stronger track record. Or, if they’re so serious about tech competition maybe they’ll get on board with net neutrality.

And look, I actually like Gail Slater (the Trump nominee that kicked off this thread). She’s got some bona fides, and I welcome Republicans taking antitrust more seriously, and rolling back the damage done by Robert Bork and his adherents (including and probably most significantly Ronald Reagan).

But to pretend that Democrats are less serious about antitrust than Republicans ignores the huge moves that the Biden administration have made in this area, including outside of big tech.

I get how it works with wifi connections, and Bluetooth scanning (since that’s a peer to peer protocol that needs to broadcast its availability), and obviously the OS-level location services, but I’m still not seeing how seeing wifi beacons would reveal anything. For one, pretty much every mobile device OS now uses MAC randomization so that your wifi activity on one network can’t be correlated with another. And for another, I think the BSSID scanning protocol is listen only for client devices.

Happy to be proven wrong, and to learn more, but the article linked doesn’t seem to explain anything on this particular supposed threat.

I set a simple task to turn off WiFi when my home network is not detected so my phone doesn’t scan and report my location to businesses.

I was under the impression that BSSID scanning was entirely passive, and that a phone that scans for beacons doesn’t actually reveal itself to anyone.