Calling them "willingly" transmitted is a bit of a stretch, given that people don't have much choice to turn just them off and defaults are a powerful thing.
The useful parallel is the general inventorying and tracking of people. Luckily we don't have the rest of totalitarianism (yet), but this cornerstone is well laid due to naive designers.
BTW you were the one who brought up the subject of Nazis.
Right, when you said "People with an identifier number tattooed on their arm" you weren't even thinking of Nazi concentration camp victims. Sure. Pull the other one.
Every router I've ever seen has a pretty clear setup option for creating a hidden network. I agree that defaults are powerful, but they don't make it any less "willing," they merely expose people's indifference.
Actually I was thinking of prisoners of the Japanese in WWII. As I said, the Nazis were hardly the only ones to number prisoners, and I suspect the phenomenon has more to do with technology than with the supreme evil tidily ascribed to losers of wars.
I'm making a general point about identifiers and protocols. The same thing applies to client MACs, which are obviously being used to track phone users with wifi on. Obviously MAC addresses can be cycled, but that takes active diligence. If the protocol had simply been designed to eschew and hide such identifiers in the first place, the entire issue wouldn't even exist.
> Actually I was thinking of prisoners of the Japanese in WWII.
I've never heard of this, and have family that served in the Pacific during WWII. I'm also having difficulty discovering any sources that mention the practice, let alone reliable ones.
> I certainly see plenty of references to "POW number" for various conflicts.
AFAIK, it was never policy of the Allied forces to tattoo anything on captured POWs. I would be very surprised if captured Axis soldiers were not given some sort of uniform, unique tracking number.
The useful parallel is the general inventorying and tracking of people. Luckily we don't have the rest of totalitarianism (yet), but this cornerstone is well laid due to naive designers.
BTW you were the one who brought up the subject of Nazis.