[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).

[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.

[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?