While the internet has mostly proved to be a boon for the humankind, yet, the deep dark corners of the internet do exist. In those corners lie the prying eyes of the internet thanks to which privacy has become a thing of the past. If you are using the internet, nothing is private in your life anymore. You might think that there are certain things that are just to yourself but that is what you are made to believe by those prying eyes. They pry and pretend that they do not exist.

Retailers, crooks, the government, and others shady individuals are tracking your movements. Even when your Wi-Fi is turned off, your phone may be broadcasting information to whomever is in range which can be used both to track repeated visits to as well as your exact movements in an area under surveillance.

It’s not a big step to couple this to personal information – a retailer for example, could track your trip to the register and correlate with your payment information. Now the tracking hardware and software vendors, the store (or chain) owner, their business partners, they can now all track where you are every time you come into range of one of their systems, and fully profile who you are, what you do, your financials, and your daily patterns!

If you are engaging in online activities, you cannot help but have web crawlers spread all over your internet space and track your habits, not just that, they have even starting making predictions about your activities.

One solution is shutting off Wi-Fi completely (including the background network scanning, a setting most people don’t know about), but you would lose benefits like automatically connecting to known Wi-Fi networks and improved location awareness for your apps. It also does nothing to help the situation for others.

The other solution is downloading Pry-Fi on your rooted android device. Pry-Fi will prevent your device from announcing all the networks it knows to the outside world, but it will still allow background scanning and automatically connecting to Wi-Fi networks. While you are not connected to a Wi-Fi network, the MAC address will constantly be pseudo-randomised, following a pattern that still makes the trackers think you are a real person, but they will not encounter your MAC address again. This will slowly poison their tracking database with useless information.

When you do connect to a Wi-Fi network, unless you specify otherwise, your MAC address will also be randomised – the same MAC address will not be used the next time you connect to this or any other network. Pry-Fi comes with a War mode, which when enabled tries to make your Android device appear like dozens of people. Just wandering around an area under Wi-Fi location surveillance for a few minutes can ruin the tracking data for the period of your stay.

Therefore, this app proves to be an important addition to keep your private information private. While blindly using the internet could be dangerous, this danger can be averted to some extent through Pry-Fi.