LEVL-ID AS A PRIVACY FRIENDLY ALTERNATIVE TO THE MAC addresS

MAC RANDOMIZATION - A HUGE STEP FORWARD FOR PRIVACY BUT 2 STEPS BACK FOR NETWORKING

Major tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and recently Apple are promoting the randomization of the MAC (media access control) address, even down to a daily randomization basis. While this constitutes a huge and welcomed step forward for user privacy, it impacts many services that use the MAC address for device identification. These services include

Network Login
Pay-per-use day passes
Whitelist/Blacklist based security
Network optimization and troubleshooting
Personalized App experiences
Parental control
You can read more about it from CommScope here

Watch how LEVL’s platform helps with device identification without relying on the MAC address:

FOR ISPs: BALANCING CONSUMER PRIVACY AND NETWORK MANAGEMENT

MAC address is used by ISPs for a variety of use-cases. These include network management and troubleshooting by correlating logs for a certain device over multiple days, parental control to enforce certain rules for certain devices and network optimization. In addition MAC addresses are used for security purposes such as whitelist/blacklisting as well as port-forwarding and more. Randomizing MAC addresses, while it will increase user’s privacy it will limit the effectiveness of many services ISPs can provide and hence will cause lower revenue and increase technical support costs. Read more here.

FOR HOSPITALITY: BALANCING CONSUMER PRIVACY AND NETWORK MANAGEMENT

The Hotel / Hospitality industry, like many others, is concerned with both guest digital privacy and a personalized, high-quality guest experience. For years, a variety of hotel systems have been able to rely on a device’s MAC address as a method of positively identifying a device, and thus a guest, to deliver a more seamless, high quality, guest experience. However, more recently, device manufacturers have been taking more concrete steps to ensure user privacy and one of those is to randomize device MAC addresses. These actions, though extremely helpful for user privacy, will come at a very real cost to guests, properties and the supporting industry. Read more here.

THE LEVL-ID: A BALANCE OF PRIVACY AND IDENTIFICATION

At LEVL, we take a novel approach to device identification. LEVL uses a full-stack approach, leveraging data from all 7 layers of the OSI model to create a LEVL-ID, a unique identifier for every device on the network. The LEVL-ID is created passively, it is not stored on the device and it is never transmitted over the air directly. As a result, it is highly effective in preserving consumer privacy while still identifying the device. LEVL-IDs are constructed in a manner to localize them to a network. Thus, there is little value to bad actors to collect LEVL-IDs. As a result, LEVL-IDs are privacy friendly, easy to implement, and cost effective. Lastly, LEVL-ID does not depend on legacy device identifiers such as the MAC address and remains persistent even if the MAC address changes frequently.