alt Hacker NewsCaptive Wi-Fi has changed at cafes and businesses. My experience is, Starbucks blocks local hot-spots. You're forced to use their Captive Wi-Fi and only their Wi-Fi. This formerly wasn't an allowed thing.
Are they mining data? Does this promote some ambiance? There's probably 3 different answers, and you'll normally hear 1 is the reason.
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How do they block them? The only way I can think of would be signal jamming, which is super illegal and would have the FCC on them like brown on coffee beans…
It's probably more to do with QOS algorithms. Unless you're not browsing TLS-protected sites there isn't much data to mine. Wifi eavesdropping is mostly a solved problem these days. If starbucks could MITM your wifi connections to mine data we'd have bigger problems.
What’s a local hotspot and how does Starbucks block it? It’s illegal to jam signals (assuming a “local hotspot” is some Wi-Fi network from a neighboring business or center?)