From what I understand, the pineapple impersonates SSIDs a wifi user is used to seeing so if someone was interested in doing some sniffing, an unknowing user would connect to it. Now what if someone is in a coffee shop, airport or hotel and they have been there before so their laptop theoretically would already be aware of the network. If there is a man in the middle doing some sniffing, would there be two instances of the sameSSID when a user is looking for a wireless network? If so, how would one distinguish one from the other? Some venues like airports use an SSID related to their name but there is no real sign on. You are taken to a portal before you get to any other site.
How would one know if they were going through a man in the middle or not?