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And with more of these, you could track where everyone is all the time!

Here's a camera based video people counter.[1] This is a bit less intrusive.

[1] https://github.com/saimj7/People-Counting-in-Real-Time



Given manufacturer’s trends of enabling the privacy feature of randomizing the MAC address every n minutes, it would take some serious effort and analysis to reverse these general trends into individuals. I’ve linked a relevant article in the bibliography about these kinds of attacks [1] but in general, at least with user numbers in the hundreds, it would be very difficult.

[1]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9369628


Just skimming that paper, it doesn't look like they made use of any kind of fingerprinting. The paper below shows how BLE devices can be profiled to extract a potentially unique fingerprint. I don't know how well this would scale to large numbers of devices, but I'd imagine if you used such a fingerprint, you could dramatically improve the association between randomized MAC addresses even if the fingerprint is not 100% unique.

https://inria.hal.science/hal-02359914/document




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