It remains to be seen to me what information is really being gathered here that wasn't already available. If you want to know where people are, geographic population demographics and residential density data is generally publicly available in most places. If you want to know where they're moving to, vehicular traffic, bus and train ridership, and airline ticket sales are also public knowledge.
This is simply providing another way to say "humans who connect to WiFi networks exist here, here, and here, and move to here, here, and here." Without knowing who actually owns and uses each device, it's hard to see how you can really call this mass surveillance, which typically implies the leakage of information that people expected to be private. The fact that my residential address has a WiFi access point in it does not seem to me to be private information. I can readily guess with at least 99% accuracy that every residential and business address in existence with visible furnishing, decoration, regular cleaning, trash outside, or any other sign of human occupancy, has a WiFi access point attached to it.
The threat they mention of intimate partner abuse and stalking whereby an attacker knows a specific person's MAC address and is able to track them if they move but retain the same device is a more obviously real concern, but easily mitigated by simply not retaining the same WiFi access point when you move to a new residential address.
This is simply providing another way to say "humans who connect to WiFi networks exist here, here, and here, and move to here, here, and here." Without knowing who actually owns and uses each device, it's hard to see how you can really call this mass surveillance, which typically implies the leakage of information that people expected to be private. The fact that my residential address has a WiFi access point in it does not seem to me to be private information. I can readily guess with at least 99% accuracy that every residential and business address in existence with visible furnishing, decoration, regular cleaning, trash outside, or any other sign of human occupancy, has a WiFi access point attached to it.
The threat they mention of intimate partner abuse and stalking whereby an attacker knows a specific person's MAC address and is able to track them if they move but retain the same device is a more obviously real concern, but easily mitigated by simply not retaining the same WiFi access point when you move to a new residential address.