4 ms·

It sounds like a lot of people aren't too familiar with the "people counter". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_counter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People

by arayh 8y ago

It sounds like a lot of people aren't too familiar with the "people counter". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_counter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_counter It's commonly used by some retail and shopping malls to "estimate" traffic and conversion. It's great for determining peak times and visit duration. This kind of technology has been commercialized for some time now.

dpods 8y ago
My wife manages a retail store and they use this tech to track sales conversions by the hour. Gross sales / Number of people walking in the store broken out by hour. Each conversion rate for each hour is tied back to the manager on duty for that hour so they can see how effectively the store is managed. They also take weather into account since that has a strong effect on foot traffic for an outdoor mall.
- jen729w 8y ago
  Forgive me, but that sounds awful. Does she like this system? Genuinely curious if it works or if it just results in a pushy manager trying to get her numbers up?
  - __jal 8y ago
    Metric-driven automated employee tracking is everywhere. If you're a software engineer or similar at a tech company, be aware that you have a very cushy, unmonitored job by most comparisons. It isn't "just" Amazon warehouse employees and other low-paid folks. https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/telegraph-workplace-sensors#.akZ8dQxp6V https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/telegraph-workplace-sen...
    - politician 8y ago
      Manna is a short story about the future of metric-driven employment culture. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
      - visarga 8y ago
        That's a great piece of sci-fi.
    - burger_moon 8y ago
      One thing that most people don't realize at big tech companies is how much your time actually is monitored. The amount of tickets you close out, the amount of code reviews you publish, how many code reviews of other employees you're doing. There's a lot of metrics that are not openly discussed but are being tracked and watched to make sure you're performing at the same level as your peers.
  - karambahh 8y ago
    About 15 years ago, as a contractor, I did a field trip with the whole executive committee of a retail company, visiting several stores. We entered/exited the store several times to check out the general store appearance. After about ten exits/entrances, the clerks approached me to ask me to stop doing so as I was wrecking their purchase/visitor ratio. If you pay attention in a mall, you'll see employees crounching to avoid triggering the sensors (they're usually at 1.5m height)
- bigiain 8y ago
  I'm now considering building a battery powered RasPi device that'll rapidly switch the MAC address on the WiFi adaptor and masquerade as extremely busy periods as I walk through a shopping mall...
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    >rapidly switch the MAC address on the WiFi adaptor // Seems like you wouldn't need to do that, just do something akin to a DoS where the traffic is spoofed to contain a different MAC? I guess you'd need driver level access to the adaptor though. Or, maybe you can just send data whilst flipping random bits in the MAC address memory address location? Sounds like a fun project!
  - redwards510 8y ago
    > Pry-Fi comes with a War mode, which when enabled tries to make your Android device appear like dozens of people. Just wandering around an area under Wi-Fi location surveillance for a few minutes can ruin the tracking data for the period of your stay. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.chainfire.pryfi&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.chainfire.p...
  - gsich 8y ago
    Then people will do Probe Request scanning, which circumvents most MAC randomizations.
Nic56 8y ago
People counters for retail stores or airports are commonplace, true. Recently, humanitarian aid organisations began to show interest in using them, as well. They could use them for instance to manage refugee camps better or to understand migration routes. So we built a tool for the NGOs in this sector, with a very similar technology used by OP as basis: https://www.aileenproject.org/ https://www.aileenproject.org/ One key difference is that each Aileen box is a client, which will upload its findings to a server, so that NGO management staff can review it. Now that the basis is there (and being piloted), we hope to make it into a product tailored to the humanitarian aid sector. One key aspect is taking privacy seriously, others will drill down into the features that refugee camp managers tell us they'd need (for instance alerts if populations seem to be on a rapid move).
- not_a_hacker 8y ago
  Oh you made the code available too https://github.com/aileenproject/aileen https://github.com/aileenproject/aileen
  - Nic56 8y ago
    Oh yeah forgot to mention that. That also fits the humanitarian aid sector, we believe. Hopefully several NGOs can use the same tool later on.
bduerst 8y ago
Would this theoretically be possible with femtocells and phone signals?
- karambahh 8y ago
  Yes but rogue femto cells for this purpose have been ruled illegal in France and, I believe, all EU countries. Retailers rollbacked to IR sensors and now are slowly adopting counters on cameras with deep learning for disambiguation.
- bigiain 8y ago
  You don't want to get caught transmitting on cellular bands. You can do this with just receive though. A $10 USB TV Tuner and a Raspberry Pi will listen in to most cellular bands, and pull enough out of the over-the-air machine to machine chatter to do a similarly accurate job of counting cellphones... The cellular transmitters (can)_ run with a lot more power than Wi-Fi, and are on lower frequencies, so the range at which you'll detect them is significantly longer, which might make localised device counting less useable.
  - gsich 8y ago
    RTL-SDR won't get you most LTE bands, 1800, 2100, 2600 MHz will be quite challenging.
    - bigiain 8y ago
      If you buy carefully you can usually get 1800 on a TV Tuner with the right chipset. You can get to 2.4GHz with a satellite downconverter if you haven't by then bought in enough to buy a (way) more expensive SDR.
      - gsich 8y ago
        E400 goes to around 1.7 GHz, R820T to about 1.85 GHz, which doesn't cover the full LTE band, so yes it's pretty shit at the higher frequencies, 10$ won't get you anywhere there. But then you are not in the price range anymore.

by arayh 8y ago

dpods 8y ago

My wife manages a retail store and they use this tech to track sales conversions by the hour. Gross sales / Number of people walking in the store broken out by hour. Each conversion rate for each hour is tied back to the manager on duty for that hour so they can see how effectively the store is managed. They also take weather into account since that has a strong effect on foot traffic for an outdoor mall.

jen729w 8y ago
Forgive me, but that sounds awful. Does she like this system? Genuinely curious if it works or if it just results in a pushy manager trying to get her numbers up?
- __jal 8y ago
  Metric-driven automated employee tracking is everywhere. If you're a software engineer or similar at a tech company, be aware that you have a very cushy, unmonitored job by most comparisons. It isn't "just" Amazon warehouse employees and other low-paid folks. https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/telegraph-workplace-sensors#.akZ8dQxp6V https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/telegraph-workplace-sen...
  - politician 8y ago
    Manna is a short story about the future of metric-driven employment culture. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
    - visarga 8y ago
      That's a great piece of sci-fi.
  - burger_moon 8y ago
    One thing that most people don't realize at big tech companies is how much your time actually is monitored. The amount of tickets you close out, the amount of code reviews you publish, how many code reviews of other employees you're doing. There's a lot of metrics that are not openly discussed but are being tracked and watched to make sure you're performing at the same level as your peers.
- karambahh 8y ago
  About 15 years ago, as a contractor, I did a field trip with the whole executive committee of a retail company, visiting several stores. We entered/exited the store several times to check out the general store appearance. After about ten exits/entrances, the clerks approached me to ask me to stop doing so as I was wrecking their purchase/visitor ratio. If you pay attention in a mall, you'll see employees crounching to avoid triggering the sensors (they're usually at 1.5m height)
bigiain 8y ago
I'm now considering building a battery powered RasPi device that'll rapidly switch the MAC address on the WiFi adaptor and masquerade as extremely busy periods as I walk through a shopping mall...
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  >rapidly switch the MAC address on the WiFi adaptor // Seems like you wouldn't need to do that, just do something akin to a DoS where the traffic is spoofed to contain a different MAC? I guess you'd need driver level access to the adaptor though. Or, maybe you can just send data whilst flipping random bits in the MAC address memory address location? Sounds like a fun project!
- redwards510 8y ago
  > Pry-Fi comes with a War mode, which when enabled tries to make your Android device appear like dozens of people. Just wandering around an area under Wi-Fi location surveillance for a few minutes can ruin the tracking data for the period of your stay. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.chainfire.pryfi&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.chainfire.p...
- gsich 8y ago
  Then people will do Probe Request scanning, which circumvents most MAC randomizations.

Nic56 8y ago

People counters for retail stores or airports are commonplace, true. Recently, humanitarian aid organisations began to show interest in using them, as well. They could use them for instance to manage refugee camps better or to understand migration routes. So we built a tool for the NGOs in this sector, with a very similar technology used by OP as basis: https://www.aileenproject.org/ https://www.aileenproject.org/ One key difference is that each Aileen box is a client, which will upload its findings to a server, so that NGO management staff can review it. Now that the basis is there (and being piloted), we hope to make it into a product tailored to the humanitarian aid sector. One key aspect is taking privacy seriously, others will drill down into the features that refugee camp managers tell us they'd need (for instance alerts if populations seem to be on a rapid move).

not_a_hacker 8y ago
Oh you made the code available too https://github.com/aileenproject/aileen https://github.com/aileenproject/aileen
- Nic56 8y ago
  Oh yeah forgot to mention that. That also fits the humanitarian aid sector, we believe. Hopefully several NGOs can use the same tool later on.

bduerst 8y ago

Would this theoretically be possible with femtocells and phone signals?

karambahh 8y ago
Yes but rogue femto cells for this purpose have been ruled illegal in France and, I believe, all EU countries. Retailers rollbacked to IR sensors and now are slowly adopting counters on cameras with deep learning for disambiguation.
bigiain 8y ago
You don't want to get caught transmitting on cellular bands. You can do this with just receive though. A $10 USB TV Tuner and a Raspberry Pi will listen in to most cellular bands, and pull enough out of the over-the-air machine to machine chatter to do a similarly accurate job of counting cellphones... The cellular transmitters (can)_ run with a lot more power than Wi-Fi, and are on lower frequencies, so the range at which you'll detect them is significantly longer, which might make localised device counting less useable.
- gsich 8y ago
  RTL-SDR won't get you most LTE bands, 1800, 2100, 2600 MHz will be quite challenging.
  - bigiain 8y ago
    If you buy carefully you can usually get 1800 on a TV Tuner with the right chipset. You can get to 2.4GHz with a satellite downconverter if you haven't by then bought in enough to buy a (way) more expensive SDR.
    - gsich 8y ago
      E400 goes to around 1.7 GHz, R820T to about 1.85 GHz, which doesn't cover the full LTE band, so yes it's pretty shit at the higher frequencies, 10$ won't get you anywhere there. But then you are not in the price range anymore.