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/

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).

Oh you made the code available too

https://github.com/aileenproject/aileen

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.

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.

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...

> 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.p...

>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!

Then people will do Probe Request scanning, which circumvents most MAC randomizations.

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?

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)

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-sen...

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.

Manna is a short story about the future of metric-driven employment culture.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

That's a great piece of sci-fi.

Would this theoretically be possible with femtocells and phone signals?

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.

RTL-SDR won't get you most LTE bands, 1800, 2100, 2600 MHz will be quite challenging.

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.

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.

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.