Party Squasher: guest occupancy counter for homes | Hacker News Reader

Party Squasher: guest occupancy counter for homes

partysquasher.com

The new thing in Corporate controlled apartments is they have your apartment fully set up with remote telemetry, which also means they have WiFi Hotspots installed in all units. From there, they track things like the hot water tank, water in the sink, heating/cooling, etc..

I can see "PartySquasher" type technology becoming a feature in w/corporate controlled apartments. Mine is particularly intrusive (Park Place, San Mateo) - in that they also have all the doors digitalized as well as the entry into mailroom/complex via Bluetooth authentication. Just to make sure you have to digitally log in to your apartment - they also lock you in 120 seconds after entering, so you can't just leave your door unlocked.

You just know that this is absolutely the future of housing once private equity starts to dominate the corporate landlord space.

Gosh that's just awful. "Hi ghshepard, welcome home! Before we unlock your door for you, please watch this 30 second ad! Oh my, once a day you'll need to fill out a survey - what did you think of the ad?" "your commons room use is 5 minutes over the limit. you'll need to pay the $200 excess use charge, or you can upgrade to our UNLIMITED commons room plan, which lets you use the commons room for five hours a month"

Even better - and I kid you not - the first notice I had that my door no longer accepted my key was when I came home one night and there was a new digital lock on the door. It was late, and thankfully I was able to find some details in my spam folder that let me get into my apartment that night.

They did the same thing to me a second time with the bluetooth connection to the apartment complex - and were very passive aggressive about let me know how to activate the application. Initially told me I had "a problem with email" if I hadn't properly read their single random-sourced mention of a new app I needed to install on my phone a couple weeks earlier that I had instantly dropped into a spam bucket as obvious phishing.

I really hate corporate apartment management.

This is pretty clever but could also lead to the greatest parties in recent history.

Very soon the norm will be to keep your phone off at any airbnb party.

Imagine an app that would alert you if a bunch of your friends turned off their phones at a location. Airbnb Party!

why turn off the phone? Just disable wifi???

Disabling WiFi on many phones doesn't actually disable wifi scanning - shopping centres use this to track recurring visits

Yes location services typically uses wifi scanning first, and GPS only when high accuracy location updates are needed. (since its lower battery drain and faster)

you're confusing disabling wifi and the temporary disconnect mode.

The nice thing of intrusive sensors that sense things that are not sensed by your usual senses, like this, is that it's easy to saturate them while faking innocence. I.e., set up your laptop so that it does many scans and/or associations to the local WiFi, and then some light internet activity (the usual suspects: WhatsApp, Facebook, etc). The detector triggers, the landlord shows up to check what's going on, you show it's just you and your partner. Do that a few times until the landlord is convinced that the sensor is malfunctioning; unless they are IT technicals themselves, which I guess won't happen often, they will have a hard time understanding what's really going on, even more to prove it.

what's the end goal? To convince the owner that the occupancy counter is malfunctioning for a couple days and then after that throw a big party? Maybe you can just ask if it's okay to host a party before renting..

Whose end goal? The tenant's goal might be, as you say, to convince the landlord that the device is unreliable, and cheat on the rent agreement. If you want to cheat, as I guess some people do (otherwise there wouldn't be need for a monitor), asking if it's ok to host a party isn't a good solution.

My personal end goal is speculation. Each time a technology is discussed it's pretty automatic for me to think about what are its weaknesses and strengths, and how its behavior can be subverted or the same thing can be used in unintended ways.

I could definitely see the use from a landlord's perspective but of course would hate this as a tenant.

My last landlord wanted me to sign a lot of arbitrary (and mostly unenforceable) rules. One was "no guests without permission". I read it over and asked him, "so if I have someone sleep over, you want me to call you on your cell?" He scratched out the rule.

All of my leases have had a variation of that clause, except it usually requires guests get permission if staying longer than X nights within Y time period because the landlord doesn't want the tenant to accidentally allow someone to establish legal tenancy (making it difficult to evict them even if the landlord can convict you).

This isn't a landlord / tenant device. It's for AirBnB hosts.

¿Porque no los dos?

There’s no reason for a landlord to get one of these since they aren’t allowed to stop people from having parties and even tracking this could be a violation of rental laws in most countries.

In my experience as a tenant, landlords don't tend to follow rental law too closely. I understand the incentives and how difficult tenants can be, and I don't envy their position (I've been on the other side too, helping manage an apartment complex). But most tenants don't push back hard enough for landlords to follow the letter.

So if I'm pissed at the neighboring AirBnB I just need to broadcast a lot of Wi-Fi network discovery queries (With different MACs of course)?

So what happens if I'm a tech nerd that has so many devices that I bring with me? Laptop, phone, tablet, streaming device, second phone because gotta keep work/life separate, and then spouse's phone, tablet, then 2.5 kids worth of tablets.

Based on device count alone, we're partying like it's 1999.

Same thought. It's unlikely I won't have at least 4 devices just myself. I assumed some sort of thermal sensor would be used here, assuming one device per person is ridiculous.

Thermal sensor won't help without advanced smarts, those devices are hot too!

The property owner/manager gives you a call and says hey are you throwing a party

Neat. I stayed at an Airbnb recently with a microphone based one, which was easy to unplug, and led me to give a 0-star review, because fuck you for putting an internet-enabled microphone in my space. I’d be much more comfortable with this.

I'd be tempted to just start carrying some sort of small speaker that plays very disturbing sounds at a volume the mic would hear, but not enough to bother people in the same room. Basically, the same tape the US military plays to tortur...intensely interrogate enemy combatants.

Pretty sure I saw a couple of party detection devices shown on some netflix airBnb creators show like 8(?) years ago. (show had a firehouse in DC revamp, then another episode with a california(?) 70's pad with 70s furniture, decor, pool.. definitely the kind of place you may want to party, yet the owners were hesitant to list it if they could not prevent that...

I believe they used a combination of sound dB meters and carbon monoxide detectors to determine approx number of people and how loud they were.

Sounds like this thing is another interesting way to gauge similar activities, which is interesting, but I would shy away from calling it first.

Maybe 'unapproved gathering detection alerts you if too many cell phones are detected on or near your property' - I dunno.

That's how it works.

"Party Squasher counts the number of mobile phones in and around your house."

I wonder if it's smart enough to detect if the neighbour is having a party or if people will start to get bogus Airbnb complaints from properties with these devices.

Carbon dioxide* detectors, people don’t produce carbon monoxide

Well, actually, that's untrue. Carbonylhemoglobin formation due to metabolic and environmental CO, and subsequent breakdown releases CO. There are, in fact, CO breath analyzers. Smokers and smoke inhalation patients have much higher levels, whereas ordinary healthy people have detectable, nonzero levels. For the point of detecting crowds, it's still meaningless.

>> I believe they used a combination of sound dB meters and carbon monoxide detectors to determine approx number of people and how loud they were.

> Carbon dioxide* detectors, people don’t produce carbon monoxide

Wouldn't smokers produce carbon monoxide when they smoked? That might be something they'd be legitimately interested in.

Thanks for the note! I tend to get all those things mixed up, I will try to remember this.

We need a name for this genre of companies. Their value proposition is completely based on you not knowing that the noise monitors they feature centrally in their strawman argument have also had their core feature for years.

Minut is the example I’m thinking of. It’s a small sensor for short term rentals that monitors noise levels, but also “crowd risk”, which is essentially measuring the number of devices nearby in the same way that this thing is. It also has a variety of other sensors onboard (it detects motion, humidity, and smoking… it can even distinguish between cigarette and marijuana smoke.)

Whatever you think about this technology aside, this company’s pitch that they are the “first guest occupancy counter” is a flat out lie. They are simply focusing their positioning on one feature available in an existing category of products that have a lot more to offer.

This seems fine for short-term rentals, which is the target audience.

I don’t think that I would personally mind it if this were installed at an airbnb that I was staying at.

As long as the data wasn't being funneled and corelated.

Thought this was going to be an mmWave sensor with an "AirBnB host friendly" UI of some sort.. turns out it's just a network sniffer? Seems.. defeatable.

    > How it Works
    > 
    > Party Squasher uses the presence of mobile phones
    > as a proxy for the presence of people.  You start by
    > connecting our small sensor to your property’s internet
    > router. [...]

Sounds like it's an 802.11 monitor mode packet sniffer, recording probe requests (which have a MAC address associated with them). Connecting to the internet is probably just to hook up to their cloud service.

Defeatable by airplane mode/wifi off/phone off, sure.

I wonder if you could trigger false alarms at will. At what point would the owners stop responding?

Phone off maybe. Android still uses Wifi when Wifi is turned off, as part of it's location tracking service. I loathe it. Btw if you toggle location off enough times, Android will eventually stop nagging you about it.

Let me use my device the way I want you f--- creeps!

I thought there was a separate wifi scanning setting for that behavior?

Yeah, you can turn off the setting that makes it so turning wifi off actually does that instead of leaving it on but telling you and your apps that it's off.

I could live with that, but what really chafes my bits is how your apps can't get so much as an NMEA string without you turning the creepy tracking telemetry that pipes data on all the SSIDs and Bluetooth beacons around you back to the mothership back on. And having Location turned off breaks many apps for no good reason.

As you note, it would be defeatable by putting your phone into airplane mode. However, if you're having a party with 30 people, I doubt you'll be able to get a majority of them to turn off their phones. If the owner gets ping'd if there are more than 10 people, I think it'd be hard to get 20 out of 30 people to turn off their phones before entering the party. Even if they turn it off after arriving, the box might have already registered that the device was there. I think enough people would think "what's the harm" or "I don't want to miss texts from people" that it would be hard to get people to comply with turning off their phones.

Or just cover the box with aluminum foil and keep your phones on…

Relatively sensible and privacy-preserving compared to what I first imagined - cameras and AI AI AI

We had this at parakeet back in 2019 Idk if calling this the first is really appropriate.

Isn't Wi-Fi Sensing built-in in next-gen Wi-Fi specs? It doesn't even need to interact with your own phone, so no luck with turning it off.

why are Landlords like this?

Parties don’t maximize profit. No fun is an externality of short-term rental apps.

yeah, but you do have to think about parties that get out of hand

"this is why we can't have nice things," because of that small %

Isn't there a legitimate problem with people renting AirB&Bs to specifically to throw wild parties, so they don't have to give a shit about the neighbors?

I mean, having your neighbor's place all the sudden turn into an unauthorized hotel is annoying enough, but it's be even worse if the hotel guests are also throwing parties. It seems like this devices is actually a conscientious way to try to limit those negative externalities.

Tail risk, basically. Amplified by cognitive biases that make horror stories more salient.

Why not just go with the old thing of treat the space appropriately and don't be a nuisance to neighbors. Really this sucks -- peasants are not allowed to gather in groups larger than 5 -- corporate landlords are a blight.

Because then you have to litigate a nebulous definition of nuisance, which is expensive and time consuming. Number of people is clear and easy to litigate.

Gross.

Genius

Interesting approach. I have a feeling that this is intended for sparsely built houses (the typical american housing maybe?) since in a dense European city I’d imagine it would pick up tons of cell phone signals from other people in their own homes or, say, from people visiting the downstairs coffee shop terrace.

The 'fix' for that (applicable in some areas, not so much in others) would be to remember phone ID's and focus on numbers (and strength) of new ID's during the rental period.

A downstairs coffee shop would be a semi periodic flux of a particular size, a party would be a surge over and above that flux and persisting outside of coffee shop hours.

Again, pattern learning is only applicable in some scenarios .. but effective enough in those.

Phones randomize mac addresses so that probably wouldn't work. Presumably you can get a read on how many devices are scanning at once, but not track them long term.

From their website:

> Our service is ideal for detached homes, where our calibration (small, medium or large homes) lets the sensor distinguish between mobile phones on your property and those nearby. It is not suitable to homes (e.g. apartments) that share walls with other homes.

One could safely assume that such a tool would likely be illegal in the EU, anyways, since that’s rather a lot of data collection activity to expose a homeowner to.

They claim on the website that their product is GDPR compliant. They aren't collecting any personally identifiable data.

Mmhm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com