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Comment by mik3y | Hacker News Reader

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. [...]

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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…

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