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Comment by rf-monitor | Hacker News Reader

I'm building an RF monitoring system.

It can tell you things like:

- The car that parked nearby last night coincided with "Chad's Galaxy Buds" with MAC address aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff. The buds also drove by briefly the previous night.

- Alert on sudden cross-specturm interference (e.g. burglars using a cheap jammer to knock out WiFi cameras).

- Alert on known device contact loss (powered off / left premises).

- Review device movement across a campus/neighborhood (using multiple RF pods).

I have a working PoC. It can run on a low-power computer (e.g. RPi) supporting multiple RF sensors (BT/BLE/WiFi). Has a web UI. Can publish events to an external security system. Currently working on an LLM interface to make it easy for a non-technical operator to set policies and ask questions.

Could be sold as an appliance system or a license for a DIY build.

Angel investors are welcome to contact rf-monitor@tuta.com

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Here's an idea for you -- property evaluation. It's not hyper-specific to your monitoring system, but it would be very interesting to understand before buying a house:

1. How loud the neighbhorhood is over time periods, eg sat night vs tues morning 2. air quality, enviromental factors, etc. 3. What percentage of vehicles/people/devices are net-new (over a time period) versus recoccuring, as identified by MAC.

I would personally pay in the low hundreds to understand overall loudness levels for a house I am about to buy, although I am fairly sensitive to sound. My wife would probably pay for the new-new people metrics.

IMO, you could charge a per-device report and deploy a unit for a week, much like a home inspector report. It would give you a revenue stream on the buy or sell side, and let you own your devices as you iterate on the sensor package.

Anyways, just my 2c, gl with your PoC.

Very cool. Do you happen to have any kind of mailing list, blog, etc?

Not until I have an MVP. But I'm happy to answer emails.

Could this be used to identify masked ICE agents?

And Santa too.

most phones these days randomize bt-le mac address every few minutes

Device manufacturers go to a great deal of effort to ensure their devices cannot be identified this way. I'm certain SOME don't have such protection but I would think many do.

Can you say exactly what you can detect with this?

When it comes to smartphones, you are mostly correct.

When it comes to peripherals (earbuds, dashcams, car audio, etc), it's a totally different story. For user convenience these devices happily broadcast useful names, manufacturer data, etc.

What are you hoping this tool will do for the world?

I hope it shifts a little power back to the people trying to protect a business or a household.

So you collect PII in a public space and use correlations to deanonymize, link and collect further PII. A GDPRinator 9000.

I'm not making early legal judgements. Feature pruning can happen later per client jurisdiction.

But in common sense terms, the privacy implications will be no different than virtually every outdoor security camera you pass by fifty times a day.

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