thetickletrunk

I don't think so. I'd been asked to look into it and it seems that any concepts like that are very much in an infancy stage.

I don't know wifi very well, but I don't believe there's anything that triangulates a user's position. It's more based on where signal is best. An access point in a school 3m away might be less desirable than one 5m away because of walls and more people/traffic on the one 3m away.

And even if there were mechanisms to track position, my understanding of enterprise wifi leads me to believe they don't have GPS X/Y/Z positioning available to be determined by satellite or input by a tech on install.

One day, if our phones had the right wifi chipsets, we might be able to say you and I walked within 3 feet of one another on network X.

It'd be a whole other ballgame to say we did that on the 10th or 13th or 113th floor of some tower.

edit! and I believe most android phones have a default setting to spoof their wifi MAC address until/unless they voluntarily connect to a network. Forget about contact tracking, but from a marketing and advertising perspective, your phone in your pocket at Walmart not even trying to connect to wifi, but with your wifi adapter enabled, would still send the odd "hello!" message to the access points in the store with your device unique MAC address. So even if you didn't connect to Walmart's wifi, if you didn't go airplane mode on the way in, they'd still know somebody stood in front of the new TV display for 3 minutes. Since more recent versions of Android, it would prevent Walmart from knowing it was your phone specifically.

https://source.android.com/devices/tech/connect/wifi-mac-randomization

So the wifi angle to contact tracing is already kinda dead because privacy controls in mobile operating systems put something like that in to stymie marketers.

Any nifty UFO sightings up there?

Why a whole OS and not an app-ified experience? What does maintaining a whole OS add to your vision than, say, a self-contained webserver?

I'd see people more likely to have (and have a need for) an Android phone. I'd think it makes sense to be geared towards it in some capacity. Keyboards and monitors aren't easy to come by.

I've not heard of you before. Not to come off mean, but...

What lessons of the OLPC project's shortcomings are you incorporating into your strategy? How do you differentiate yourselves from what OLPC was? I might be off base, but it seems like a comparison you'll encounter whether it's rational or not.

Your wifi scans still don't provide your real MAC so scanning from a device doesn't let the access point know that it was your device that scanned it.

And some website has SSIDs - which is cool - but doesn't position anyone.

Contact tracing for the purpose of seeing who came within close proximity to one another for something like this virus is entirely different.

Consider that a hospital or hardware store has 1 SSID advertised by many access points. If all we had was Wigle's map, we'd have to say that every student at Harvard was "close" enough to the 1 person at Harvard with COVID19 so the whole university should isolate.

The difference between cellular and wifi is that cellular is intended to cover a chunk of map so there's a fighting chance to start with that position could be established. Wifi is meant to cover space. Wigle might know where Harvard's student wifi was by lat/long, but it still has no clue if you and I were at the same coordinates on different floors and thus not capable of communicating a disease.

Wifi just can't do it with the technology in the access points and in our devices. If it could, it would be done.

Beamforming might help. You'd still need something like a compass in the access point to know in which direction the beam was formed.

And you still need to be "connected". What if your phone never connected? You've still got the problem of privacy controls being in place that actively try to not tie the wifi presence of your device to your personal identity.