this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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Any reason this wouldn't work with cell towers?
Yes, it wouldn't really.
Right now the way this works is that a human body absorbs a certain about it wifi signal, so of the signal strength in a room dips and comes back up, someone walked through the room, for example. Couple this with what IPs and MAC addresses the router is connecting to, and Verizon can tell "human with laptop," or "human watching TV." So just "human body" or dog/cat are what it can detect. Verizon does try and sell this as a feature, as in a shit security feature.
So for cell towers, they're too far from people in an already chaotic environment to really be useful. Trees, cars, and a million other things can throw off trying to detect already minute changes in signal density. Not to mention that the signals from cell towers are much stronger, so harder to detect the changes.
Yes, however do you remember the big fuss over 5g tower tech coming from Huawei and how that is a security issue? Well turns out the 5g towers can employ beam forming for better connection with each phone. And the interesting thing is that AESA radars work much the same - so you can imagine what a nation wide network of these towers would provide for china in terms of air traffic information
Sure, but why bother?
Practically speaking, we all carry trackers in our pockets, attached to our phone number, email and social media. We already consent to giving away all that data, which basic ping triangulation also allows for fairly granular location tracking.
The wifi tracking method is helpful because it very granular in an otherwise opaque area. It tracks based on body size, who does what around the house, who specifically watched what on TV.
In that last comment, they said air traffic information. So think military aircraft movements.