WiFi Watchdog

We are the SensibleDTU research group at Technical University of Denmark.

In 2013 we have handed out 1000 smartphones to our students (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0095978) to find out how they form networks of friendships (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0100915), how they move in public space (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2641283), as well as how ideas and illnesses spread among them.

Sometimes seemingly innocent data can reveal a great deal about you. This app is just one example of this: the WiFi routers your phone sees during normal operation can be mapped to physical locations with great precision, and out of thousands that you see every day, just a few are necessary to reconstruct most of your mobility.

The problem is that we are not the only ones with access to such data. Last time we checked, 17 out of 20 top games on Android Play Store also require this information.

Choose wisely - if you avoid apps, which require access to your location, you should also avoid apps with access to WiFi information. Hopefully soon this app will stop working because the permission policy of the app store and Android will have been updated. Until then, remember: any app with just WiFi permission can track your location (although they don't necessary do). Find out more in the article we published: http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.06311.

Our privacy policy is simple. We only store your IP address for 24 hours when you connect to our server and we do not associate it with the names of routers which you have seen. That's it.

Find us on twitter:

https://www.twitter.com/sapiezynski - @sapiezynski

https://www.twitter.com/h0pbeat - @h0pbeat

https://www.twitter.com/radugate - @radugatej, and

https://www.twitter.com/suneman - @suneman