A new piece of surveillance kit is getting attention in the United States, and the idea behind it is worth understanding even if it never turns up here.
The product is called SignalTrace, marketed by the security firm Leonardo. It sits alongside an automatic number plate reader: while the camera records the vehicle, a second sensor picks up the wireless signals that nearby devices broadcast as they pass, such as Bluetooth from phones, smartwatches and earbuds, plus RFID tags. Pair the two and you no longer have only a record of a car. You have a record of which devices travelled in it, and which people tend to travel together.
Deployment so far looks small. Reports point to a handful of units in Oxon Hill, Maryland, and an earlier version of the technology appearing on a New York state contract price list. Leonardo says the system does not identify people. That claim rests on a narrow reading of the word identify: researchers working with a dataset of 1.5 million people found four points of time and place were enough to pick out 95 per cent of them.
Why a Sydney business should care
This is a product being sold overseas, not a breach and not something reported in Australia. The useful part is the pattern, and it applies to you today.
- Your devices are noisy. Staff phones, work utes and wearables advertise identifiers constantly. That is already how some shopping centre and car park analytics work. If you would rather not broadcast, turn Bluetooth off when it is not in use and switch off automatic joining of unknown Wi-Fi networks.
- Anonymous is a weak promise. If your business collects guest Wi-Fi logins, vehicle movements, door access logs or CCTV, treat it as personal information even when no name is attached. Keep it only as long as you actually need it, know who can access it, and be able to say why you hold it. That is broadly the test the Privacy Act asks of you, and it is the question a customer or an insurer will ask after an incident.
Neither step costs anything. Both shrink the amount of data about your people and your customers that is sitting somewhere you do not control.
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