sapienza/probe-requests

Mobile devices try to automatically switch to WiFi connectivity whenever possible. To facilitate this automatic process, they store the list of the names (SSID) of the networks the user typically connects to and, periodically, these SSIDs are sent in broadcast in the form of Probe Request to search for available networks. The following questions then rise naturally: "What do your smartphone probes say about you?"; "Is it possible to infer meaningful relationships among a group of people just using their smartphones' probes?". To answer all these questions, we organized a campaign of probe collection in Rome (Italy): We targeted a university campus as well as city-wide, national and international events. Our campaign lasted three months, and we managed to collect, using commodity hardware only, ~11 million probes sent by ~160 thousand different devices. The release contains anonymized traces in .pcap format. ; [e-mail]