Who tracks your devices? Find them with TRACE!

Today, most of us carry several wireless devices every day, including smartphones, headphones, smartwatches, tablets, and laptops. These devices constantly communicate with each other to make our lives easier, whether by automatically switching headphones between devices or helping us find lost keys with an AirTag.

But this convenience depends on invisible wireless communication happening all around us. The networks that emerge in this way are called “crowdsourced finding networks” and have not yet been studied extensively. Even though the data in these networks is encrypted, the timing, size, and certain patterns can still reveal a surprising amount of information about us. In our research, we investigate what these hidden signals can tell us about nearby devices, how people move through the world, and when a device may pose a threat to someone’s privacy or safety.

At our booth, you can explore how invisible tracking works in practice. Try our app for detecting suspicious tracking devices in real time and see how machine learning can identify and follow wireless devices in crowded environments such as train stations, revealing how easily tracking can happen without people ever noticing.