MAC Address Anonymization for Crowd Counting

Research has shown that counting WiFi packets called probe requests (PRs) implicitly provides a proxy for the number of people in an area. In this paper, we discuss a crowd counting system involving WiFi sensors detecting PRs over the air, then extracting and anonymizing their media access control (MAC) addresses using a hash-based approach. This paper discusses an anonymization procedure and shows time-synchronization inaccuracies among sensors and hashing collision rates to be low enough to prevent anonymization from interfering with counting algorithms. In particular, we derive an approximation of the collision rate of uniformly distributed identifiers, with analytical error bounds.