Researchers are going to present an update to the Snoopy Project, a distributed mobile tracking and intelligence platform at Black Hat Brazil and ZeroNights Russia. Snoopy devices, called drones, collect mobile device data as a phone or tablet makes a Wi-Fi access point request, but also VPNs that data to a central server for correlation and analysis. The risks range from location-based marketing, which some view as a privacy violation, to dissident surveillance by oppressive governments. In a noteworthy experiment, the researchers collected 80,000 devices in a 60-minute span at a number of busy London hotspots such as Kings Cross and Oxford Street Tube stations.
Source: https://threatpost.com/snoopy-mobile-tracking-profiling-project-gets-a-boost/102639/