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Party Squasher: guest occupancy counter for homes

partysquasher.com

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Re: Party Squasher: guest occupancy counter for homes

#21

Post by dylan604 »

petesergeant wrote: post #15

Neat. I stayed at an Airbnb recently with a microphone based one, which was easy to unplug, and led me to give a 0-star review, because fuck you for putting an internet-enabled microphone in my space. I’d be much more comfortable with this.

I'd be tempted to just start carrying some sort of small speaker that plays very disturbing sounds at a volume the mic would hear, but not enough to bother people in the same room. Basically, the same tape the US military plays to tortur...intensely interrogate enemy combatants.

Re: Party Squasher: guest occupancy counter for homes

#22

Post by dylan604 »

So what happens if I'm a tech nerd that has so many devices that I bring with me? Laptop, phone, tablet, streaming device, second phone because gotta keep work/life separate, and then spouse's phone, tablet, then 2.5 kids worth of tablets.

Based on device count alone, we're partying like it's 1999.

Re: Party Squasher: guest occupancy counter for homes

#27

Post by altairprime »

kedikedi wrote: post #4

Interesting approach. I have a feeling that this is intended for sparsely built houses (the typical american housing maybe?) since in a dense European city I’d imagine it would pick up tons of cell phone signals from other people in their own homes or, say, from people visiting the downstairs coffee shop terrace.

One could safely assume that such a tool would likely be illegal in the EU, anyways, since that’s rather a lot of data collection activity to expose a homeowner to.

Re: Party Squasher: guest occupancy counter for homes

#28

Post by mdasen »

Domenic_S wrote: post #11
mik3y wrote: post #5

Thought this was going to be an mmWave sensor with an "AirBnB host friendly" UI of some sort.. turns out it's just a network sniffer? Seems.. defeatable. > How it Works > > Party Squasher uses the presence of mobile phones > as a proxy for the presence of people. You start by > connecting our small sensor to your property’s internet > router. [...]

Sounds like it's an 802.11 monitor mode packet sniffer, recording probe requests (which have a MAC address associated with them). Connecting to the internet is probably just to hook up to their cloud service. Defeatable by airplane mode/wifi off/phone off, sure.

As you note, it would be defeatable by putting your phone into airplane mode. However, if you're having a party with 30 people, I doubt you'll be able to get a majority of them to turn off their phones. If the owner gets ping'd if there are more than 10 people, I think it'd be hard to get 20 out of 30 people to turn off their phones before entering the party. Even if they turn it off after arriving, the box might have already registered that the device was there. I think enough people would think "what's the harm" or "I don't want to miss texts from people" that it would be hard to get people to comply with turning off their phones.

Re: Party Squasher: guest occupancy counter for homes

#29

Post by kbos87 »

We need a name for this genre of companies. Their value proposition is completely based on you not knowing that the noise monitors they feature centrally in their strawman argument have also had their core feature for years.

Minut is the example I’m thinking of. It’s a small sensor for short term rentals that monitors noise levels, but also “crowd risk”, which is essentially measuring the number of devices nearby in the same way that this thing is. It also has a variety of other sensors onboard (it detects motion, humidity, and smoking… it can even distinguish between cigarette and marijuana smoke.)

Whatever you think about this technology aside, this company’s pitch that they are the “first guest occupancy counter” is a flat out lie. They are simply focusing their positioning on one feature available in an existing category of products that have a lot more to offer.

Re: Party Squasher: guest occupancy counter for homes

#30

Post by stevenicr »

Pretty sure I saw a couple of party detection devices shown on some netflix airBnb creators show like 8(?) years ago. (show had a firehouse in DC revamp, then another episode with a california(?) 70's pad with 70s furniture, decor, pool.. definitely the kind of place you may want to party, yet the owners were hesitant to list it if they could not prevent that...

I believe they used a combination of sound dB meters and carbon monoxide detectors to determine approx number of people and how loud they were.

Sounds like this thing is another interesting way to gauge similar activities, which is interesting, but I would shy away from calling it first.

Maybe 'unapproved gathering detection alerts you if too many cell phones are detected on or near your property' - I dunno.

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