BlueZoo Adds To Patent Stack For Its Passive WiFi Audience Measurement Tech

March 27, 2025 by Dave Haynes

The Silicon Valley audience measurement tech firm BlueZoo has been granted a seventh patent with the US Patent and Trademark Office, having to do with its use of what they call passive Wi-Fi technology to measure and log the presence and movement of people without risking privacy intrusion.

“With the revelations of misuse of the MAC addresses of smartphones for surveillance and the advent of GDPR promulgated by the European Union, it has become imperative for businesses to seek out measurement solutions that respect the privacy of consumers,” says Jan-Willem Korver, BlueZoo CTO, in announcing the patent. “Solutions based on smartphone location tracking via mobile apps are privacy-intrusive, as are camera-based solutions.  BlueZoo’s engineering team is committed to delivering technology to measure the presence and movement of people in a privacy-protected manner.”

Patent application 17/496,729, Mobile Device Detection and Tracking, has been approved and assigned patent number 11,727,443.

BlueZoo, says PR, delivers solutions for several markets, including out-of-home advertising where BlueZoo measures impression counts that media owners use to set the prices for advertising.  Retailers use BlueZoo to measure impressions delivered by in-store signage, most often promoting products sold in their stores.  Insurers use BlueZoo to measure and mitigate risk of slip, trip, and fall claims. Operating on a global scale, BlueZoo remains committed to delivering privacy-centric solutions, gathering no personally identifiable data, but still reporting granular real-time insights about impressions, viewers, and human occupancy.  

The patent is described as: A method for monitoring a visitor count in a domicile and reporting the visitor count to a user comprising:

• detecting, by a wireless communicator, wireless device broadcasts from wireless devices, the wireless device broadcasts include a device identifier used to connect to wireless networks, wherein the device identifier of a given wireless device broadcast identifies a particular wireless device of the wireless devices;
• communicating a number of unique device identifiers to a web server;
• determining, by the web server, the number of unique device identifiers exceeds a predetermined threshold; and
• transmitting, by the web server, a notification to a user device indicating the predetermined threshold has been exceeded.

This is how BlueZoo describes it in lay terms:

Mobile devices use primarily two technologies to communicate with other phone users: cellular networks and Wi-Fi networks. Wi-Fi networks are often preferred because Wi-Fi communications are widely available at no cost to the consumer and rarely impose connectivity limits. Over ninety-five percent (95%) of all mobile phones actively broadcast Wi-Fi probes, whether or not they are connected to a Wi-Fi access point. Mobile phones identify available networks by broadcasting “probes” that say “I am here; is anybody out there?”. The phone identifies itself by broadcasting its MAC address.