We launched Trailsense today. It counts hikers by fingerprinting wifi probe requests, no cameras, no raw data leaving the node.
The technical side of this felt solved once we had the anonymization right. But it's still a device in the woods listening for signals from every phone that walks by, whether that phone's owner knows it or not.
Trails can get busy, and others stay empty, but how do you know? We built Trailsense to answer that.
Our solar-powered nodes count hikers using anonymized wifi probe requests, the pings a phone sends while scanning for known networks. A dashboard turns those counts into a clear view of how busy each trail is over time. No cameras, no app for hikers to install, and no personal data ever leaving the device.
