Fingerprints and DNA are the foremost pieces of evidence used in identifying criminals in a court of law, but many experts believe it is not enough. If police were able to use WiFi devices from where an incident took place, then authorities could have access to information that could place people at the scene of a crime.
Information gathered by WiFi devices, like routers, could be used to identify criminals. Routers capture noise from smart phones, tablets and wearables, including failed and successful attempts to log onto a network, and the time in which they attempted to connect.
Furthermore, routers are able to obtain media access control (MAC) addresses from mobile technologies, which are unique for each user’s phone, laptop or tablet that they try to connect to a network with. Dan Blackman, a technical adviser to Western Australia Police, has described the data from WiFi devices as “gold” in terms of evidence for court.(1)
“These devices could hold a lot of information, but we’re not capturing it,” he said. “If we were to look at it from a purely legal perspective, we might be able to place a specific person at a specific location at a specific time.”(1)
