Android wifi sniffer: find nearby devices

Question

There are a lot of public places where your mobile phone is used for tracking. Your mobile device is used as identifier, for example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23665490

Is it possible to use an Android device as scanner to find the MAC addresses of nearby mobile devices?

I've found examples to scan Access points on an Android device but was not able to find more information about scanning for other devices.

Answer 1

If you would like to capture all the traffic closer to your android you would need to put your wlan card in monitor mode . This is not always possible as you will need root access and will depend on the phone, in the nexus models it is usually easy. When your card is in monitor mode you will be able to capture all traffic with sniffers like shark.

But without monitor mode you can still do some things.

You can check the devices connected to a wifi network with tools like Fing, you will need to be connected to that network.

For collecting data from hotspots you can use wifiAnalyzer, but this will not reveal the clients of the network.

Furthermore you can create a map and submit data of the hotspots with wigle, this is call walldriving and you can check information about hotspots in https://wigle.net/