An Autonomous Reputation Framework for Physical Locations based on WiFi Signals

Online reviews are used on a large scale to assess the quality and reputation of urban venues like hotels, restaurants, museums, etc. However, contributing reviews requires manual effort in the digital world, undertaken by only a small fraction of a venue's visitors. In this paper, we present a framework that automatically assigns an offline reputation score by only relying on the physical presence of a user at a venue. In our approach, we passively capture the list of preferred WiFi networks (PNL) radiating from users smartphone as part of WiFi Probe requests in order to anonymously detect similar and recurrent users and to derive a personalised reputation score for an urban venue. By leveraging these ubiquitous WiFi radio signals, we seek to gather participation from a much broader set of visitors than online contributors.