Neat. But a bit of realism is needed, given that this is Chicago.

FTA: “The Array of Things is not counting MAC addresses on smartphones”

The government doesn’t need to count MAC addresses to see where one is or has been. They already have access to the phone location data from your friendly cell phone provider. Plus anyone with an Android or iOS product in their pocket is extremely likely to already be sharing the same with those respective companies.

However, this array could (and should) track MAC address propagation from an area to the next to see how fast traffic (vehicular and otherwise) is moving. Sounds to me like the illusion of preservation of privacy is preventing such a feature from being implemented.

FTA: “The image from the camera never gets stored or transmitted”

Yes. And a few lines of code can change that. Isn’t this the city that wanted a camera on every other light pole? Or was that only for those neighborhoods that were not quite as equal as others? On the upside the network is unlikely to have the bandwidth for wholesale image propagation, though the processing capabilities are likely sufficient for reasonably decent facial recognition (and that wouldn’t take “storing” or “transmitting” images).

Did I mention that this is Chicago?