Hate to break it to everybody but if you've got more than one wireless access point on your network, you can track peoples' locations anyway. Not really in real time, not really with any decent granularity, but I can dump the .csv out of my Unifi network and tell you when GRETAS iPHONE goes from my parking lot WAP to my lobby WAP to my lounge WAP. Does it give me GPS? Nope. Does it give me real-time intelligence? Nope. But then, neither does this stuff.

SpotterEDU has two "success stories" on its page - the depressed kid who only left her dorm for meals and "Jeff Rubin taught a large lecture of over 300 students and was able to run a report a few weeks in and identify the students missing the most class." This is pretty much what it lets you do - analyze signal strength data after the fact. If they were serious they'd geofence it: security gets an alert if a student is more than 150 feet from classrooms they're attending, for example. THAT is good and Orwellian but nobody's going to bother because that means someone has to react to the data in realtime and someone has to have the responsibility of choosing to react or not react to the data. So really, all this lets 'em do is check attendance.

At a community college level you can't take a class without f'n roll call. Part of it is because there are Running Start kids in there and they're minors. Part of it is because there are work programs that require attendance for the subsidies to pay out. Part of it is because now that every white male is a potential active shooter they need attendance lists to triage mass murders. And a depressing amount of it is because every bad grade is an opportunity to litigate so collegiate performance is making a hard shift from subjective to objective.

SpotterEDU’s terms of use say its data is not guaranteed to be “accurate, complete, correct, adequate, useful, timely, reliable or otherwise.”

I mean, that's just a shitty app. If I'm requiring you to run my app, and I'm requiring you to run my bluetooth hotspots, but I'm not required to guarantee the veracity of their handshake? get outta here.