In my opinion that would be a great feature for presence detection of friends and non-family members. It could also prove to be a great tool for security. If you ever have anyone break in, you could probably report it to the police with the IMSI #id of the burglar.
I am not able to do such an integration into Hass, but maybe someone else can. The necessary hardware to do this is 8$ on Ebay.
I don’t think this will be very useful. Have a look at this issue where it’s described what the scanner is actually doing. Especially the last comment is what I’m referring to:
My IMSI catcher only listen cell towers. But it’s not the case of all IMSI catcher.
Yes, you don’t need to run over all places and you could be at few kilometers of the cell tower.
So frist of all you’ll get a lot of noise (irrelevant mobile devices). And considering that the cell tower could have a pretty big coverage, it would assume you are at home, even though you’re actually having a beer with your neighobur.
I do see a bit of value though regarding the monitoring of nearby devices in case some one broke into your house. Might be useful to be able to narrow down who’s been there. But then again, there may be an aweful lot people around in urban areas. And I’m unsure how the police would react if you tell them “It probably one of those 1.000 IMSIs I have monitored with my (legal?) IMSI scanner”.
I do think imsi catchers are legal in most countries as long as one doesnt try to listen or break encryption. If it was only to pick up cell phones in your home or just adjacent to your home then it would be useful.
