Your AirPods May Be Tracking You: SignalTrace and Surveillance (Podcast Transcript)

Your AirPods broadcast a signal. Now that signal can identify you.

Listen to the full episode or read the transcript below.

I want to start today with a question, and I want you to actually sit with it before I say another word.

If a machine could listen to you without ever needing your permission, would it ask?

Hold on to that. We're going to come back to it.

We live in a world where the most powerful technology ever built is being handed to you without instructions, without warnings, and without anyone asking whether it serves you or uses you.

That question has a name. The Virtuous Machine.

I'm Michael Routhier, and this is Tech 4 Grown-Ups, the show that believes technology should answer to human beings, not the other way around. This is the show the tech industry doesn't want you to hear. No corporate talking points, no sponsored opinions, just honest conversation.

Let's go.

The Device You Put On Without Thinking

Today we're talking about the thing sitting in your ears right now, or on your wrist. The device you put on this morning without thinking about it twice. Because why would you? It's just AirPods. It's just a smartwatch. It tells you your steps, plays your music, listens to your requests, and lets your family reach you whenever they need to.

But somewhere right now, a company has figured out how to turn that convenience into something else entirely.

There's a company called Leonardo, Leonardo US Cyber and Security Solutions, and they've built a system called SignalTrace.

Here's how they describe their own product in their own words, and I'm saying this verbatim: it's designed to identify people of interest by the signals emitted from their electronic devices they travel with; fitness trackers, smartwatches, RFID tags, signals from mobile phones.

Listen to that again with me, slowly.

Not vehicles. People.

This system pulls in the Bluetooth signal broadcasting quietly from your AirPods, your Apple Watch, your fitness tracker, and it plugs that directly into the license plate reader cameras already sitting on roads across the country.

So now ask yourself something. When you bought that smartwatch, when you put those AirPods in your ears for the first time, did you agree to also wear a tracking beacon for a government contractor?

No. Of course you didn't. Because nobody asked you to.

It Gets More Serious From Here

SignalTrace doesn't just catch a signal and forget it. It categorizes the device. It builds a profile. And according to Leonardo's own marketing, it can flag when two devices are consistently seen traveling together.

Think about that. Their language for this is "the discovery of convoys and other movement and travel patterns".

Let that phrase sit in the room for a second. Convoys. Movement patterns.

That's not asking where a car is. That's asking where you are. Who you spend time with, where you go, and how often you go there together.

That is a map of your relationships, built without your knowledge, using devices that you paid for because they made your life easier.

Now I want to ask you something Socrates might have asked, if he lived long enough to see what a smartwatch has become. Is a thing still a convenience if the price of that convenience is a version of yourself you never agreed to hand over?

Precision Over Panic

Now I want to be careful here, because precision matters more than panic.

As of right now, no state has confirmed a purchase of this exact upgraded version of SignalTrace. That matters. I won't tell you otherwise.

But here's what should still keep you up tonight.

This isn't Leonardo's first version of this technology. It used to be marketed under a different name, the Elsag EOC Plug. And by the company's own numbers, earlier versions of this system are already deployed with close to 4,000 agencies in more than 25 countries.

The infrastructure is already built. The relationships are already signed. The only new piece, the piece being marketed right now, while we're recording this episode, is the upgrade that identifies you personally through your devices.

And nowhere, I mean nowhere, in Leonardo's published materials is there any requirement that police get a warrant before accessing this data.

No warrant. Just access.

This Is Not Just an American Story

Now, I know this story is coming out of the United States right now. But I want to be very clear with you: this is not a story about America. This is a story about a logic, and that logic does not respect borders.

Let's look at North Korea for a moment. Citizens there are required by law to install a government surveillance app, Kwangmyong, directly onto their phones. Investigations into smuggled devices found phones that automatically screenshot the screen every five minutes, storing the images in a folder only government officials can open.

Sit with that. Images into a folder that only government officials can open.

Now let's look at Russia. They operate a system called SORM. And in a major 2026 update, telecom companies are now required to collect device identifiers, coordinates, and usernames, and link it all together for one stated purpose and I'm quoting their language here, not mine; to "quickly establish links between individuals, devices, networks, accounts and online activity".

Now go back and reread what SignalTrace does.

I'm not standing here telling you that the United States is North Korea, or that it's Russia. It is not. And I'd be doing you a disservice if I told you otherwise. Comparisons like that lose their power the moment you overstate them.

But here's what I am telling you; the underlying logic is identical. Identify a person through their devices. Link them to other people. Map their patterns. Do it without a warrant, without oversight, without the public even being told.

That logic doesn't care what language it operates in. It doesn't care what flag flies over the building where the servers sit.

Whether you're listening to this in Toronto, in London, in Sydney, in Manila, this is not someone else's problem to watch from a distance. This is the shape mass surveillance takes everywhere, in its early stages, before anyone is paying attention.

Two Questions I Want You to Sit With

I want to slow down here, because this is the part of the show where I ask you to actually think with me, not just listen to me.

Here's the first question; if you have nothing to hide, does that mean you have nothing to lose?

Sit with that. Because I think most of us answer that question too fast. We say, "Oh, I've got nothing to hide," and we move on with our day. But that was never the real question. The real question is whether a system should exist that can be used against anyone, without a warrant, without oversight, without you ever being told it's happening.

Having nothing to hide doesn't protect you from a system that was never built to ask permission in the first place.

Here's the second question; who benefits from you never finding out this exists?

Because that's really what we're talking about today. Not whether the technology works, it clearly does. The question is who benefits from silence.

And I'd ask you to notice something. Every single protection you've ever had from government overreach exists because someone, somewhere, insisted on it before the technology became normal, not afterwards.

What History Teaches Us

Every meaningful protection we now take for granted was won by ordinary people who simply refused to stay quiet.

Think about the civil rights movement in the U.S. Rosa Parks did not have a law behind her the day she stayed in her seat. She had a decision. She had a voice. And that one act, multiplied by thousands of others willing to speak and march and be seen, rewrote the law itself.

Think about the nuclear arms conversation of the twentieth century. Scientists, the very people who helped build those weapons, turned around and became some of the loudest voices demanding oversight, treaties, and limits. Those who built it were scared of it. Just like we've spoken about before with AI.

Ordinary citizens organized. They marched. They wrote to their governments. And over decades, they built the arms control frameworks that still hold today.

None of that happened because governments woke up one morning and decided to regulate themselves. It happened because people made noise before the silence became permanent.

That is the pattern, every single time. The technology arrives quietly. The public finds out late. And the only thing that has ever reversed course is people, ordinary people, like you and me, deciding the silence had gone on long enough.

We Are at That Exact Moment

We are right now at that exact moment with SignalTrace. The window is still open. Deployment isn't even confirmed yet.

So here's what I'm asking you to do. I'm not going to leave you with just fear today, because fear without action is just noise. That's all it is.

If you're in the United States, contact your representatives directly. Ask them plainly whether they support requiring a warrant before this kind of tracking data can be used.

Wherever you are in the world, look at your own country's surveillance oversight. Ask the same questions of your own government. This conversation does not stop at one border.

Look into organizations already doing this work:

• The ACLU has an active project tracking exactly this kind of technology. Visit them at aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation maintains something called the Atlas of Surveillance: a public map of what's already deployed and where. Check it at atlasofsurveillance.org

• The EFF also has dedicated resources on street-level surveillance and your rights at eff.org/issues/street-level-surveillance

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And talk about it loudly.

Most people have never heard the word SignalTrace before today, before you've listened to this episode. That gap, that silence, it's exactly the condition this technology needs in order to spread unnoticed.

Closing Thought

Now I'm going to leave you with the question I opened with, because I think it deserves one more pass.

If a machine could listen to you without ever needing your permission, would it ask?

The honest answer is it already doesn't.

And the only reason that changes is if enough people decide to say something before it becomes permanent.

This is Tech 4 Grown-Ups. Stay sharp, stay loud, and I'll see you next week.

Marcus Aurelius asked a question that I think about every time I sit down to record this show; what is it fundamentally that this thing is for? Not what it claims to be for. What is it actually for?

That's the Virtuous Machine question. And it applies to every piece of technology being built right now. The AI, the algorithms, the platforms, all of it.

You'll find everything from today's episode at tech4grownups.com. Join the conversation in the community. The link is there.

Stay sharp, stay loud, and I'll see you in the next one.

➡️ Related: [Your AirPods Can Now Identify You to Police. Yes, Really.] 

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➡️ Related: [An AI Just Broke Into the NSA. And Nobody's Talking About What That Actually Means.] 

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