The Sapienza computer scientists say Wi-Fi signals offer superior surveillance potential compared to cameras because they’re not affected by light conditions, can penetrate walls and other obstacles, and they’re more privacy-preserving than visual images.
[…] The Rome-based researchers who proposed WhoFi claim their technique makes accurate matches on the public NTU-Fi dataset up to 95.5 percent of the time when the deep neural network uses the transformer encoding architecture.
Time to carry a WiFi jammer
Time to start making faraday clothes.
With wild and crazy shape lines. Ultra futuristic fashion here we come!
Well of course the Sapienza scientists would figure this out, Agent 47 keeps killing everyone in the labs
Can I become obese in a day to avoid being fingerprinted?
I did that over 40 years.
Doesn’t help.
Reminds me of the Christian Bale batman movie where he could spy on everywhere from the bat cave. Seemed so far fetched it almost ruined the movie
It was very much not even far fetched at that point. 1984 wrote about the same kind of surveillance, and at that time it would have been pretty far fetched. It was published in 1949; the video camera was only 24 years old at that point.
No-one suspected Bruce Wayne’s “free WiFi for Gotham City” initiative
And this here folks is the true ending. No one there is going to stop it as always.
Congratulations! You are now fully fucked!
There is the draft dodger, he is located in building #52556 in this city, info updated 125 milliseconds ago. He left his phone at his house 5 states away, go get him.
You know, this, and the using wifi to see through walls stuff to me just immediately seemed to fall into “don’t research this, it can only be used for evil”.
I don’t get why we bother studying these types of things.
We study it because EVERYTHING can be used for good or evil.
If we’d stopped researching anything that could be used for evil we’d never have gotten into the stone age
Yeah, like, why learn how to split the atom if all we can do is splode stuff. It’s not like we can cure cancer or power things without emitting planet killing gasses or anything.
This has me wondering how my sack of potatoes body would look 🤣
you can also take a picture of a person with a camera that senses light beams
The most primitive of physics concepts, the transmission/absorption/reflection of energy, is completely unknown to most people it would seem.
95.5% accuracy is abysmal for any use case these people want to use it for
what if you combine it with other types of imaging
Dingdingding
Wait… so the guys with tinfoil hats were on to something?
Except that the tinfoil hats don’t work
Maybe wearing a different tinfoil hat every day would mess up a person’s “fingerprint”
you might be onto something.
take a mylar square and place it somewhere random on your body every day.
Eat a piece of spinach and increase the iron in your body.
This is all beyond stupid and hysterical.
instructions unclear, I have glued spinach to my skin and the rabbits won’t stop chasing me.
need further instruction.
Actually you’ve gone far enough to baffle the system.
I would say have fun frolicking with the rabbits?
Yep it has to be random to mess with the algorithm. You could have fun and cut different shapes each day.
The resulting image must just basically look like a shadow, I can’t imagine that they’re going to get much internal detail with Wi-Fi considering that my router’s signal practically gets blocked by a piece of cardboard.
This research essentially amounts to, humans can be individually identified with nothing more than low quality x-rays. Well yeah, so what, you can also use visible light and in any situation where you’re going to use Wi-Fi to detect someone, it’s got to be easier to buy a cheap CCTV camera.
When they send a drone to your house they can make sure exactly where you are so they can shoot you through the wall.
They explicitly went into the advantages over cameras:
- Any light condition (of course IR lighting with IR cameras are the gold standard so this can argueably be met otherwise)
- The ability to cover multiple rooms through walls with a device. A sub-10 GHz signal can penetrate most interior walls. People could be tracked without even being able to see a camera and by extension not knowing where to mess with to defeat surveillance.
So perhaps a building takes a picture of everyone as they come in the front door and also establishes a ‘WhoFi’ profile for that person. They could keep track of their movement through the building while maintaining an actionable correlation to a photo.
First of all: cardboard does NOT block electromagnetic waves. You need a Faraday Cage for that. And even then, it has to have holes of a certain size to block specific wavelengths/frequencies. It’s why you have a mesh on the door of your microwave for example.
Secondly: they’re not attempting to photograph you. Just identifying your unique signature once would allow them to track your location anywhere where they have the gear installed.
EDIT: I suppose your comment is written in a way that it’s not clear whether you’re saying certain frequencies absolutely require meshes of a certain size to be blocked or if you’re just adding that extra detail about the design of Faraday cages for the hell of it. But…
Original comment: It doesn’t have to have holes to block radiation. A continuous sheet blocks all frequencies. A mesh is just nice so we can see through the cage or allow air to pass etc.
From the page you linked: “A Faraday shield may be formed by a continuous covering of conductive material.” “… if the conductor is thick enough and any holes are significantly smaller than the wavelength of the radiation.”
My bad, a Farady Shield works just as well and it doesn’t need holes. But I was thinking about ways to combat this while posting and a solution involving conductive fabric was going through my head during that moment.
Given your in-depth knowledge of Wi-Fi to consider it blocked by cardboard, I somehow doubt the rest of this comment is credible…
Cool
If it doesn’t get used for bad purposes it is very cool yes. So no it’s not cool at all. It’s fucked.
People willingly provide enough tracking of themselves already
While this could have military applications, the need to generate a profile of the person you want to track makes this less of a concern for your average “carries a phone everywhere” person
Stilsuits: get it for the unbearable heat as we turn the Earth into a desert, now with wifi blocking!
Why would someone research something like this? God damn, like use your life for good, homie
You think if people who publish their work publicly didn’t research things like this, they would just never be discovered?
At least this way, we all know about the possibility, and further research can be done to see what can mitigate it.
Everything is incremental progress in some way.
I remember years back someone doing experiments with Wi-Fi to see if a room was occupied based on signal attenuation.
This just looks like an extension of that.
Not everything is a giant leap
Well I heard about this and thought “this will be great for home automation”, but I also know that someone was equally excited about using this to rob people of basic freedoms or being a fucking creep or both.
If it’s your home why can’t you just have a camera or motion sensor. Rather than trying to adapt something that isn’t designed for the purpose.
Cameras require light, while radio waves works almost as well in darkness.
A motion sensor is an extra device that needs to be connected, have power and so on.
There are already radio wave motion- and room occupancy sensors where you can specify zones and so on, but if I could have personalized on top of that I’d take it.
Finally, using a thing for something useful other than its intended purpose is kinda fun.
I can imagine this being initially an accidental discovery like oh every time so and so’s body interacts with the WiFi signal it’s the same pattern… until someone starts exploring this further… and then some engineer or their manager started looking for applications for this. In my experience engineering researchers especially are very good with coming up with use cases for whatever tech they’re working with, with little ethical consideration.
I doubt it. You’d need to be looking really closely at the waveforms to notice this, so they were likely already doing something similar, like that research that can pinpoint where people are in a house based on their WiFi. They were probably already doing something creepy before they noticed that this was more straightforward than they expected.
Once you start playing with radiowaves and antenna you start noticing the intricate ways it plays with and around bags of water like bodies. I’m sure the original research on location/movement tracking was due to scientists trying not to get interference, later once they figured it out it was natural to see how much data they could get out of a radio interference profile.
I remember the original tech was going to be marketed as a way to tell if your old person (parent etc) had fallen down and stopped moving. Not the best use case, and then the privacy implications became clear. Once that happens the race begins to exploit the tech.
…But the eventuality here is something like a Star Trek tricorder that can take multiple vitals and detect irregularities from across the waiting room. Sensors that remember who was in a room and what settings they had. Etc. Some cool thing besides the bad stuff (microtarget those ads).
