Submitted 1 day ago by bignose@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world
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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.
Ironically, a tin foil hat would probably work to prevent that kind of surveillance
A faraday hat.
wouldn’t that make it wors? basically any signal can bounce off you, making yourself even easier to track.
The tracking happens even with a big reflector/scatterer on your head, but as long as you dont wear it regularly, the system would have difficulty identifying you from wave propagation alone
I’m generally pro research, but occasionally I come across a body of research and wish I could just shut down what they’re doing and rewind the clock to before that started.
There is no benefit of this for the common person. There is no end user need or product for being able to identify individuals based on their interactions with WiFi signals. The only people that benefit from this are large corporations and governments and that’s from them turning it on you.
Continued research will ease widespread surveillance and mass tracking. That’s not a good thing.
There is no end user need or product for being able to identify individuals based on their interactions with WiFi signals
Cat tracker
Why do you need to identify specific cats over merely the presence of movement or cats in general?
It is cool for home automation if you can turn it into a presence detection software (do not connect your Homeassistant to the internet though)
If all you need is presence detection then a motion sensor would be vastly more efficient.
If you actually need identity detection, then maybe, but you’ll still have to have a camera or detailed access logs to associate the interference signature with a known entity and at that point you may as well just put an RFID reader under the bowl you throw your keys into or use facial or gait detection.
Well it could be pretty handy for home automation.
I wish this was the goal, instead of large corpos doing large corpos things
Could be developed into a useful tool for search and rescue
Probably not.
This kind of thing relies on the fact that the emitter and environments are static, impacting the propagation of the signals in a predictable way and that each person, having a unique physique, consistently interferes with that propagation in the same way. It’s a tool that reports “the interference in this room looks like the same interference observed in these past cases.”
Search and rescue is a very dynamic environment, with no opportunity to establish a local baseline, and with a high likelihood that the physiological signal you are looking for has been altered (such as by broken or severed limbs).
There are some other WiFi sniffing technologies that might be more useful for S&R such as movement detection, but I’m not sure if that will work as well when the broadcaster is outside the environment (as the more rubble between the emitter and the target the weaker your signal from reflections against the rubble).
Don’t think of this as being able to see through walls like with a futuristic camera, think of this as AI assisted anomaly detection in signal processing (which is exactly what the researchers are doing).
Being able to scan and model a 3D environment using wifi? Sure. Wifi-fingerprinting the people in the scan? Why?
That’s a very unique fingerprint he’s got.
“Hey boss come look. This microwave is walking around again”
Great, another dystopian way for authorities to observe me on the shitter
Your poo time has expired and your pay is docked. Flushing will cost 50 dollars for the next week. Get back to work
You get poo time? That’s socialism!
Please drink a verification laxative?
Incorrect bio-signature detected, drink verification can to continue your content.
Legendary reference
accurate matches up to 95.5% of the time
and they’re more privacy-preserving than visual images
Uh-huh.
My thought exactly. Their definition of privacy is… interesting
When anyone or anything says that their product works “up to x%” I always presume it doesn’t really work at all.
Christ, 1% is included in that “up to 95.5%” vague bullshit statement.
I believe the reason they had to say “up to” is because the “signatute” will vary day to day ever so slightly (natural weight fluctuation), and if you gain or lose weight it can change dramatically, so the AI would have to constantly consider that and adjust it’s records.
Honestly, unpopular opinion, but as long as it isn’t very short wavelength RF and they allow for self-hosted/open-source alternatives, I do find it a bit more privacy respecting than cameras, of course they have to say they are using the technology in public places.
It also has it’s ways of fooling it, instead of wearing a wig and a false nose, you could wear a carbon-infused silicone fat suit to change the way you interact with RF.
This shits already used by xfinity
I was having a nice day :(
Yes, according to your wifi fingerprint, you had.
I’ve seen some article recently that the patterns of Wi-Fi/Bluetooth (don’t remember which one) interference with brainwaves can be scanned to reconstruct brainwave signature remotely, meaning that it might be possible to scan anyone’s EEG from Wi-Fi/Bluetooth distance. And there are some AI advancements for reconstructing inner monologue from EEG. So maybe we’re not so far from actual remote mind-reading.
You had non work related thoughts on three separate occasions last week. Please report to HR for attitude adjustment.
Time for tin foil hats
Stilsuits: get it for the unbearable heat as we turn the Earth into a desert, now with wifi blocking!
they're more privacy-preserving than visual images.
hhhhwat. How can they identify you and also be privacy preserving? 🤔
It’s all AI. You should not worry about it. In fact you should not think about it. All is going to be fine.
This is fine.
Well, the alternative would be a camera in every toilet stall. See how our benevolent corporate overlords only have our best interest in mind?
They know you are a person and they can call your a certain UUID, but there will be a hard time matching you to your name etc.
Camera’s can do face recognition (if your face is even in the database) to know who you are.
This only works until the point where they have your form in a database which they can check…
We have heard this non-sense before, only to find it's trivially easy to connect to your PID.
I’d imagine it’s like online advertisers: they convert your fingerprint to a token to try to sell you shit, but they allegedly don’t know who exactly you are or where you go. So visiting animatedllamaporn.com is still your little secret…
Someone’s going to use this to drop missiles on “baddies” with their sleeping families in 3 2 1
Reporting about starving children? That’s capital punishment for the whole family.
Let me know when I can selfhost LibreFi Security on my router and use it for myself. Sounds great for private home use.
ALERT ALERT ALERT
Sorry dude I forgot to add your bio signature to my WiFi router.
There’s a yo mama joke in here somewhere, I can feel it.
Neat. Good luck protecting yourself from this.
On the other hand, I’m seriously considering opening an Etsy shop selling foil-lined clothes. I’m pretty good at sewing. What do you think?
Then I’ll look for the person with the fingerprint of foil-lined clothes
Not if everyone buys it, because then we’d all look the same
You’d need fabric with continuous metallic threads that form a complete mesh to actually block the 2.4/5GHz signals - most DIY foil approaches leave gaps that WiFi can still penetrate thru.
I feel like you’re overthinking this. These are people who buy crystal-infused drinking cups to reset their personal feng shui. (Spoiler: it’s just glitter.)
I really wish I didn’t have morals. It’s so easy to make money if you’re willing to fleece people.
I think you will be the one guy in the crowd wearing foil-lined clothes.
So, you’re saying the tin foil hat people were right all along?!
Ironically, they’re still wrong, because even in their wildest conspiracies, they didn’t imagine Wi-Fi could be used to “take pictures” of a sort.
Tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists predate wifi by at least a decade
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.
I know people, funded, building WiFi scanners, but for the industry. They are cheap and can scan big stuff but they are quite imprecise, I wonder if you have like to stand in a specific pose on a specific spot for it to work?
ileftreddit@piefed.social 10 hours ago
Why would someone research something like this? God damn, like use your life for good, homie
StenSaksTapir@feddit.dk 5 hours ago
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.
gcheliotis@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
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.