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 worse? basically any signal can bounce off you, making yourself even easier to track.
edit: wording
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
So wear many different hats. Got it.
Many different items of tinfoil clothing. Tinfoil shirt today, tinfoil codpiece for the weekend
Great, another dystopian way for authorities to observe me on the shitter
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?
Incorrect bio-signature detected, drink verification can to continue your content.
deleted by creator
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.
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
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.
Someone’s going to use this to drop missiles on “baddies” with their sleeping families in 3 2 1
Reporting about starving children? That will be capital punishment for the whole family.
Stilsuits: get it for the unbearable heat as we turn the Earth into a desert, now with wifi blocking!
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
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.
A truly horrifying prospect.
Tuesday, in 2025.
No. It’s Friday.
Time for tin foil hats
You had non work related thoughts on three separate occasions last week. Please report to HR for attitude adjustment.
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.
This shits already used by xfinity
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.
accurate matches up to 95.5% of the time
and they’re more privacy-preserving than visual images
Oh fuck all the way off.
My thought exactly. Their definition of privacy is… interesting
I was having a nice day :(
Yes, according to your wifi fingerprint, you had.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQn9L-wkq_c&t=1m29s