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.
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
It’s not at all bad for an initial proof of concept.
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.
But, but, splosion make line go up. Splosion good…?
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
No-one suspected Bruce Wayne’s “free WiFi for Gotham City” initiative
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.
Time to start making faraday clothes.
With wild and crazy shape lines. Ultra futuristic fashion here we come!
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.
Yep it has to be random to mess with the algorithm. You could have fun and cut different shapes each 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?
Well of course the Sapienza scientists would figure this out, Agent 47 keeps killing everyone in the labs
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.
deleted by creator
Time to carry a WiFi jammer
This has me wondering how my sack of potatoes body would look 🤣
Can I become obese in a day to avoid being fingerprinted?
I did that over 40 years.
Doesn’t help.
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.
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.
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.
Given your in-depth knowledge of Wi-Fi to consider it blocked by cardboard, I somehow doubt the rest of this comment is credible…
When they send a drone to your house they can make sure exactly where you are so they can shoot you through the wall.
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
Since it ‘figerprints’ you, changing your fingerprint by blocking parts of the signal with pieces of foil doesn’t seem like a terrible idea.
Now, the question is: is such a tactic like wearing gloves, or like using super glue?
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.
I mean, wouldn’t you anyway? You don’t wear your good Sunday tinfoil hat to work. That one’s for church and swinger club visits only!
Yeah, wouldn’t want to have to change hats, when I go to the swinger club after church.
Many different items of tinfoil clothing. Tinfoil shirt today, tinfoil codpiece for the weekend
Have you tried turning off the router?
Yeah, but then I had no excuse to wear a tinfoil codpiece.
Chuck vindicated. What a chicanery.
That’s a very unique fingerprint he’s got.
“Hey boss come look. This microwave is walking around again”
