I was really impressed that a ESP32 Antenna Array Can essentially make a WiFi camera - it uses both time and phase differences to localize based on MAC addresses (which are sent plaintext) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXwDrcd1t-E
WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
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Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#72There are much better invisible mass surveillance devices like the one you carry around in your pocket every day.
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#73How good is ethernet over electrical sockets these days.
I had one about 15 years ago maybe, but it wasn't that good.
Has tech changed. I'd use it over my wifi setup if its was fast.
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#74How good is ethernet over electrical sockets these days. I had one about 15 years ago maybe, but it wasn't that good. Has tech changed. I'd use it over my wifi setup if its was fast.
This tech is known as BPL(broadband over powerline) if you want to look further into it.
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#75[deleted]
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#76Funny how mass surveillance concerns are popping up here and there these days. That boat sailed 20 years ago.
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't feel that this article is a fair summary of the paper. And the title is just clickbait. The paper says, in a somewhat contrived scenario, with dozens of labelled walkthroughs per person, they can identify that person from their gait based on CSI and other WiFi information. This is a long way from identifying one person in thousands or tens of thousands, being able to transfer identifying patterns among statio…
It feels rather more than a little bit creepy to realize that Comcast et al, and thus the US government (if you live there), laundered through 3rd party data brokers, knows if you're sleeping and knows if you're awake. Knows if you've been bad or good, for ICE/ATF/DEA/SEC's sake.
The creepy part isn't the tech itself, it's that BFI data is unencrypted by default. So it's not even that someone has to hack your router. Any device in range can just passively read it.
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#78I was really impressed that a ESP32 Antenna Array Can essentially make a WiFi camera - it uses both time and phase differences to localize based on MAC addresses (which are sent plaintext) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXwDrcd1t-E
Yes, that’s a noteworthy project that has some good use cases!
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#79Not sure how many people are aware that the newer Alexa devices have "presence detection" that uses ultrasound so they can detect when people are nearby. [0] Heck, even Ecobee remote temperature sensors can do this. Reminds me of the story about how the Google Nest smoke detector had a microphone in it. [1] 0 - https://www.amazon.com/b?node=23435461011&tag=googhydr-20&hv... 1- https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comment…
That reminds me of the other story where the Pixel phones come with a microphone that turns on every time you make a call!
The phone actually records audio and sends it remotely to someone else.
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#80This is a VERY controlled environment - and they used 20 passes of each person walking with direct knowledge of each person to train for identity. They did no tests with multiple people walking at the same time, or with any other external moving distortion effects (doors opening, etc) . This is very far from actual 'identification' of people in real public settings - and no doubt the cell phone everyone is carrying w…
Exactly. All of these stories using WiFi to detect things with high accuracy are just extreme machine learning demos. Given a tightly controlled environment and enough training data, you can use a lot of things as sensors. These techniques are not useful for general purpose sensing, though. The WiFi router in your home isn't useful for this.
WiFi AP's already do a lot of tracking and measurement just to improve signal fidelity and effective throughput. Why wouldn't those same techniques be useful for more general object tracking? Of course using a single AP to attempt to track movement in real-time is unlikely to have great results, but with several APs and enough compute triangulation should improve results.