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WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
111–120 of 199 posts
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#112Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#113This 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…
the article is off-base with wifi. the real story is in 6G cellular.
there is a working group at 3gpp, an EU-funded research group (6th sense, Open6GHub), universities (NCSU, Bristol), and many companies working very hard right now on proposals to include "integrated/joint sensing and communication" (ISAC/JCAS) in the 6G spec.
ISAC means adding mmWave to 6G (ostensibly for speed, but also) to build a high-fidelity 3d realtime "digital twin" of the real world that can see through walls, owned and operated by your telecom provider.
> A very exciting innovation that 6G will bring to the table would be its ability to sense the environment. The ubiquitous network becomes a source of situational awareness, collating signals that are bouncing off objects and determining type and shape, relative location, velocity and perhaps even material properties. With adequate 6G solutions for privacy and trust, such a mode of sensing can help create a “mirror” or digital twin of the physical world in combination with other sensing modalities.
https://www.nokia.com/about-us/newsroom/articles/nokias-visi... https://www.bell-labs.com/institute/blog/building-network-si...
there's been a testbed deployment in a German hospital for "non-invasive" monitoring of vitals; which sounds to me like it can literally see a heartbeat.
https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2024/12/17/noki...
truth is, this is the nature of wireless radios. we can't keep improving bandwidth and latency without also turning the radio into a camera. i'm disturbed by the inevitability.
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#114Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#115There is no could. This is a turnkey function for any modern managed wifi system right now.
To detect and track people? As someone who manages a modern wifi system, I have doubts. This isn’t a could, this is a never.
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#116I’m not understanding this. You still have to deploy a piece of hardware to read the Wi-Fi waves. Why wouldn’t you just deploy some other piece of hardware that’s better at surveilling the surroundings? Also, if the Wi-Fi device is in the area are not busy now your camera is off that doesn’t seem good. Also, I imagine you have to tune it for every environment, geometry that doesn’t sound easy. And then after all that…
Because a device to receive WiFi signals could be hidden behind a wall outlet with no sign that it is installed?
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#117Could? Is mate. Is.
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#118“Could become” Already is and widely used for exactly what the article worries about
Not even close. Now I feel like I need to make an X account that just posts headlines after s/could/will never/.
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Why wouldn't those same techniques be useful for more general object tracking?
These demos use machine learning to train against a known environment.
Basically, pattern matching changes in the signals against a very controlled set of training data.
You can use WiFi signals to detect that something is changing in the environment, but without the machine learning with controlled input data you don't know what it actually means. This is how WiFi presence detection works, but it won't tell you if it's a person moving through the house or your cat walked in front of the router.
Re: WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system
#120This 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…
the article is off-base with wifi. the real story is in 6G cellular. there is a working group at 3gpp, an EU-funded research group (6th sense, Open6GHub), universities (NCSU, Bristol), and many companies working very hard right now on proposals to include "integrated/joint sensing and communication" (ISAC/JCAS) in the 6G spec. ISAC means adding mmWave to 6G (ostensibly for speed, but also) to build a high-fidelity 3d…
Bruce Wayne implemented this almost 2 decades ago in The Dark Knight. EU innovation moving at a snail's pace as usual /s