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mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

joshhorne.com

81–90 of 192 posts

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#81

I have a theory / idea I call MOOP - massive open online psychology - the idea is that our phones / radar devices monitor our daily interactions - tone of voice, body gestures - to get a state of our anger / love / etc between our families (and work). And then uses simple epidemiology to help guide / train us. The basic idea is your phone becomes your life coach. This "privacy protecting" radar (which does not seem p…

Nbd, but moop means garbage at the burn.

I agree this will happen, I suspect Apple is not only in the best position to exploit mmWave hardware but already well down the road in related interaction design.

Apple Watch already offers limited physical sense-based life coaching in the form of hand washing duration tracking and feedback.

Apple Watch’s assisted interaction with UI that quietly debuted in iOS 15 was an important set of physical sense-based interaction primitives in production.

They suggest to me the company has likely progressed capabilities sans mmWave.

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#82
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on. The whole "mm wave radar is detail rich but gives privacy" line is a contradiction. Any data that is detailed enough to be useful is detailed enough to be a privacy concern. While it might not be the same as leaking nude photos from someone's camera, radar data is something that needs to be carefully thought out. Radar data from a car can provide information about people's driving behavior even without loca…

My main point is the data is anonymous at source. I think having control over how that data is correlated back to an individual is important

I think you are still off about the privacy aspect. At the source, a return from a single radar pulse is pretty uninformative. But a single pixel on a camera sensor is also uninformative. Even at the source, an aggregated set of radar returns is still a privacy concern on the level of an aggregated set of camera pixel values. Not operating in the light domain doesn’t make the privacy concerns go away, it just means that laypeople aren’t going to understand the risks as intuitively.

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#84

> Because mmWave radar doesn’t process visual light, what it sees is not personally identifiable. With machine learning improvements, identification and more are possible. From a 2021 paper on IEEE 802.11bf Wi-Fi Sensing, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.14918.pdf > Indeed, it has been shown that SENS-based classifiers can infer privacy-critical information such as keyboard typing, gesture recognition and activity tracking…

My reaction as well. Given how many ways there are to uniquely identify individuals this isn't a selling point for the tech. It's just a different kind of camera and of course it can identify people it's just that it will not reproduce a picture of people's faces to do so.

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#85
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> leaking nude photos from someone's camera whatever happened to that meme about common ccd cameras picking up uv images that make out details through eg swimsuits, but hopefully filtered and removed in software before making it to the images?

Why not just fix the swimsuits? Seems like a much more straightforward solution.

[deleted]

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#86
post #84

> Because mmWave radar doesn’t process visual light, what it sees is not personally identifiable. With machine learning improvements, identification and more are possible. From a 2021 paper on IEEE 802.11bf Wi-Fi Sensing, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.14918.pdf > Indeed, it has been shown that SENS-based classifiers can infer privacy-critical information such as keyboard typing, gesture recognition and activity tracking…

My reaction as well. Given how many ways there are to uniquely identify individuals this isn't a selling point for the tech. It's just a different kind of camera and of course it can identify people it's just that it will not reproduce a picture of people's faces to do so.

Not yet, because the resolution is too small for now but you can count on progress. Thinking more globally, couldn't 5G mmWave make it possible to get to know exactly how people are moving ? (let's say, someone gets out of his house, the government can know it in realtime, even without a phone, because the mmWave could map its position).

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, don't buy it. Gait analysis is excellent at identifying people, and that's projecting from a 2D image at a distance. Anything which can draw a moving voxel cloud around a human is going to figure out who that human is eventually.

I don't disagree but I think this version of privacy is reductive. Plenty of real world privacy exists on a spectrum. My family knowing I'm in the bathroom is a far cry form them pointing a camera at me. If stores track you "anonymously" with this ... Who cares? It's less invasive than the ubiquitous security cameras they have pointed at you.

Google knowing every time I’m in the bathroom and keeping a detailed log of the times is a far cry from someone in my family happening to notice I go in there once.

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to identify a face; you can identify people by Gait. If you can resolve something as big as a leg you've got enough, as long as you have it over 10 seconds or so.

It's odd that people care so much about technology "identifying them" when they have cell phones in their pocket and license plates on their car. There's not much of your daily life left after that, but I suppose it makes them feel good to imagine they're important enough to be tracked.

I opt into carrying a cell phone and it’s when I want. I don’t opt in to my neighbor’s Alexa tracking my comings and goings by scanning through my walls.

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#89

Do any of you see avenues for a conventional radar company to contribute to this emerging trend? We produce high-end FMCW radars ( http://dopplerradars.com ) and I have been looking for ways to align us more with Tech and less with Defense.

Arms race: help evolve 802.11bf with deep understanding of risk management. Sell souped-up localization and CSI countermeasure devices, e.g. for industrial laboratories. Work with two celebrity neighbors on a sanctioned, comedic public demo of seeing through home and business walls, in advance of Wi-Fi 7 launch. Publicity will mean a larger market for both attack and defense products. If it's done early enough, it could materially influence the WiFi Sensing standard and thus devices racing to be the first to support not-yet-official WiFi 7. There are legitimate use cases, but consent and bounded scope are critical for mass-market acceptance. Non-naive experts can help.

http://www.orca-project.eu/

https://ans.unibs.it/projects/csi-murder/

> Imagine that someone wants to illegally track the position of a person inside a laboratory, for instance to measure how much time is spent doing different activities at different desks, as depicted in the upper picture. How much effective can this attack be? ... With CSI-MURDER, the localization becomes impossible because results will seem random, thus preserving the person privacy without destroying Wi-Fi communications

Re: mmWave radar, you won't see it coming

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on. The whole "mm wave radar is detail rich but gives privacy" line is a contradiction. Any data that is detailed enough to be useful is detailed enough to be a privacy concern. While it might not be the same as leaking nude photos from someone's camera, radar data is something that needs to be carefully thought out. Radar data from a car can provide information about people's driving behavior even without loca…

> leaking nude photos from someone's camera whatever happened to that meme about common ccd cameras picking up uv images that make out details through eg swimsuits, but hopefully filtered and removed in software before making it to the images?

I recall the panic over that back in in the day, IIRC it was near-visible infra-red, not UV - if you didn't have sufficient IR filtering over the sensor, were using flash (and the flash included a decent amount of IR), and the subject was wearing something thin, you'd potentially get unintended skin detail with the IR reflection.

As I understand more or less a solved problem on modern cameras such as on your smartphone... instead of a bulb you tend to have white LED for your flash that doesn't really give off useful (any?) IR, and there's better/more consistent IR filtering on the sensor.

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