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
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
Have you tried turning off the router?
Yeah, but then I had no excuse to wear a tinfoil codpiece.
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.
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?
A faraday hat.
Chuck vindicated. What a chicanery.
That’s a very unique fingerprint he’s got.
“Hey boss come look. This microwave is walking around again”
Let me know when I can selfhost LibreFi Security on my router and use it for myself. Sounds great for private home use.
ALERT ALERT ALERT
Sorry dude I forgot to add your bio signature to my WiFi router.
There’s a yo mama joke in here somewhere, I can feel it.
Incorrect bio-signature detected, drink verification can to continue your content.
Legendary reference
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!
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
Not if everyone buys it, because then we’d all look the same
I think you will be the one guy in the crowd wearing foil-lined clothes.
You’d need fabric with continuous metallic threads that form a complete mesh to actually block the 2.4/5GHz signals - most DIY foil approaches leave gaps that WiFi can still penetrate thru.
I feel like you’re overthinking this. There are people who buy crystal-infused drinking cups to reset their personal feng shui. (Spoiler: it’s just glitter.)
I really wish I didn’t have morals. It’s so easy to make money if you’re willing to fleece people.
e: autocorrect
It’s so true. Would you like to buy some Trump memorabilia? Made in 100% American spirit in China
Or sell a “WiFi mask” to modify the signal to look like celebrities.
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
When anyone or anything says that their product works “up to x%” I always presume it doesn’t really work at all.
Christ, 1% is included in that “up to 95.5%” vague bullshit statement.I believe the reason they had to say “up to” is because the “signatute” will vary day to day ever so slightly (natural weight fluctuation), and if you gain or lose weight it can change dramatically, so the AI would have to constantly consider that and adjust it’s records.
Honestly, unpopular opinion, but as long as it isn’t very short wavelength RF and they allow for self-hosted/open-source alternatives, I do find it a bit more privacy respecting than cameras, of course they have to say they are using the technology in public places.
It also has it’s ways of fooling it, instead of wearing a wig and a false nose, you could wear a carbon-infused silicone fat suit to change the way you interact with RF.
I hate it when commercials say “up to 100%.” It’s literally a pointless metric; that could mean anything from 0% to 100%, inclusive.
edit: Closed quote.
Sounds like an ad tailored specifically to putin
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.
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…?
This shits already used by xfinity
Well, that’s quite different, it didn’t identify anyone
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.
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?
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.
This is fine.
Well, the alternative would be a camera in every toilet stall. See how our benevolent corporate overlords only have our best interest in mind?
They can see you’re a person but not exactly who you are.
How is that a “fingerprint”?
Well they can identify you are the same person but not your identity… So it’s like a disenbodied fingerprint.
I suppose they could potentially make some database and train an AI on it someday to match to actual identities, but usefulness would be pretty limited at only 95% accuracy. That’s a false reading 1/20 times, so I suspect it would fail bigly to accurately recognize people from large data sets.
That’s a false reading 1/20 times
And when has something like that ever stopped anyone?
Well okay you’re not wrong, there is always some sucker out there.
They know you are a person and they can call your a certain UUID, but there will be a hard time matching you to your name etc.
Camera’s can do face recognition (if your face is even in the database) to know who you are.
This only works until the point where they have your form in a database which they can check…
We have heard this non-sense before, only to find it’s trivially easy to connect to your PID.
Never said that it wasn’t easy, it’s just harder than with facial recognition. In theory you could do it correctly in a way that it isn’t indentifiable.
Also this works in places where faces are protected
I’d imagine it’s like online advertisers: they convert your fingerprint to a token to try to sell you shit, but they allegedly don’t know who exactly you are or where you go. So visiting animatedllamaporn.com is still your little secret…
