10 ms·
This 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 t
by sponaugle 7mo ago
This 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 with them offers many orders of magnitude better opportunity. In a real crowded environment this would be nearly worthless.
The devices that reported BFI information were also stationary, and there were no extra devices transmitting information that would be conflicting.
A single camera would be much more effective.
- Modified3019 7mo agoWhen it comes to capability, the phrase “it’s the worst it’s ever going to be” comes to mind.
- mahrain 7mo agoYes, you won't be able to do this on normal wifi traffic typically either, you need to send specific packets at a high enough rate (in between normal internet traffic) in order to sense with any accuracy, as I also remarked earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46976849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46976849
- sponaugle 7mo agoYea, that makes sense as you would need quite a bit of information across a reasonable temporal range if the identifying qualities are movement related. Very interesting.
- dylan604 7mo agoThere'll be an update where a first responder can send a special packet to an SSID that will enable these high rate packets without needing to join the wifi. It'll be secure where only the good guys will know about it so that it won't be able to be used nefariously. /s
- vasco 7mo agoWell nowadays you individually track by using mac addresses and other network information from the devices within range. Cisco has some creepy real time maps of your location with each person walking around and all their previous visits etc
- avidiax 7mo agoModern phones connect with a randomized MAC address. So yes, you can track a person around, but you will need another system (like the WiFi login page) to match MAC to identity.
- ffsm8 7mo agoReally? I thought it was only I phones that did that though?
- iberator 7mo agowindows 11 also has it.
- itintheory 7mo agoAndroid has been doing this for a while, too
- K0balt 7mo agoSaw a system like this at a Podunk, nowhere, USA police station over a decade ago. It had high fidelity maps of peoples comings and goings based on Bluetooth and WiFi MAC IIRC. And some kind of API backend to look up identity based on those identifiers, not sure to who. You could for example flag a location (house) and get a list of all of the comings and goings over the last x months, then look them up by identity. You could also flag when an individual was in proximity to another, or when someone turned on, off or switched phones. I’m sure it amounted to illegal surveillance and would be inadmissible if any of it was done without a warrant, but it would be beautiful for parallel construction. (How is that even constitutional???) It apparently relied on some kind of infrastructure deployment that consisted of “traffic cameras” and “satellites” ( I’m certain not of the spacecraft type) that I assume were just small receivers mounted on street lights, since the streetlights were almost completely replaced at the same time as the cameras were put in, by the same out of state contractor. I was there to change out a bad SSD and do a RAM upgrade on one of the servers. I don’t imagine the technology has become less invasive. If you have a phone or carry active Bluetooth devices, assume you are 100 percent tracked 100 percent of the time.
- wcunning 7mo agoThis is going into the next Wifi standard specifically to get this data off of normal wifi traffic.
- Aurornis 7mo agoExactly. 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.
- t-3 7mo agoWiFi 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.
- Aurornis 7mo ago> 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.
- gentleman11 7mo agotoday's tech demos are tomorrow's everyday
- margalabargala 7mo agoExactly. People are wrong to dismiss this as they're doing in this thread. LLMs were useless back in 2021.
- notepad0x90 7mo agoYes, but things could be refined. With more resources and research thrown at it, it could become more versatile, that's why the title of the post says "could". And chances are, there are private and government entities already doing this. Research like this has been coming out for at least a decade now. Even Xfinity has motion detection in homes using this technique now: https://www.xfinity.com/hub/smart-home/wifi-motion https://www.xfinity.com/hub/smart-home/wifi-motion
- thesuitonym 7mo agoYeah, it can and will be refined, but the major limiting factor is resolution. Wi-Fi radio waves are just too big to get a very clear image.
- mvanbaak 7mo agofor now ...
- XorNot 7mo agoNo this is fixed by physics. 5ghz waves are about 60mm wavelength. Your resolution limit is about 30mm as a result.
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoThere are techniques that can reduce that limit when you have multiple signals, though whether they can be combined with this technique isn’t clear.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jazzyjackson 7mo agoWifi 7 includes 6Ghz band but fair enough
- anu7df 7mo ago
- IshKebab 7mo agoYeah this is one of those "cool demo" research results that is completely impractical in the real world that is sold (probably by university PR departments) as an actual viable technique that might have real-world implications. We've seen it before with things like taking photos around corners. And no, it isn't like the Wright flyer and a bit crap now but in 40 years we have jet planes. This will never get significantly better.
- BatteryMountain 7mo agoUnless they start storing data about your specific gait & posture, skull shape, limb dimensions and build up a "fingerprint" of your body.
- hsbauauvhabzb 7mo agoYou mean like those scanners at the airport?
- malfist 7mo agoPlease submit full body 3D scan for verification, otherwise discord will lock you to the "kids only" section and mock you mercilessly.
- hsbauauvhabzb 7mo agoYou have nothing to hide unless you’re a pedophile plane bomber
- jajuuka 7mo agoYeah I've seen this same type of study done over the years with the same dire warning. But like you pointed out it's just extremely labor intensive when it's simply easier to attack phones, security cameras or any other smart device that can be easily hacked. Or just install your own bugs. Would not be surprised to see this get more traction right now due to the political climate.
- spyder 7mo agoYes it's in a controlled environment not in a real world noisy environment. But this is more stealthy than a camera and could potentially work with non-line-of-sight or even through walls. And based on that I could imagine with a combination of a camera and this method, you could train the model on data where both the camera and this method is seeing the individual and then continue to track them with the wifi sensing + the trained model even where the camera cannot see them anymore. But yea real world is noisy, so it could be very challenging.
- woodrowbarlow 7mo agothe 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-vision-for-the-6g-era/ https://www.nokia.com/about-us/newsroom/articles/nokias-visi... https://www.bell-labs.com/institute/blog/building-network-sixth-sense/#gref 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/nokia-fraunhofer-hhi-and-charite-to-collaborate-on-wireless-sensing-solutions-for-healthcare/ 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.
- Ancapistani 7mo agoGreat. Now you’re telling me the chicken wire embedded in my walls isn’t sufficient, and I’m going to have to go with grounded sheet metal?
- insane_dreamer 7mo agounderground bunker
- testplzignore 7mo agoBruce Wayne implemented this almost 2 decades ago in The Dark Knight. EU innovation moving at a snail's pace as usual /s
- culi 7mo agoYes but this is just the start and its already good enough for an ICE car to park outside your house and check if you're home and what room you're in.
- scottLobster 7mo agoThey can do that by looking at the cars in my driveway/garage and or just watching the windows for any period of time. Plus my phone. If <insert 3 letter agency> agents are sitting outside of your house, they aren't going to drive away because you pull the plug on the router and suddenly deprive them of BFI packets.
- Fnoord 7mo agoIf I was interested in mass surveillance I would combine the radio data (WLAN, BT, ...) with the camera feed. If you then see the same person with ML, you can correlate that with radio's. You can even do that with cell towers with anonymous SIM, especially if combined with public transport camera feed or ALPR/ANPR.
- niobe 7mo agoHEADLINE: Electromagnetic radiation can be used to see!!!! Right, that's what your eyes do. Radio is much longer wavelength than visible light (~5-10cm). So at best it offers extremely crappy resolution unless - you're doing something clever with second order information.