this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
545 points (98.2% liked)

Technology

73232 readers
4270 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
L4s@hackingne.ws
545
Humans can be tracked with unique 'fingerprint' based on how their bodies block Wi-Fi signals (www.theregister.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by bignose@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
143 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] unmagical@lemmy.ml 105 points 2 days ago (18 children)

I'm generally pro research, but occasionally I come across a body of research and wish I could just shut down what they're doing and rewind the clock to before that started.

There is no benefit of this for the common person. There is no end user need or product for being able to identify individuals based on their interactions with WiFi signals. The only people that benefit from this are large corporations and governments and that's from them turning it on you.

Continued research will ease widespread surveillance and mass tracking. That's not a good thing.

[–] Vinstaal0 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It is cool for home automation if you can turn it into a presence detection software (do not connect your Homeassistant to the internet though)

[–] unmagical@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If all you need is presence detection then a motion sensor would be vastly more efficient.

If you actually need identity detection, then maybe, but you'll still have to have a camera or detailed access logs to associate the interference signature with a known entity and at that point you may as well just put an RFID reader under the bowl you throw your keys into or use facial or gait detection.

[–] Vinstaal0 1 points 22 hours ago

A motion detector is far more inferior to precense detectors, most just use milimator wave though.

load more comments (16 replies)