WhoFi: Unique 'fingerprint' based on Wi-Fi interactions
www.theregister.com
: Wi-Fi spy with my little eye that same guy I saw at another hotspot

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.

  • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    13 hours ago

    They explicitly went into the advantages over cameras:

    • Any light condition (of course IR lighting with IR cameras are the gold standard so this can argueably be met otherwise)
    • The ability to cover multiple rooms through walls with a device. A sub-10 GHz signal can penetrate most interior walls. People could be tracked without even being able to see a camera and by extension not knowing where to mess with to defeat surveillance.

    So perhaps a building takes a picture of everyone as they come in the front door and also establishes a ‘WhoFi’ profile for that person. They could keep track of their movement through the building while maintaining an actionable correlation to a photo.