this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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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
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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.

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[–] 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@feddit.nl 7 points 2 days ago (2 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@feddit.nl 1 points 1 day ago

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

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