I'm surprised that there's not a single comment here about 802.11ay which is also 60GHz. Each channel on that standard can do something like 40Gbps, which is nuts. From Wikipedia[0]:
> The link-rate per stream is 44 Gbit/s, with four streams this goes up to 176 Gbit/s.
Yes, it can't penetrate walls, but is huge for point to point communication. Think VR headset bandwidth, file transfers between devices, wireless backhaul between buildings. It's not just for spying on your cat.
I think it's important to remember that it's not magic, it's just radio waves. You can "sense" with a lot more resolution if you use a camera and light bulb. There are plenty of eyeballs, cameras, and lights all around you right now. Even worse, someone could be looking in your window with binoculars.
Sure, can privacy advocates stop down playing what we lose because we value privacy though?
There needs to be a balance, location information will be very useful for a lot of things, but only if we have it fully implemented. I want things to sense when I fall and call for help for me. (If I was at a big risk I'd have a button, but for the average young person the risk is non-zero but very small). I want my home automation stuff to figure out where they are and configure themselves. I want my routers to suggest that I'd get better coverage by moving it.
Yes there is privacy concerns and they need to be addressed, but don't lose the good with it.
I cant see through walls with a lightbulb. I can with wifi.
This standard makes my wifi router into an internet connected, closed source blob, light bulb and camera that is impossible to obscure (without killing my internet connection).
Sure, I can wire my whole house for ethernet. And, while I’m behind the drywall, I might as well rip off all the drywall put a layer of Al.
Here’s a business idea - drywall with aluminum fibers embedded in. For those of us who don't want our sexy times recorded by our router.
EDIT: made wifi’s ability to see through walls explicit per _jal’s comment.
QuietRock has drywall that combines soundproofing with RF shielding (steel plate), but it's expensive and targeted at military use cases, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29902926
Another idea in the opposite direction: somebody should build a $20 firewall/tappable ethernet cable with some kind of builtin eBPF support + a universe of community packages.
The community would then share privacy-enhancing I/O profiles for every kind of device. If years later e.g. my adversarial lightbulb pivots to brokering kompromat SIGINT, I want to filter that out, and I want not to be the first one to write a filter like that..
Does it change the internal state of the lightbulb’s logic? No.. but hopefully it would even be able to simulate the state loop of the lightbulb well enough to guess what to filter out.
Of course there may also come a time when somebody starts to sell $20, 60 ghz-spectrum-only-visible “human activity fakers” to disrupt the collection of such data. Maybe with a “Honey, I’m home!” package being the most popular, lol
> Li-Fi connections are broadcast over the air through a light-emitting diodes (LED) broadcaster and support rates up to 100Gbit/s ... Li-Fi can also serve to identify an object’s indoor position more accurately than Wi-Fi or GPS used today (less than 2cm and less than 3 degrees of orientation while it is providing real-time localization (less than 34ms). This accuracy is vital in multiple applications such as navigation In-Door Robots and Drones, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Gaming, among others ... it cannot go through walls, and thus a private local area network (LAN) can be created by lighting up a closed room ... Any organization that needs to keep information within the four walls, such as military bases and banks, can use the technology to keep data restricted to a single room.
> What an absolutely ridiculously ignorant statement to make.
Why is that an ignorant statement? It's comparing to what one might consider the "gold standard" of spying, so it seems quite a relevant thing to consider if one is after an objective estimate of how much worse wifi sensing might be...
I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old. It seems this, like a lot of new tech these days, will end up offering little benefit while providing new malicious capabilities.
It's very scary shit. We could soon have no privacy at all in our own homes because of other people's WiFi networks. If the output is strong enough, all you have to do is connect to/crack someone's WiFi and use it to get a layout of all their neighbor's places.
> all you have to do is connect to/crack someone's WiFi and use it to get a layout of all their neighbor's places.
It's much worse: neither crack nor connection is required. The technology is entirely passive, it only uses reflections from Wi-Fi radios, same as radar. No connection to the router is required, hence the acronym DFWS (Device-Free Wireless Sensing).
To be clear, this can be done today with $20 ESP32 WiFi devices + custom firmware, i.e. any motivated attacker can already see through the walls of homes and businesses. The Wi-Fi 7 Sensing draft standard is proposing to make this available to everyone.
Perhaps we need a celebrity to help demo SENS transparency of their home walls, to help consumers and regulators understand the implications. That could motivate research investment in privacy controls.
This is a great example of why people don’t have privacy. Ethernet cables exist, and wholly forgo these problems. But, they are less convenient. Consumers complain a lot about privacy, but do little to really demand it. Of course manufacturers deserve much of the blame here for actually implementing these things, but it doesn’t seem as if consumers are trying to steer them in the right direction at all.
One thing I see 802.1bf ( Sensing ), along with 802.11be ( WiFi 7 ) could be used together in setting up consumer mesh WiFi Network. Home Wireless Networking is still pretty much an unsolved problem for average consumers.
Edit: Turns out there are other comments below mentioning this.
There is a difference between consumer benefits and maybe industrial benefits. Maybe it might make communication between sorting bots more accurate and quicker.
There seems to be a lot of FUD about this. Make no mistake, the malicious and privacy invasive applications are already being used; they just don't follow a IEEE spec and aren't associated with WiFi directly.
If a maliciously controlled router wants to track you it already can because your phone, smart watch, and laptop already broadcast themselves.
This technology may not seem useful to the purpose of WiFi on it's face but that couldn't be further from the truth. Knowing the population of a room in terms of devices but also people is useful for WiFi deployment planning and power level optimization. 2000 people with 2 devices is different from 4000 individual people.
People already have WiFi enabled lights and other sensors so providing a standard for object & people detection will make those use cases even better.
The hypothetical in this is that this suddenly opens the door to RF-based physical sensing, when every attacker that can gain from this is already using it, just via custom equipment.
>People already have WiFi enabled lights and other sensors so providing a standard for object & people detection will make those use cases even better.
Yet another reason I prefer Zwave for my home automation communications. Sure you could probably use it in the same way, but it won't be handed to you on a silver platter like the wifi stuff discussed here!
This is not a future I'd like to see. What bothers me even more, is that if the neighbors above me decide to join an "Apple Security Sensing Program" by toggling it on, it may as well be sensing and logging my activity.
Other than that, I do have a lot of ESP32s at my place sensing for activity via IR as well as by creating an FFT-"audio" log. No sound just FFT aggregated over one second, but all these devices store the data on my home server, not in some cloud.
I feed fft data into machine learning system for signal classification. It’s a nice real time system with midrange Xilinx ZynQ SoC. Some Xilinx IP blocks with hand written classification engine.
I guess author wants to classify sounds in his environment too.
> What bothers me even more, is that if the neighbors above me decide to join an "Apple Security Sensing Program" by toggling it on, it may as well be sensing and logging my activity.
60 Ghz is heavily blocked by walls, glass and doors, even more than 5Ghz, so that's very unlikely scenario.
I remember when first contactless payment options appeared, many people started buying anti-RFID wallets and bags. I'm not sure if they're still a thing, but the people who need "radio-privacy" will definitely find a way.
I have a few wallets with alleged RFID blocking. For those its mainly to stop arse grabbing attacks where card info (or security badge info) could be cloned with a little badge reader held in someone's palm.
I want my Wi-Fi to deliver me fast internet access, not track my position. Have a feeling this will be used for il-intent and monetized by future routers
What are you talking about, providing you fast internet access doesn't maximize the benefit for me and my shareholders. We need your exact location, eye movement, and heart rate every second so we can do better invasive target advertisements, or sell these to other companies.
I don't need more than a few hundred megabits on the go, thank you very much. If I want to go faster, and Ethernet cable is always a faster solution with less moving parts.
> it has been shown that SENS-based classifiers can infer privacy-critical information such as keyboard typing, gesture recognition and activity tracking ... since Wi-Fi signals can penetrate hard objects and can be used without the presence of light, end-users may not even realize they are being tracked ... individuals should be provided the opportunity to opt out of SENS services – in other words, to avoid being monitored and tracked by the Wi-Fi devices around them. This would require the widespread introduction of reliable SENS algorithm for human or animal identification.
Would this require a worldwide database of biometric signatures for each human that opts out?
No, the future is decentralized. In the US, you will always be tracked because of regulatory capture of the FCC. In Europe, your phone will display a tracking consent pop-up everytime you go into a cafe. If you don't comply, you will have to get your coffee and free wifi elsewhere.
My concern is that people opting out of this protocol won't actually be opting out of the sensing technology. Any attacker trying to sense keystrokes using RF waves already can do that and won't be hindered by some opt out program nor be considered whether or not wifi 7 sensing is allowed to be part of new routers.
SWAT teams, home burglars and the NSA will all be clients for the data.
Once the granularity gets fine enough, movements involved in prayers, sex and elimination of waste can all be monitored remotely by state actors.
Malware from around the world will now be able to transmit details of your body movements back to their controllers.
Imagine being able to blackmail you because malware detected you having sex when your partner was away or performing Muslim prayers in an islamophobic society.
Technology can't be stopped by individual engineers refusing to invent it, it can only be stopped by everyone agreeing on the ways it shouldn't be used. So it was for arson (fire), homicide (every weapon since the rock), and obscene material (all communications technology), and so must it be for privacy and the various techniques of monitoring us.
It isn't just you, but it should be. The privacy implications are potentially disturbing and need to be address (I have no idea how). However there are also a lot of real uses for this that will make your life better. Some of those are things we haven't thought of yet.
> Imagine that someone wants to illegally track the position of a person inside a laboratory, for instance to measure how much time is spent doing different activities at different desks, as depicted in the upper picture. How much effective can this attack be? ... With CSI-MURDER, the localization becomes impossible because results will seem random, thus preserving the person privacy without destroying Wi-Fi communications.
> other comments that question the ratio of benefit vs. risk
I think it is important to note that different people will have different inputs into benefits and risk. E.g. a 24 year old male living alone probably doesn't have a use case for elderly fall detection, etc. But, a 75 year old woman living alone probably does.
Also, I am of the opinion that is possible to do this properly (i.e. securely and privacy preserving). Case in point: people carry microphones (in phones) that can record any audio with them... but they do it because they trust that their phone is secure and private.
> Outside of fine-grained location tracking, UWB is also used for radar sensing. Google is using UWB for its Soli radar, which is embedded in the most recent Nest Hub display to track respiration during sleep ... Novelda, argues that UWB sensing is more effective than the traditional motion sensors that hotels have historically deployed because they can sense a person even when they are still by “seeing” micromovements made by the person’s breathing. Lenovo embedded the Novelda chip into its laptops as a way to keep the screen on only when a person is in front of it, which helps save on battery power.
This is great because, finally we can start selling ads with verified "proximal views" to advertisers and make more money! In fact we can think of all the wonderful product synergies here. For example, we can increase the number of proximal views by automatically locking the smart lock in their room so they can't get out for the duration of the ad. Or we can lock the doors of our smart cars while the ads are playing, that's up to 6 verified viewers all at once! We can have ad screen on toilet stalls that autoplay when someone s(h)its. Your phone can start playing ads whenever you come near it! The possibilities here are endless
This could easily fall within the realm of the Supreme Court's decision in KYLLO v. UNITED STATES where it was ruled that a thermal imaging search of a home is a violation of the US 4th amendment.
How much additional value does this provide vs the addition of ToF information in beacons that already exists?
This seems primarily about providing tracking capabilities to operators whereas ToF provides tracking to the people who are actually trying to do positioning. The privacy implications are worrying.
Cisco has been doing something like this with Angle of Arrival with a 16 antenna array for the past few years. It’s pretty cool but only works in perfect setups, and the antennas need to be mounted above you.
It's most probably meant for opportunistic sensing in industrial environments, where it might become quite useful. It's not something you're going to use at home.
Since this is passive sensing, an attacker outside your home can make use of the WiFi signals emitted from the router inside your home. Or they can broadcast their own signal.
Of course there are all sorts of positive applications for the user. It's just their number is dwarfed by the real purpose of these things. We've known they've been coming for a while. Now they here and we'll have to fight it, then lose.
Mass surveillance. Only through warrants, of course.
Or, you know, if a cop wants to stalk their ex-gf, or an isp tech support nerd wants to stalk a customer. Or any script kiddie or petty criminal can get hold of your wifi password or drop his own AP in your house.
Nothing to see here. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
They've been making that tech for years, every office and school classroom I've been to in the last 10 years has that now. This is just another stupid shot in the dark. Maybe someday someone will actually find a useful purpose. We are limited by what we can't even imagine so there's always hope but until then, I'll let those with deep pockets spend the energy trying to find a good use for it.
> lights turning on automatically when you enter a room
Was this really it? Or did they have some use-case not currently covered by motion sensors?
I can see some potential use for security (cheap REX sensors can be easily tricked, allowing unauthorized access into secure areas). The fix is obvious (stop cheaping out on your REX sensors) but I can envision someone trying to bill wifi sensing as the hip new solution for REX systems.
I've long had an obsession with energy savings and heating, and I think the best way to save energy on heating is by heating people instead of building. With accurate person detection in a room, you could shine low intensity IR at their exact position to keep them warm without wasting energy on heating the rest of the room.
But yeah, I think we can all expect this will be used to monitor behaviour in stores, to spy on people in homes, to rob us and to throw more "relevant" advertising in our faces.
> The only real practical example is fall detection, what's the real purpose of this?
I can think of few real world applications. Eg. I have autism and air filter. Air filter working on full power is very uncomfortable for me, but with position sensing, it can be configured to run more often when I'm not in room. Motion sensing isn't exactly a solution, because I can be very still.
Automated light management is sensible too. It can also be used to automatically turn off lights if I fall asleep.
Then make a dedicated fall detector and sell it to the elderly. They already make wrist bands with panic buttons that phone for help, put the sensor in the phone hub just in case they fall and lose consciousness.
> Great article. To get out ahead of this, I’ll go ahead and pre-write this for the IEEE. They’re going to need it in a few months.
> “The IEEE has heard the concerns of consumers and takes privacy very seriously. We recognize that the potential value of the proposed standard is enormous, but that it must be paired with technologies that prevent it’s misuse in an ever more dangerous cyber world. As such, we are delaying the implementation of this technology in the .bf standard, and we will re-address it once we have come to a consensus across all stakeholders including privacy and consumer advocates.”
> we could use terahertz spectrum to detect specific molecules and in turn use terahertz frequencies and radios as a way to track specific ingredients in food or pollutants in the air.
Your next door neighbor’s wifi will know your every movement, and can probably image it too.
End of privacy within closed doors.
I guess I always thought that should be sacred space.
> In 2012, her work on Sparse Fourier Transforms was chosen as one of the top 10 breakthroughs of the year by Technology Review ... In 2014, on the celebration of Project Mac's 50th anniversary, her work on X-ray vision was chosen as one of the "50 ways that MIT has transformed computer science."
I need this, room occupancy is still not a cleanly solved problem for home automation. Most methods relies on BLE or phone wifi but that sucks in many ways.
Wouldn't this have to be constantly transmitting to work? I can't imagine the amount of interference this would create. The lower frequencies are already congested enough...
I'm surprised that there's not a single comment here about 802.11ay which is also 60GHz. Each channel on that standard can do something like 40Gbps, which is nuts. From Wikipedia[0]:
> The link-rate per stream is 44 Gbit/s, with four streams this goes up to 176 Gbit/s.
Yes, it can't penetrate walls, but is huge for point to point communication. Think VR headset bandwidth, file transfers between devices, wireless backhaul between buildings. It's not just for spying on your cat.
I think it's important to remember that it's not magic, it's just radio waves. You can "sense" with a lot more resolution if you use a camera and light bulb. There are plenty of eyeballs, cameras, and lights all around you right now. Even worse, someone could be looking in your window with binoculars.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ay
> It's not just for spying on your cat.
Can we stop downplaying privacy issues please?
Sure, can privacy advocates stop down playing what we lose because we value privacy though?
There needs to be a balance, location information will be very useful for a lot of things, but only if we have it fully implemented. I want things to sense when I fall and call for help for me. (If I was at a big risk I'd have a button, but for the average young person the risk is non-zero but very small). I want my home automation stuff to figure out where they are and configure themselves. I want my routers to suggest that I'd get better coverage by moving it.
Yes there is privacy concerns and they need to be addressed, but don't lose the good with it.
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Not trying to be provocative, but how is this any worse than existing cameras or motion sensors?
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Clearly you've not met my cat.
I cant see through walls with a lightbulb. I can with wifi.
This standard makes my wifi router into an internet connected, closed source blob, light bulb and camera that is impossible to obscure (without killing my internet connection).
Sure, I can wire my whole house for ethernet. And, while I’m behind the drywall, I might as well rip off all the drywall put a layer of Al.
Here’s a business idea - drywall with aluminum fibers embedded in. For those of us who don't want our sexy times recorded by our router.
EDIT: made wifi’s ability to see through walls explicit per _jal’s comment.
> drywall with aluminum fibers embedded
QuietRock has drywall that combines soundproofing with RF shielding (steel plate), but it's expensive and targeted at military use cases, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29902926
Another idea in the opposite direction: somebody should build a $20 firewall/tappable ethernet cable with some kind of builtin eBPF support + a universe of community packages.
The community would then share privacy-enhancing I/O profiles for every kind of device. If years later e.g. my adversarial lightbulb pivots to brokering kompromat SIGINT, I want to filter that out, and I want not to be the first one to write a filter like that..
Does it change the internal state of the lightbulb’s logic? No.. but hopefully it would even be able to simulate the state loop of the lightbulb well enough to guess what to filter out.
Of course there may also come a time when somebody starts to sell $20, 60 ghz-spectrum-only-visible “human activity fakers” to disrupt the collection of such data. Maybe with a “Honey, I’m home!” package being the most popular, lol
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To put a slightly finer point on it, I can't see through your walls with my lightbulb, but I probably can see through your walls with my router.
Your creepy neighbor in the apartment next door is getting a new toy.
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> drywall with aluminum fibers embedded in. For those of us who don't want our sexy times recorded by our router.
The ancients had a solution for this (brick walls).
Along with plaster-and-lathe there was also plaster on a wire mesh. Old houses with these kind of plaster walls get terrible cell phone reception.
> You can "sense" with a lot more resolution if you use a camera and light bulb.
(Visible) Light has a frequency of around 400-790 THz, which explains why it has a inherently better resolution.
https://www.rtinsights.com/li-fi-a-new-wireless-alternative-...
> Li-Fi connections are broadcast over the air through a light-emitting diodes (LED) broadcaster and support rates up to 100Gbit/s ... Li-Fi can also serve to identify an object’s indoor position more accurately than Wi-Fi or GPS used today (less than 2cm and less than 3 degrees of orientation while it is providing real-time localization (less than 34ms). This accuracy is vital in multiple applications such as navigation In-Door Robots and Drones, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Gaming, among others ... it cannot go through walls, and thus a private local area network (LAN) can be created by lighting up a closed room ... Any organization that needs to keep information within the four walls, such as military bases and banks, can use the technology to keep data restricted to a single room.
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Yep!
So if I don’t want anyone taking a WiFi “photo” of me on the throne I should put up aluminum foil curtains?
Wear a tin foil hat. And take a photo of yourself anyways cause a guy on the throne with a tin foil hat on sounds hilarious
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Watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrxWiU_v9Qs
Yes and no. So you have to have a cable again to every room (for the AP), because the wifi signal can't go thru walls?
I hope then you can dissable the lower frequencys, because now you have 5 or more APs in your appartement.
> What an absolutely ridiculously ignorant statement to make.
Why is that an ignorant statement? It's comparing to what one might consider the "gold standard" of spying, so it seems quite a relevant thing to consider if one is after an objective estimate of how much worse wifi sensing might be...
But do those cameras and lightbulbs come with a industry standard specification for occupancy sensing.
Occupancy sensing and other surveilence have no place in a wireless communications specification.
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I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old. It seems this, like a lot of new tech these days, will end up offering little benefit while providing new malicious capabilities.
It's very scary shit. We could soon have no privacy at all in our own homes because of other people's WiFi networks. If the output is strong enough, all you have to do is connect to/crack someone's WiFi and use it to get a layout of all their neighbor's places.
> all you have to do is connect to/crack someone's WiFi and use it to get a layout of all their neighbor's places.
It's much worse: neither crack nor connection is required. The technology is entirely passive, it only uses reflections from Wi-Fi radios, same as radar. No connection to the router is required, hence the acronym DFWS (Device-Free Wireless Sensing).
To be clear, this can be done today with $20 ESP32 WiFi devices + custom firmware, i.e. any motivated attacker can already see through the walls of homes and businesses. The Wi-Fi 7 Sensing draft standard is proposing to make this available to everyone.
Perhaps we need a celebrity to help demo SENS transparency of their home walls, to help consumers and regulators understand the implications. That could motivate research investment in privacy controls.
More details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901979
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This is a great example of why people don’t have privacy. Ethernet cables exist, and wholly forgo these problems. But, they are less convenient. Consumers complain a lot about privacy, but do little to really demand it. Of course manufacturers deserve much of the blame here for actually implementing these things, but it doesn’t seem as if consumers are trying to steer them in the right direction at all.
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One thing I see 802.1bf ( Sensing ), along with 802.11be ( WiFi 7 ) could be used together in setting up consumer mesh WiFi Network. Home Wireless Networking is still pretty much an unsolved problem for average consumers.
Edit: Turns out there are other comments below mentioning this.
"Home Wireless Networking is still pretty much an unsolved problem for average consumers."
What do you mean? Most consumers have a wireless router, and that works for their needs.
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It's been the same throughout history. Invent a tool...use it to kill.
I wouldn't be as negative.
Frequently we create the tool in order to kill with it.
After that we also use to tool to create.
We're equally capable of good and evil and yes, we are frequently good, too.
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...also the other way: a lot of inventions were used in the civil world just after being designed and developed in the military one.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones ..."
There is a difference between consumer benefits and maybe industrial benefits. Maybe it might make communication between sorting bots more accurate and quicker.
Doubtful. Beam forming would be more beneficial.
There seems to be a lot of FUD about this. Make no mistake, the malicious and privacy invasive applications are already being used; they just don't follow a IEEE spec and aren't associated with WiFi directly.
If a maliciously controlled router wants to track you it already can because your phone, smart watch, and laptop already broadcast themselves.
This technology may not seem useful to the purpose of WiFi on it's face but that couldn't be further from the truth. Knowing the population of a room in terms of devices but also people is useful for WiFi deployment planning and power level optimization. 2000 people with 2 devices is different from 4000 individual people.
People already have WiFi enabled lights and other sensors so providing a standard for object & people detection will make those use cases even better.
It's not FUD. There's nothing hypothetical about the danger.
The hypothetical in this is that this suddenly opens the door to RF-based physical sensing, when every attacker that can gain from this is already using it, just via custom equipment.
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So there’s FUD about something we should already reasonably have FUD about?
When analysing FUD always use the ELMER acronym
E - Expectations
L - Lifetime
M - Motivation
E - Environment
R - Reward
:-)
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There was also a lot of FUD about what data the feds were collecting about the general public during the Bush era. Then the Snowden leaks happened.
>People already have WiFi enabled lights and other sensors so providing a standard for object & people detection will make those use cases even better.
Yet another reason I prefer Zwave for my home automation communications. Sure you could probably use it in the same way, but it won't be handed to you on a silver platter like the wifi stuff discussed here!
This is not a future I'd like to see. What bothers me even more, is that if the neighbors above me decide to join an "Apple Security Sensing Program" by toggling it on, it may as well be sensing and logging my activity.
Other than that, I do have a lot of ESP32s at my place sensing for activity via IR as well as by creating an FFT-"audio" log. No sound just FFT aggregated over one second, but all these devices store the data on my home server, not in some cloud.
Tell us more about the home sensors why ir? And what is the fft data for?
I feed fft data into machine learning system for signal classification. It’s a nice real time system with midrange Xilinx ZynQ SoC. Some Xilinx IP blocks with hand written classification engine.
I guess author wants to classify sounds in his environment too.
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> What bothers me even more, is that if the neighbors above me decide to join an "Apple Security Sensing Program" by toggling it on, it may as well be sensing and logging my activity.
60 Ghz is heavily blocked by walls, glass and doors, even more than 5Ghz, so that's very unlikely scenario.
> that's very unlikely scenario.
Wi-Fi sensing works with 2.4 Ghz and higher.
I remember when first contactless payment options appeared, many people started buying anti-RFID wallets and bags. I'm not sure if they're still a thing, but the people who need "radio-privacy" will definitely find a way.
I have a few wallets with alleged RFID blocking. For those its mainly to stop arse grabbing attacks where card info (or security badge info) could be cloned with a little badge reader held in someone's palm.
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I want my Wi-Fi to deliver me fast internet access, not track my position. Have a feeling this will be used for il-intent and monetized by future routers
In this case you may want to use a router based on free software: https://ryf.fsf.org/categories/routers.
+1
As many APs today are already cloud dependent I can totally see where all the sensed data will be stored and out of the owners control.
I’m skeptical there are customers really asking for this.
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How would this be useful? Collecting the average distance away from an access point someone uses their phone or whatever?
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What are you talking about, providing you fast internet access doesn't maximize the benefit for me and my shareholders. We need your exact location, eye movement, and heart rate every second so we can do better invasive target advertisements, or sell these to other companies.
But tracking your position allows it to give you fast internet access.
I don't need more than a few hundred megabits on the go, thank you very much. If I want to go faster, and Ethernet cable is always a faster solution with less moving parts.
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How does beamforming position granularity correlate with speed?
(2021) privacy comments on Wi-Fi 7 standards work for 802.11bf, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.14918.pdf
> it has been shown that SENS-based classifiers can infer privacy-critical information such as keyboard typing, gesture recognition and activity tracking ... since Wi-Fi signals can penetrate hard objects and can be used without the presence of light, end-users may not even realize they are being tracked ... individuals should be provided the opportunity to opt out of SENS services – in other words, to avoid being monitored and tracked by the Wi-Fi devices around them. This would require the widespread introduction of reliable SENS algorithm for human or animal identification.
Would this require a worldwide database of biometric signatures for each human that opts out?
No, the future is decentralized. In the US, you will always be tracked because of regulatory capture of the FCC. In Europe, your phone will display a tracking consent pop-up everytime you go into a cafe. If you don't comply, you will have to get your coffee and free wifi elsewhere.
I can no longer tell apart sarcasm and real dystopia
> If you don't comply, you will have to get your coffee and free wifi elsewhere.
You will be able to take legal action against the café, but it won't make a difference.
My concern is that people opting out of this protocol won't actually be opting out of the sensing technology. Any attacker trying to sense keystrokes using RF waves already can do that and won't be hindered by some opt out program nor be considered whether or not wifi 7 sensing is allowed to be part of new routers.
Nice...
SWAT teams, home burglars and the NSA will all be clients for the data.
Once the granularity gets fine enough, movements involved in prayers, sex and elimination of waste can all be monitored remotely by state actors.
Malware from around the world will now be able to transmit details of your body movements back to their controllers.
Imagine being able to blackmail you because malware detected you having sex when your partner was away or performing Muslim prayers in an islamophobic society.
Just put it under "contact tracing and covid prevention" and people will cheer you for it and ask for more.
Hmm, this is what I imagined: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/07/21/books/review/0721...
Is it just me, or does this seems like a really, really bad idea? The privacy implications here seem… disturbing.
Technology can't be stopped by individual engineers refusing to invent it, it can only be stopped by everyone agreeing on the ways it shouldn't be used. So it was for arson (fire), homicide (every weapon since the rock), and obscene material (all communications technology), and so must it be for privacy and the various techniques of monitoring us.
Even then it isn't stopped; once something exists someone will eventually use it, and likely in way not intended by the designer.
Since 802.11bf makes most existing walls transparent, it should lead to innovation in wall construction.
It may also increase market demand for light-based wireless networking (Li-Fi) which has the advantage of being stopped by existing walls.
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I think future home privacy will go beyond blinds. We will be lining the walls in RF blocking sheets.
RF shielding materials: https://mpkb.org/home/special/emf/protective_materials & https://www.eiwellspring.org/shielding.html
QuietRock 530RF drywall will block sound and RF, https://www.buildsite.com/pdf/pabcogypsum/QuietRock-530-Inst...
Honest question: is wrapping a home in a Faraday cage even plausible?
Or on a room level? How do you control for RF leaks? How do you handle windows and doorways?
I’m fascinated.
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It isn't just you, but it should be. The privacy implications are potentially disturbing and need to be address (I have no idea how). However there are also a lot of real uses for this that will make your life better. Some of those are things we haven't thought of yet.
What sort of real uses?
Some WiFi systems [1] [2] already offer sensing capabilities for home security.
[1]: https://www.linksys.com/us/support-article?articleNum=317804
[2]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171114005542/en/Nex...
I agree with other comments that question the ratio of benefit vs. risk. But I’m an old fogey who feels similarly about other “smart” home devices.
Also possible with open firmware on low-cost ESP32 devices, https://wrlab.github.io/Wi-ESP/ & https://github.com/StevenMHernandez/ESP32-CSI-Tool
But there's a big difference in custom firmware used in a few products and IEEE standardization in every new WiFi access point.
We need more funding for countermeasures, https://ans.unibs.it/projects/csi-murder/
> Imagine that someone wants to illegally track the position of a person inside a laboratory, for instance to measure how much time is spent doing different activities at different desks, as depicted in the upper picture. How much effective can this attack be? ... With CSI-MURDER, the localization becomes impossible because results will seem random, thus preserving the person privacy without destroying Wi-Fi communications.
400+ (!) papers on wireless sensing, over the last decade https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/ & https://groups.csail.mit.edu/netmit/sFFT/soda_paper.pdf & https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/103715
> other comments that question the ratio of benefit vs. risk
I think it is important to note that different people will have different inputs into benefits and risk. E.g. a 24 year old male living alone probably doesn't have a use case for elderly fall detection, etc. But, a 75 year old woman living alone probably does.
Also, I am of the opinion that is possible to do this properly (i.e. securely and privacy preserving). Case in point: people carry microphones (in phones) that can record any audio with them... but they do it because they trust that their phone is secure and private.
Please dance the Amazon Verification Dance.
I cannot fathom any good use for this technology.
- Automatically alert emergency services to cardiac arrest - Health monitoring - intrusion detection - gesture control
Adaptive ventilation and maybe even heating of rooms depending on the number of people present.
You can add a 100 euro CO2 sensor to control your HVAC.
There isn't a use case for this that isn't abusive outside an industrial setting.
I think if ISPs push for these in routers we will see comeback of rewiring houses with ethernet points.
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There are far less invasive ways to do so. Like, for example, an IR sensor.
In a related note, this week Google ATAP and Ford announced Ripple, a open standard for consumer radio sensing based on Project Soli (60 Ghz)
[1] https://github.com/CTA-Ripple/Ripple-v.0
[2] https://9to5google.com/2022/01/06/google-soli-radar-ripple/
That's based on UWB (Ultra Wideband), which is also present in some iPhones.
https://staceyoniot.com/two-companies-show-where-our-uwb-fut...
> Outside of fine-grained location tracking, UWB is also used for radar sensing. Google is using UWB for its Soli radar, which is embedded in the most recent Nest Hub display to track respiration during sleep ... Novelda, argues that UWB sensing is more effective than the traditional motion sensors that hotels have historically deployed because they can sense a person even when they are still by “seeing” micromovements made by the person’s breathing. Lenovo embedded the Novelda chip into its laptops as a way to keep the screen on only when a person is in front of it, which helps save on battery power.
This is great because, finally we can start selling ads with verified "proximal views" to advertisers and make more money! In fact we can think of all the wonderful product synergies here. For example, we can increase the number of proximal views by automatically locking the smart lock in their room so they can't get out for the duration of the ad. Or we can lock the doors of our smart cars while the ads are playing, that's up to 6 verified viewers all at once! We can have ad screen on toilet stalls that autoplay when someone s(h)its. Your phone can start playing ads whenever you come near it! The possibilities here are endless
This could easily fall within the realm of the Supreme Court's decision in KYLLO v. UNITED STATES where it was ruled that a thermal imaging search of a home is a violation of the US 4th amendment.
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/kyllo.h...
As we know, outlawing activities is a sure-fire way to prevent them from happening!
How much additional value does this provide vs the addition of ToF information in beacons that already exists?
This seems primarily about providing tracking capabilities to operators whereas ToF provides tracking to the people who are actually trying to do positioning. The privacy implications are worrying.
Cisco has been doing something like this with Angle of Arrival with a 16 antenna array for the past few years. It’s pretty cool but only works in perfect setups, and the antennas need to be mounted above you.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/controller/te...
Who is actually asking for this? It can't be for consumers just wanting to use the internet right? I don't get it.
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...
The big one is "heartbeat detection".
"Tactical suggests there are 14 heartbeats in the room"
"During the interview the candidates heart rate increased during questions on their reasons for leaving the last position"
ohhh. There is sooo much here :-)
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Advertisement signage efficiency
Here we go
It's most probably meant for opportunistic sensing in industrial environments, where it might become quite useful. It's not something you're going to use at home.
I think there’ll be a decent amount of home interest, particularly for home security. Linksys is already doing WiFi sensing as part of their various smart home products: https://www.linksys.com/us/support-article?articleNum=317804
The Linksys docs even mention how you may have to tune the sensitivity to filter out motion from your neighbors...
Since this is passive sensing, an attacker outside your home can make use of the WiFi signals emitted from the router inside your home. Or they can broadcast their own signal.
However, it could be something employers would want to use when you are working remotely. Unfortunately.
This has nearly zero non-orwellian use-cases inside a home.
Of course there are all sorts of positive applications for the user. It's just their number is dwarfed by the real purpose of these things. We've known they've been coming for a while. Now they here and we'll have to fight it, then lose.
You have no idea what the future will come up with. There is a lot of potential on both sides.
Not mentioned in the article but a futuristic guess would be to provide omniscient eyes for AI/robots.
Short term smart bots that can navigate and clean a cluttered household with little kids and toddlers knocking about.
Longer term, maybe nanobots.
It could be Rosie from the Jetsons but more likely it’s Amazon analyzing my poop density to sell me some goofball supplements.
Terahertz-radar doorbell breathalyzer virus test decides whether to smart unlock front door to allow leaving the house?
Philip K. Dick would be proud.
There is some previous work dating back at least to 2015. They were detecting people and gestures using current WiFi technologies.
http://rfcapture.csail.mit.edu/
This could inspire some clothing designs that weave in rf blocking or distorting materials to wear in retail or work places.
That would be like hiding from cameras by wearing a bright orange reflective vest.
Will be great for making targeted interactive ads that follow customers around as they shop.
The only real practical example is fall detection, what's the real purpose of this?
Mass surveillance. Only through warrants, of course.
Or, you know, if a cop wants to stalk their ex-gf, or an isp tech support nerd wants to stalk a customer. Or any script kiddie or petty criminal can get hold of your wifi password or drop his own AP in your house.
Nothing to see here. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
I worked briefly for a company working on WiFi sensing, and besides fall detection, nobody could give a compelling use case.
When pressed to come up with a motivating vision, the big idea was lights turning on automatically when you enter a room.
I guess? Like a lot of R&D, it seemed a solution in search of a problem.
They've been making that tech for years, every office and school classroom I've been to in the last 10 years has that now. This is just another stupid shot in the dark. Maybe someday someone will actually find a useful purpose. We are limited by what we can't even imagine so there's always hope but until then, I'll let those with deep pockets spend the energy trying to find a good use for it.
> lights turning on automatically when you enter a room
Was this really it? Or did they have some use-case not currently covered by motion sensors?
I can see some potential use for security (cheap REX sensors can be easily tricked, allowing unauthorized access into secure areas). The fix is obvious (stop cheaping out on your REX sensors) but I can envision someone trying to bill wifi sensing as the hip new solution for REX systems.
Yeah seemed like a replacement for other motion sensing... but then how localized can this actually be?
I've long had an obsession with energy savings and heating, and I think the best way to save energy on heating is by heating people instead of building. With accurate person detection in a room, you could shine low intensity IR at their exact position to keep them warm without wasting energy on heating the rest of the room.
But yeah, I think we can all expect this will be used to monitor behaviour in stores, to spy on people in homes, to rob us and to throw more "relevant" advertising in our faces.
>"you could shine low intensity IR at their exact position to keep them warm without wasting energy on heating the rest of the room."
brings new meaning to beam forming! I like it.
> The only real practical example is fall detection, what's the real purpose of this?
I can think of few real world applications. Eg. I have autism and air filter. Air filter working on full power is very uncomfortable for me, but with position sensing, it can be configured to run more often when I'm not in room. Motion sensing isn't exactly a solution, because I can be very still.
Automated light management is sensible too. It can also be used to automatically turn off lights if I fall asleep.
That sounds useful in your case, thanks for sharing.
A lot of the active research in this area was military funded.
I am sure the invisible hand of the market will make sure it's put to best possible use :)
Kept a lot of smart students busy
Saving lives isn't good enough for you?
This gave me 'think of the children' gaslighting vibes.
Then make a dedicated fall detector and sell it to the elderly. They already make wrist bands with panic buttons that phone for help, put the sensor in the phone hub just in case they fall and lose consciousness.
Check if anyone is home before a robery ?
Thanks to the person who posted this comment on the article, https://staceyoniot.com/the-next-big-wi-fi-standard-is-for-s...
> Great article. To get out ahead of this, I’ll go ahead and pre-write this for the IEEE. They’re going to need it in a few months.
> “The IEEE has heard the concerns of consumers and takes privacy very seriously. We recognize that the potential value of the proposed standard is enormous, but that it must be paired with technologies that prevent it’s misuse in an ever more dangerous cyber world. As such, we are delaying the implementation of this technology in the .bf standard, and we will re-address it once we have come to a consensus across all stakeholders including privacy and consumer advocates.”
I expected wifi sensing to be exploited when I saw the tech demo years ago but I did not expect it to become a standard.
(2010) early public firmware for research on Wi-Fi sensing, > This paper reports ongoing efforts by the IEEE 802.11bf Task Group (TGbf), which is defining the appropriate modifications to existing Wi-Fi standards to enhance sensing capabilities through 802.11-compliant waveforms.
(2021) panel discussion on RF sensing, https://staceyoniot.com/what-you-missed-at-the-rf-sensing-ev...
> we could use terahertz spectrum to detect specific molecules and in turn use terahertz frequencies and radios as a way to track specific ingredients in food or pollutants in the air.
(2021) EU-funded CSI countermeasures research in privacy protection, https://ans.unibs.it/projects/csi-murder/
(2022) product launch ahead of the 2024 standard,riddleronroof
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Your next door neighbor’s wifi will know your every movement, and can probably image it too. End of privacy within closed doors. I guess I always thought that should be sacred space.
Finally! X-Ray glasses like what the ads in the comic book promised!
Thanks, MIT! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dina_Katabi
> In 2012, her work on Sparse Fourier Transforms was chosen as one of the top 10 breakthroughs of the year by Technology Review ... In 2014, on the celebration of Project Mac's 50th anniversary, her work on X-ray vision was chosen as one of the "50 ways that MIT has transformed computer science."
I need this, room occupancy is still not a cleanly solved problem for home automation. Most methods relies on BLE or phone wifi but that sucks in many ways.
This is awesome!
This is the natural evolution of ultrasound radars, currently present in some devices.
And just what do people think 5G is for?
I've been frustratedly trying to tell people this for a few years now. Glad it's finally "coming to light".
^^^ this pun has something to do with electromagnetic radiation
Wouldn't this have to be constantly transmitting to work? I can't imagine the amount of interference this would create. The lower frequencies are already congested enough...
It uses reflections from existing transmissions.
your access point is transmitting beacons on a regular basis anyway.
I see a nice niche market opening for devices that scramble this kind of spatial detection.
Co-founders are welcome to contact me.
Do smell next.
Sounds like a coup for Cognitive
can someone who knows more than me speak to the GDPR (European privacy law) implications of a technology like this?
Meh,not even web3.0 compatible. Very disappointing.