Comment by qwertox
4 years ago
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.
Correct, the ultimate goal is to perform automatic activity logging.
For example my bathroom has two IR sensors (https://www.amazon.de/dp/B08LBDYPYD), one inside the shower, one outside of it. This lets me log the time and duration of when I take a shower or how often I shave.
It also has an I2S MEMS microphone which collects the data for the FFT where the goal is to replace the IR in the shower with it since the water sound is enough information.
Also temperature and humidity, where the latter also gives a good indication of when I showered and when I forgot to close the window some time after showering.
My bedroom also has the same "setup", where the FFT shows me how big of a problem I have with snoring. Eventually I can add some logic on the server to slightly wake me up if I snore, but currently I'm just logging. The PIR serves as a measurement of how much I'm moving at night without requiring a camera for this. Though I have another ESP32 under my bed fixated at the slatted frame which contains an 9dof-IMU and logs any significant movement which may be related to quality of sleep. Also the magnetic field which is why I have a strong magnet attached to my bed tablet, so I know when it changed position. Even though the tablet knows that itself because it is logging its own accelerometer every minute.
I live alone, so all of this is no problem.
At this point I'm mostly only logging, and only using the shower and bed data to see when I used them, which I can then see in Grafana. I think the data will only gain value when watched over a long time frame.
3 replies →
> 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.
Smart cards store secret keys and modifiable internal state on-device. Older smart cards, with for example a MIFARE chip from around the year 2000, can be cloned relatively easily because they have many vulnerabilities, but newer cards with for example an NXP SmartMX2 P60 are, to date, impossible to clone unless you have access to the card for a large amount of time.
You'd also be surprised how powerful smart cards are these days. the aforementioned NXP chip has 586 KB ROM, 144 KB EEPROM and 11 KB RAM, crypto coprocessors for RSA/ECC/DES/AES, and a 32-bit CPU.