Comment by snickerbockers
1 month ago
Okay I'm as concerned about privasy as everybody else is here but i also gotta admire that its pretty neat they can actually do that. Are they measuring the signal echo like what radar does? If they controlled both the receiver and transmitter i wouldn't be as surprised to find out they can tell when something crosses between them and form a 2-dimensional mesh (like that episode of Star Trek TNG where geordie detects cloaked romulan ships by having starfleet deploy a fleet of ships that send signals back and forth and look for timing variances) but if I'm understanding correctly this is different because they only control a single point in the network?
I wonder if they have enough information to make out shapes or if it's just a simple rangefinder?
It's far from great for imaging, but it can be done. https://www.zmescience.com/research/inventions/wifi-technolo...
Similarly, "DensePose from WiFi" (2023), 40 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423395
Honestly even that is pretty incredible. At the very least that's enough date to count family members, possibly ID them if they have different-shaped bodies, and identify certain activities with obvious silhouettes (eg, sex).
I don't think it justifies the impending orwellian hellscape this technology will eventually unleash, but one positive thing about this that has me a bit excited is that this could easily clear up many ambiguities in criminal cases. for example, fairly often a death will get ruled as a suicide but victim's relatives and friends will insist that it must have been a murder; imagine being able to use this technology to definitively prove whether or not there was another party present when the victim died.
Or in rape cases where the defendant is protesting their innocence, knowing the body language of the victim and the defendant could be a vital clue because you might be able to observe the victim fighting back.
Again, I don't think the positives outweigh the negatives to the point that it could ever justify an invasion of privacy on this scale (you might as well just make everybody let the government set up a thermal camera in their house!) but it is interesting to think about the problems this could solve.