WiFi routers can see people through walls. Here's how it works
www.zmescience.com
external-link
With the help of AI, the researchers were able to detect the movement of human bodies in a room using Wi-Fi routers -- even through walls.

What do you guys think about this?

fiat_lux
link
fedilink
5
edit-2
1Y

Honestly, I’m not sure. Privacy has always been a spectrum, but we’re now living in a world where it’s near impossible to get close to 100% privacy for any action from the start. I suspect the current possible remedies are “ensuring the people and organisations which use/abuse surveillance are heavily regulated and compliance heavily enforced” which ironically requires transparency.

Realistically there needs to be lengthy legal procedures to grant authorities and companies use of such techniques. Legislation like that is complicated and slow to develop though. It also risks pinning the core privacy concepts to specific versions of specific tech, which complicates its enforcement over time.

Even if it is very illegal to do this to someone though, there will always be people who use it for whatever purposes. Obviously making it illegal under wiretapping laws without explicit opt-in consent to do it is something that would need to happen. I’d also like to see mandatory source attribution laws.

That won’t stop everyone though. Which means we maybe need to start looking into comstruction legislation to ensure RF blocking materials are used in external wall construction. If that is an effective remedy to Van Eck phreaking at all. I have no idea what resolution information can be determined from devices that aren’t purpose built broadcasting and receiving devices.

And all of that requires good-will and sensible decisions from the existing legal systems and legislators. Which can’t be completely achieved, and in many cases is… currently very poor.

Tl;dr A very hard problem which will need work from a bunch of different parts of society and likely cannot be completely solved for all people. The only solution for this specific technique right now I think is to go fully off-grid with no electricity. Even then though you’ll still have satellites and drones to intrude.

Create a post

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

  • Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
  • Don’t promote proprietary software
  • Try to keep things on topic
  • If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
  • Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
  • Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

  • 0 users online
  • 57 users / day
  • 383 users / week
  • 1.5K users / month
  • 5.7K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 2.44K Posts
  • 57.6K Comments
  • Modlog