And much like flawed facial recognition technology, I’m sure the police will misuse this to convict innocent people of crimes to keep the for-profit prison system full.

Excerpt from the article:

The researchers… call their approach “WhoFi”, as described in a preprint paper titled, “WhoFi: Deep Person Re-Identification via Wi-Fi Channel Signal Encoding.”

Who are you, really?

Re-identification, the researchers explain, is a common challenge in video surveillance. It’s not always clear when a subject captured on video is the same person recorded at another time and/or place.

Re-identification doesn’t necessarily reveal a person’s identity. Instead, it is just an assertion that the same surveilled subject appears in different settings. In video surveillance, this might be done by matching the subject’s clothes or other distinct features in different recordings. But that’s not always possible.

The author asserts that re-identification doesn’t necessarily reveal a person’s identity, although I suppose this is similar to how a single fingerprint or DNA sample doesn’t necessarily reveal a person’s identity, right up until somebody can connect your fingerprint to your identity, say, by correlating your location with other tracking methods or something.

Time to add a tinfoil suit to the hat!

So is this for the safety of the children, right?

/s

These are only going to get more accurate as time goes on, and we begin to use higher and higher frequencies. This works at 2.4 GHz, but would work better at 5 GHz, and would work even better at 6 GHz. The reason for this is that the higher the frequency is, the smaller it is, and therefore the more accurate it can be, and it requires more access point devices, which would make the signal stronger in an area with an access point.