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Humans can be tracked with unique 'fingerprint' based on how their bodies block Wi-Fi signals (www.theregister.com)
submitted 1 year ago* by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The Sapienza computer scientists say Wi-Fi signals offer superior surveillance potential compared to cameras because they're not affected by light conditions, can penetrate walls and other obstacles, and they're more privacy-preserving than visual images.

[…] The Rome-based researchers who proposed WhoFi claim their technique makes accurate matches on the public NTU-Fi dataset up to 95.5 percent of the time when the deep neural network uses the transformer encoding architecture.

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[–] 42 points 1 year ago (12 children)

they're more privacy-preserving than visual images.

hhhhwat. How can they identify you and also be privacy preserving? 🤔

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    They know you are a person and they can call your a certain UUID, but there will be a hard time matching you to your name etc.

    Camera's can do face recognition (if your face is even in the database) to know who you are.

    This only works until the point where they have your form in a database which they can check...

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    We have heard this non-sense before, only to find it's trivially easy to connect to your PID.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Never said that it wasn’t easy, it’s just harder than with facial recognition. In theory you could do it correctly in a way that it isn’t indentifiable.

    Also this works in places where faces are protected

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    They can see you're a person but not exactly who you are.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    How is that a "fingerprint"?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Well they can identify you are the same person but not your identity.. So it's like a disenbodied fingerprint.

    I suppose they could potentially make some database and train an AI on it someday to match to actual identities, but usefulness would be pretty limited at only 95% accuracy. That's a false reading 1/20 times, so I suspect it would fail bigly to accurately recognize people from large data sets.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I'd imagine it's like online advertisers: they convert your fingerprint to a token to try to sell you shit, but they allegedly don't know who exactly you are or where you go. So visiting animatedllamaporn.com is still your little secret...

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