Your body can be fingerprinted and tracked using Wi-Fi signals
As if you were not enough to worry about monitoring, the researchers discovered a new way of identifying and following people using Wi -Fi signals – and I am not talking about anything relating to your electronic devices. This technology can identify a specific individual person and follow them in a physical space and through places, depending on how their body interacts with Wi-Fi signals.
“Whofi”, a system developed by researchers from the University of Sapienza in Rome, reminds me of this “Sonar” scene from The black knight. And to be sure, to follow how wireless electronic signals interact with the physical world is not new-almost ten years ago, they understood how to make a 3D card of a building using Wi-Fi. But this new system can “digital imprint” (or at least their body), follow them in physical space and re-identify them in the same place or in a different place, depending on the way Wi-Fi them.
Similar attempts have been made as recently as 2020, but only obtained a precision of 75%, which was not good enough for real surveillance. According to the research document (identified by the register), the Whofi system can be precise up to 95.5% when used with its neural network. This configuration could beat the conventional identification with the cameras in many ways, because it is not affected by the light conditions and can “see” through the walls and other physical objects.
The implications are astounding, given the omnipresence of Wi-Fi in almost all public and private spaces. A fairly harmless but always frightening use could be a system that determines when a specific customer returns to a store and sends them a coupon as a “welcome” present. A much more sinister application would simply be to follow where a person goes and when, including private residences, if the Wi-Fi data were sold or obtained otherwise. It goes without saying that government agencies would be extremely interested in accessing this data.
Currently, the Whofi system is proof of concept requiring incredibly advanced software to implement. But it is very real, and the equipment used to develop it was nothing special. According to the article data set, these results were obtained using the Wi-Fi signals generated by two N750 TP-Link, which are fairly basic models that do not even use the fastest and fastest Wi-Fi technology.
The only cold comfort that I can offer to someone who finds the frightening implications is that the configuration of the tests is not exactly medico-legal. Again, referring to the set of data, the researchers used 14 different people to follow, each with a combination of basic clothing, outdoor clothes and a backpack. Reaching 95% clarification on this relatively small sample would probably not be enough, let’s say, presenting as proof in a criminal trial … but it is certainly good enough to find someone for an arrest.
