One day, WiFi might even be usable as a method for making a reliable network connection
Damn. “TikTok would like to access WiFi”
We need new permissions for this shit. WiFi can do presence detection and now heart rate? What next? Eye tracking?
I’m pretty sure applications can only send and receive data, with the finer details being handled by the OS.
But yes, there should be a specific permission to access biometric information.
That makes sense. I assume these exotic ability’s require precise control of the radios. So, for now, until an API made, we should be safe.
Maybe not eye tracking, but probably head tracking.
Apps watch how we move/rotate devices to understand whether we’re walking, resting, lying down, etc., I assume? (The most popular apps I mean with large data teams)
Wish that stuff could be turned off unless it was e.g. a game that made legitimate use of the accelerometer.
GrapheneOS does allow you to turn it off. It has a permission switch for your phone sensors. I don’t know if there are other versions of android that allow the same.
WiFi can also do pretty precise location. Bluetooth/BLE even more precise (inches or less)
I think they mean without a phone. A 2.4ghz radio can be used as a presence detection radar.
It sounds like they’re specifically talking about a phone, making reference to app permissions and TikTok.
Android throttles the hell out of WiFi requests since (I think) Android 9. You need to manually allow WiFi request spamming in developer options to let apps do something like determining location from it.
I think it can also detect our neural frequencies, aka ‘read our minds’. That’s why we see ads for things we thought about but never even searched for.
Dog… What?
https://www.neurology.columbia.edu/news/mind-reading-technology-can-turn-brain-scans-language
We already live in a world with existing, functional mind-reading devices. There is even a device designed to help people that are suffering from ALS communicate by reading their thoughts, and has a privacy feature where the user can activate and deactivate the device by thinking a password in their mind, in order to allow them to still have private thoughts.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-brain-device-is-first-to-read-out-inner-speech/
Phones are not fMRIs though.
Also: wifi can read my mind.
Fucking lmfao
This tech scares the hell out of me.
Great if we can make MRI quality imaging eventually available, but being able to monitor where people are in their homes remotely and their health status in our world is fucking dangerous.
Real question: how do you stop this?
I don’t use wifi at all in my home but I live in an apartment and all my neighbours obviously do.
How in the hell do I stop this from getting into my home?
Turns out the tinfoil hat gang was right the whole time.
Innocuous radio signals are one thing but if my apartment is inundated with radio waves that can literally be used to track my movements and monitor my heartbeat, being forced to allow this is a perverse and sickening invasion of privacy.
If you think the lack of privacy is bad now, just wait till they use this to target done strikes. We’re all in for super fun times.
Yes, 20 people at a government agency are watching you watch Netflix and taking a shit.
the problem is that you don’t need 20 people for this kind of thing. you can just kinda passively slurp the data up from every router and throw it into a machine learning model to be used by cops or sold to advertisers. you don’t need a human in the loop anywhere and it’s essentially impossible to opt out of
Own the network. Run OSS.
That’s about it.
“Howdy neighbour. Your wireless modem/router combo is mine now. Thxkbye”
Your neighbors WIFI signals are too weak to matter in this case. Even if they were strong enough, this is a receiver-transmitter setup, so it would still be impossible to do unless you connect to their network. Even then, they’d have to assume you’re the only person present between the transmitter and the receiver.
Presence detection through WIFI was already garbage enough, this one is plain unusable.
Good to know.
The stuff I’ve read about recently tracking movements using wifi - would this need more powerful radio waves than most people use or no?
You need more power than what regular people use. You would need the signal to go through walls into your home, and then read whatever comes back out through the same walls, so it’s a lot more attenuation than you typically expect.
Wear an aluminum foil vest and a Faraday suit. Burn your computer after reading, I’ve said too much…
Put the house in a faraday cage?
With 6 ghz wifi you’d need a cage with a size of around 1mm irc.
Copper mesh fabric.
Foil is cheap enough and a good isolator for plenty of things.
So if you don’t want someone to measure your heartbeat and to physically know where you are at all times your only option is to cover your entire living area, including the windows, in aluminum foil?
I guess what I’m getting at here is that this situation is deeply, deeply fucked.
In a world where private health care is the norm, yes. It’s scary.
In a world where Public health care is the main provider of health it isn’t.
oh yes it still is
It has nothing to do with that. This is about privacy and data security.
If we think about the applications of the technology to the benefit of someone’s health I think it’s really cool.
Needless to say it does pose a risk to our privacy and data security if used with an intention to monitor ones health without their consent.
What?
Edited for better comprehension. I didn’t have my coffee, sorry
Yeah I’m with you.
“Using this technological advancement to improve health care is good”
“Not in countries where health care is publicly run”
“What” is the correct response here.
deleted by creator
Wifi sognals can read my heart rate, and be used to track me around my house. But I still can’t get a signal in my room one floor up from the router.
This is the key point - these have to be clear signals in the same room.
Hence wifi 7.
Care to elaborate?
Faster speeds, better connection, requires higher AP density.
Wow, all that with an esp32. No fancy hardware needed.
This is really cool and will be useful. My second thought was oh great now my smart TV can see how excited I am watching their injected ads and how many people saw it too. One of the many reasons to never connect modern TVs to the Internet.
Inb4 the cops starts doing nonconsensual “polygraph tests” using wifi
Those 5G Conspiracy Theorists probably feel vindicated after reading this lol
Those 5G Conspiracy Theorists probably feel vindicated after reading this lol
I rather think they will be let down, given we’re on wifi 7, not 5G, and also no injected nanites were involved.
And I guarantee some organization will figure out how to use this for some police state bullshit.
That’s already the original use case. Cardiac signature biometrics, can install in a doorway and do identity verification and track/monitor every individual that passes through the threshold
People do not have that distinct cardiac ECG profiles, and it would be wrong after one coffee.
Holy shit the US state paranoia in the sub. Buy more guns.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9921530/
I wouldn’t be as sure about that as you are
The article you cite states that accuracy drops to 60% if the enrollment and testing data were collected at different sessions. I imagine the effects of coffee or walking on heart rate would make that even worse.
Capitalism asks whether you are the kind of person harvesting people’s health info without concent or selling aluminum mesh underwear with fearmongering campaign. No other choices.
So how long before our phones can measure heart rate from your pocket, or being held in your hand?
They already can by putting your finger on the camera and lighting up your finger with the led light. Then it detects the rhythmic changes picked up by the camera… At least 10+ years ago. It was a good novelty feature, but turns out, for most healthy people, checking your heart rate gets old after a few runs.
I saw demos online where they could also determine heart rate through video. The example I saw was a video of a newborn’s face.
It’s probably possible right now.
2026: Major grocers found using customer heart rate to personalise prices - higher the pulse, higher the price
I’m f’d my resting BPM is like 90.
I’ve heard of similar, but how exactly does this work? Does it say $0.99 on the shelf and the receipt winds up being $1.50?
I was referencing digital price labels that retailers are installing.
This technology is being touted by the companies putting them in place to be a cost saving measure as staff no longer need to print new labels and manually replace them for products on the shelf. This is true in that it is a benefit of digital labelling, however there are many other usage options that could be implemented after installation.
- alter prices around lunch hour for ready meals and snacks at retailers in walking distance to secondary schools
- automatic increases for products being purchased more rapidly than historical averages to capitalize on a yet unknown trend
- increases simply as stock begins running low
Imagine in a few years when this technology is combined with network snooping of phone identification, loyalty rewards card purchase histories, and automatic buying of customer information from data brokers, all to create a profile that predicts when a person would be likely to be menstruating and the moment they walk in the store, the hygienic products they buy every month raise in price by 30%.
It’s a bleak future I’m afraid.
Good point. A US department store chain – Kohl’s – has been using electronic shelf labels that change several times per day. Not sure how they handle the discrepancies. How do I prove the product was prices $1 when I picked it up if the label now says $2? Is it my responsibility to notice the register price was different?
I more or less avoided Kohl’s, so I’m not sure how that was handled.
The only solution for that which I see is taking photos of the labels for every product taken off the shelf, but that’s quite the imposition obviously. Trouble is there are no laws guiding these practices, and the result is going to be quite the mess for customers to understand.
In my opinion, the best purchasing experience for this type of shopping is using a handheld device with which you both scan the product as you take it off the shelf, and also process payment on your way to the exit. No cashier lines, and even better, no more unloading and repacking of your items just to purchase them. From the shelf into your bag, only back out again in your kitchen.
On another note, it boggles my mind to see the square footage used by all these self checkout machines when these terminal systems exist. Sadly I’ve never used one in North America. This is an aspect of shopping that could make me loyal to a single vendor. I would actually install the vendor’s phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals.
I would actually install the vendor’s phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals.
I think you’re right, but I dread it. I avoid installing apps. The thought of installing even more tracking for multiple vendors annoys me.
Although I am resistant, your point about bagging once is a true benefit.
One downside, that system doesn’t seem to support cash.I didn’t give the privacy concern much thought in the moment, mainly thinking how useless and poorly designed those apps usually are, but I do agree.
Considering it now, I do have loyalty cards in my company vehicle for certain things, primarily fuel, and those of course remain in that vehicle as they serve no other purpose. Perhaps keeping an old phone for purposes of doing this scanning thing might be ideal. Though ideally I’d imagine a few dedicated handheld terminals kept in store for redundancy purposes.
Speaking of redundancy, you’re right about paying in cash. Perhaps as easy as a ‘cash’ button and it would send the purchase total to a customer service desk. Around here, all grocers have a ‘cashier’ desk where you get lottery tickets and gift cards and such.
Though it would be funny to see these handheld terminals have a compartment to accept notes and coins haha.
Perhaps keeping an old phone for purposes of doing this scanning thing might be ideal.
That’s an excellent idea!all grocers have a ‘cashier’ desk where you get lottery tickets.
Ha! Great observation. There’s no way in hell stores are going to give up on gambling cash. :-)
Cool tech but I question it’s usefulness. They focus on clinical in their language but anybody who’s on telemetry orders needs waveforms not beats per minute. I care if they’re suddenly in afib, not that they’re a little tachy after getting up to go to the bathroom.
Well some darker entities probably would appreciate access to this tech. In order to confirm mission complete if you smell what I am cooking.
They mentioned apnea.
3 letter agencies have already been using this for cardiac signature identity verification and tracking for a long while
If it could do that this whole time why did I invest a bunch of money and a whole lot more time in fancy mmWave presence sensors?? 🥲
Capitalism
I am not surprised. Passive WiFi was introduced nearly a decade ago, so it makes sense that measurement systems based on WiFi have come a long way since. It’s frightening, honestly.
