this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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Humans can be tracked with unique 'fingerprint' based on how their bodies block Wi-Fi signals (www.theregister.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by bignose@programming.dev 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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[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

They explicitly went into the advantages over cameras:

  • Any light condition (of course IR lighting with IR cameras are the gold standard so this can argueably be met otherwise)
  • The ability to cover multiple rooms through walls with a device. A sub-10 GHz signal can penetrate most interior walls. People could be tracked without even being able to see a camera and by extension not knowing where to mess with to defeat surveillance.

So perhaps a building takes a picture of everyone as they come in the front door and also establishes a 'WhoFi' profile for that person. They could keep track of their movement through the building while maintaining an actionable correlation to a photo.