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In reply to the discussion: Amazon's Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen [View all]CloudWatcher
(1,862 posts)The paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00250
They setup -- in a lab -- a bunch of hardware that is also used in WiFi. In particular lots of 1D sensors (one dimensional) and by combining lots of data were able to reconstruct moving objects and maybe map them to a human pose. It's a cute trick.
But to jump from this demo to asserting you should be worried about wifi spying on you ... yeah, get a tin hat, they're on sale.
This is basically the same as saying that radio waves (WiFi!) can be used to cook food (microwaves!) and radar (!) omg!
But it's 180 degrees apart from asserting that this technology has gotten anywhere near something that has ever been sold to the public hiding in your WiFi devices.
WiFi is hard enough to do right. If you want to believe your wifi base station is spying on you, look for tiny microphones and tiny cameras, they're a lot easier to add than doing this low-resolution radar demo. And the fear that wifi in your phone has extra gear to spy on you has never thought about the microphones and cameras and near-field sensors built into every smart phone. What's the point in adding radar when there are already microphones and cameras?
[why should you trust me? you don't have to, but I did happen to work on the first "WiFi" products at Apple before it was even called WiFi, we just called it AirPort and it's been pretty funny to see it become so ubiquitous over the years]