Scientists in Germany have demonstrated a startling new form of surveillance: identifying people using nothing more than ordinary WiFi signals. By analyzing how radio waves bounce around a room, researchers can effectively “see” and recognize individuals — even if they are not carrying a device and even if their phone is turned off.
It would be great if there were some open source tool kits for this. If the technology is going to exist it should be in the hands of the people.
Yeah, if this shit hast to exist, at least let me use it for presence detection in Home Assistant without having to buy separate sensors or something!
It would be amazing to not have to deploy a network of esp32s to do it with Bluetooth.
Although I’m already putting one in each room.
Probably just need a protocol to work with the data, however it can be interfaced with. Is it just measuring signal strength via speed over time?
Opensource tech to do the same thing has been in the hands of the people for a long time. This is just a different way of doing it without motion sensors.
Tadaa https://github.com/francescopace/espectre
MVP
Damn, I thought I called it 8 months ago, but that was about reading heart rates using wifi…
Yeah it’s nuts. There’s also https://www.tommysense.com/ which is planning individual presence detection and location tracking within rooms using an esp32 mesh, but that’s closed source
Seems not for long…
If you’re technical you might like enjoy this article that explains how the tracking works. Basically the router can perform math on the interference created by objects moving around the room. It seems like this would have to be part of the router firmware, which doesn’t sound like a standard feature. But if it is, the fix would be to install modified firmware with that function disabled. The smoking gun will be if somebody gets into DMCA trouble for doing this.
New person in room detected, please drink verification can.
Or an open source hardware device that changes your “wifi signature” randomly.