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WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed (news.ucsc.edu)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 20 points 1 year ago (16 children)

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?

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  • [–] 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

    Turns out the tinfoil hat gang was right the whole time.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] -5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yes, 20 people at a government agency are watching you watch Netflix and taking a shit.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    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

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Put the house in a faraday cage?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    With 6 ghz wifi you'd need a cage with a size of around 1mm irc.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Foil is cheap enough and a good isolator for plenty of things.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    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.

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