My thought process is this. Your neighbor likely has neither the inclination or the technical knowledge to use disturbances in the wifi signals from their own wifi to do this. Additionally they likely don't have access to every neighbors wifi (which if you had it would likely allow you to fine tune this significantly).

So basically, every neighbor you have or at least the majority of them are getting together to do this?

The premise is that a person can set up a wifi network in a place adjacent to [target], monitor that network, map the area they want to surveil (while it's empty would be better) and then use disturbances in that area to track [target] within the space.

What you'd still need is time to measure the disturbances and gather a profile on the individual you were tracking in order to remove false positives (people of the same height and weight or body type etc).

It actually is at least location specific. Because you need penetration of the Wi-Fi signal into the space in order to collect the data necessary. I live in a place that was built on a steel frame with sheet rock. I can't even get signal from my own wifi standing on my door step. I also don't pick up the wifi of my neighbors, and can't get cell signal in the house. So they'd have to break into my home and place monitors to pick up my own wifi in order to do this. At that point it'd be much easier to plant a bug.

Because it's location specific and dependent on the materials of the construction of the place being penetrable enough to collect said frequencies (and because wifi is often high frequency and the higher the frequency the less penetrative power it has), it's much more likely that this kind of surveillance method would likely be used by a 3-letter agency, and at that point they'd drop a wifi pineapple on the roof, assuming they needed to do that at all. Or track you through public wifi.

There's lots of news stories about new and old ways of surveillance and some of those are just easier, less intrusive, less expensive, and possibly more effective.

Some plants have leaves so sensitive you can measure their movements to reconstruct conversations that happened in their vicinity.

I think a few years ago there was a story about listening in on a conversation by during a laser at a window.

You could potentially do the same thing with sonar.

I have questions about why your neighbors would do that. The usefulness of it for your everyday civilian isn't worth the work, and even if it was it relies on the cooperation of more than one person, and the right location factors to do it.

I also have questions about what happens when there are no users interacting with the wifi.

"This technology turns every router into a potential means for surveillance," warns Julian Todt from KASTEL. "If you regularly pass by a café that operates a WiFi network, you could be identified there without noticing it and be recognized later -- for example by public authorities or companies."

It is sufficient for Wi-Fi devices in their vicinity to communicate with each other. This creates an image - comparable to a camera image, but based on radio waves.

It exploits the legitimate users who are connected to the Wi-Fi. They regularly send feedback signals, also known as beamforming feedback information (BFI), to the router in the network - unencrypted and readable for third parties. This creates images from different angles that can be used to identify people. This only takes a few seconds once the machine learning model behind it has been trained.

This paragraph in particular suggests that you still need training data. That seems like it would require a larger window of data collection and training.

In the home there must be stationary or rarely moved devices (usually one to three) connected to this router via Wi-Fi — for example, a printer, a smart speaker and/or a smart TV. Sometimes Wi-Fi extenders and mesh Wi-Fi devices can perform the role of a “sensor”.

Motion detection will occur only in the oval zone between the router and the “sensor”, and post-setup testing is required.

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/wifi-sensing-motion-detection-howto/53851/

https://www.informatik.kit.edu/english/11147_14950.php

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260522023127.htm