“The encouraging results achieved confirm the viability of Wi-Fi signals as a robust and privacy-preserving biometric modality, and position this study as a meaningful step forward in the development of signal-based Re-ID systems,” the authors say.
How is this even close to privacy preserving??
I think they mean it’s similar to a one-way hash in that you can verify that the interference ‘fingerprint’ of someone when you see that pattern again, but you can’t identify a person from only the interference data, so for instance you could potentially have a database of targets to locate, and share only their wifi fingerprints with various other agencies to monitor for, without actually sharing their name, image, etc.
Obviously surveillance as a general concept is inimical to privacy, irrespective of how it’s done.
They needed their keywords
Time to rename my home network to McDonald’s Free Wi-Fi
