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Comment by exporectomy | Hacker News Reader

Here's the good news description of it. Kind of unclear why it's so important as to put into every Wifi device though https://beyondstandards.ieee.org/ieee-802-11bf-aims-to-enabl...

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I'm not sure why you think this is good news:

"The technology can measure range, velocity, and angular information; detect motion, presence, or proximity; detect objects, people, and animals; and be used in rooms, houses, cars, and enterprise environments."

It seems incredibly invasive. Can some peeping tom just turn on his WiFi base station to track if the next door neighbour he is obsessed with has a guy over...if she's in her bedroom...is in the shower...you get the idea. Creepy stuff!

Not only that but it entirely silent. At least with cameras or IR detectors you can kind of see where they are. If this becomes wide spread -- you'll have to ask yourself who's spying on you. Up late on a Saturday night at 12Am? You're uptight neighbours might want to know about that. On some kind of disability insurance? Good luck! Now they'll install this in your home (as a requirement) and know everything about your movements: the time you wake up, when you go out, when you have guests over...

Do other people have better walls than what I'm used to? I already know quite a bit about where my apartment neighbors are in their space and what they're doing.

I'd love to have this for home automation purposes, but I can't be in favour of this knowing what the standard FAANG companies will probably abuse this standard for, let alone scummy ISPs.

I expect dumb limitations like "too many people around you, you must buy a more expensive plan to play this audio"

As something to install and run for yourself? Sounds cool in theory but awful for your neighbors, and what should be a no go generally. Think of areas where liberty and privacy are conditional, or indeed as a fundamental feature that any ISP could turn on by default in their mandatory router/modem boxes?

If it works reliably, it could make it trivial to implement things like "turn off the lights 10 minutes after everyone has left the room" and "turn on the lights when someone enters". Right now you can still do that with presence sensors, but they're annoying and require hardware for every corner of the room to work reliably.

With its band steering capabilities, I'm convinced WiFi can already make an approximation of your location. It can't deal with things like reflection and interference for positioning of course, but it's still pretty close to working already.

Of course, I mean this as something I'd like to turn on and integrate into Home Assistant, not as something that every ISP router should come with (which is what I fear will probably happen).

It will probably turn off your lights when your neighbor goes to sleep.

Yeah, I can not see a legitimate use for this technology and much less a reason to put it in every router. Sounds creepy and invasive

Time to buy shares in CAT 5 :P

I imagine people will sell directional jammers to point at your neighbors Wi-Fi that will fiddle with the intensity to keep the SNR just enough to receive packets.

> I'm not sure why you think this is good news:

I think GP meant it's a `good (news description)`, not a `(good news) description`

From the link you posted:

> Measurements obtained with WLAN sensing can be used to support new industrial and commercial applications in semiconductor manufacturing, enterprise networking, and test and measurement equipment. The standard will also benefit end user applications, such as home security, entertainment, energy management (HVAC, light, device power savings), home elderly care, and assisted living.

Sounds reasonable. I still worry about what it means for privacy in our homes, and for the future with ever more surveillance and erosion of our rights.

I would guess that setting up a WiFi receiver outside of anyones living space but within signal range is not illegal if you are not intercepting and decoding packets, so anyone could currently get visibility into any home with WiFi. Police, neighbors, crooks, anyone. However there is some precedent for police, they are not allowed to use thermal viewers to look through the walls of peoples homes without a warrant. This would seem to be similar. It's been disconcerting that the police have just adopted technologies because they think they would be useful without anyone considering whether a warrant should be required. There should be a law saying that any technology use by police requires a warrant unless it has been specifically allowed to be warrantless.

There are some good uses of a WiFi tracker though, such as an automated health monitor. I'd like to have a continuous record of where I am in my house. I could use it to tell how much time I spend on a computer, how much sleep I get, what I spend most of my time doing, how much exercise I get, where I left some object, lots of things. I just don't want other people or companies to have all that information and I don't want the police or government to be able to get it without a warrant.

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