"5G is for sensing, not communication"
It'll surely be changed at some point. I didn't think this would go to #1 within 20 minutes of my posting it. I chose the title out of frustration, to be frank, as a tongue in cheek protest of the stifled, polarized, repressed, sad state of public understanding of what RF technologies are capable of and our collective inability to have substantive conversations about these capabilities, let alone organize around issues of accountability and transparency in their deployment.
It's a reference to the article submitted a few days ago about a future Wi-Fi sensing standard [1]. I just saw that article, went to the comments and didn't see one single comment mentioning 5G.
Look at the last sentence of the abstract:
> Our results in realistic settings with five subjects suggest that accurate recognition of activities and environmental situations can be a reliable implicit service of future 5G installations.
My "academic speak" brain looks at this as a researcher essentially raising a huge flag, saying to us "hey, in case you weren't paying attention, we're making a collective decision to allow passive sensing technology everywhere".
I'd like to think we could have that kind of conversation before mm-wave beamforming antenna arrays were installed on every other street corner in the country, backed by proprietary hardware and software.
But at the rate things are going, we're on track to have the conversation after the fact. When all of our devices are hooked in, when we're dependent on the standards, when the consequences are immediately in front of us and our institutions are lined up to exploit the emerging applications.