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Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

I find these applications intriguing for VR/AR/XR, but there are also the privacy concerns. I can see internet providers and big tech really wanting to leverage this data for profit

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the privacy concerns are really something. Background emission is pretty much as abundant as ambient light these days, at least within the radius of day-to-day living. even in less developed countries. Western signals intelligence gathering already reached critical mass, the decision to deploy dragnets collecting the tons of data we all produce every day, has already been made.

Just frightening to think about the never ending increase in detail and variation when it comes to the data to be collected.

but look, 300 bucks for the privilege of inviting a self-propelled LiDAR scanner, complete with internet connection and non-optional user registration, into your domicile! It can vacuum too? Sound like a deal to me!

Though only tangentially relevant, I can recommend Valetudo as a way to take control of your vacuum's firmware.

thanks mate! just forwarded this to a friend of mine. he will be delighted for sure

I'm less worried about the govt surveillance and more so about abusive advertising, though I wonder how much additional insights it will really provide. The amount the data brokers and scientists can infer already is pretty astounding

Why not both? Both are bad and both should be minimized.

The government has ample ways to get the same data via other means and probably more sophisticated tech. I would imagine they are well beyond this

I also don't do things that would have them watching or worrying about me, so not really concerned personally and only see the upside to the government / military having this capability, with appropriate oversight (which I'm sure many will imply is non-existant)

There is a valid product offering for ISPs, monitoring people for medical emergencies. I suspect this will be how it gets accepted by many people

Would you say this is any different from the classic "I have nothing to hide" argument?

Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

not sure, I don't want the gov't to have unfettered access or capabilities, they need oversight and to provide transparency. I'd rather see them put out the reports of how many times they use it, rather than relying on companies volunteering the same information as it applies to them. At least some of them do in the absence of a self-reporting gov't agency

generally, there's a balance and it tends to oscillate around that depending on larger events and trends

WiFi 7 sensing is not gov specific. It's going into commercial routers and laptops.

Speech surveillance has lead to self-censorship of speech.

Motion surveillance can lead to self-censorship of motion.

I think my speech has been self-censored more by the woke movement than the government. Social norms or fads seem to outweigh anything the gov't would get away with, at least in the US

WiFi and other through-wall radar sensing has been sold to governments for more than a decade, and research code/firmware/papers have been online for 5+ years.

WiFi 7 Sensing expands the list of ecosystem participants to hundreds of millions, i.e. it's about scale and ubiquity, not any particular actor.

No one can predict what it means to abolish opaque walls. Observations are going to alter the observed.

I wonder if at some point the amount of data each individual produce would be so large and contradicting that it would be almost unusable by all but the most advance tech department and with great resources.

No, it's the opposite. Dedicated silicon (TPU, NPU, Intel/AMD client AI) blocks on commodity processors are lowering the cost of edge processing of high-volume raw data into low-volume, high-value signal for centralized aggregation.

Precision of WiFi sensing resolution increases at higher frequency / shorter wavelength, e.g. upcoming mmWave standards.

Why should privacy be the objective of the scientist?

I mean, why should any scientist think about ethics? [INSERT $GOLDBLUM_QUOTE HERE]

Also, when you start to invent new technology, you're not just a dispassionate objective scientist pushing the boundaries of knowledge. You're an engineer whose products are also engineering society.

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with ..."

That's a Jurassic Park quote? Wow!

I'm not faulting the the scientists here, they aren't the first to do this. I remember seeing similar from a US university research a few years back. This reminded me about the latest wifi-6E(?) that's going to make this easier for ISPs to obtain similar tracking capabilities.

I for one always own my wifi/modem stack rather then renting the one from the ISP

Because observers become part of science experiments.

It's where the truth lives.

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