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Humans can be tracked with unique 'fingerprint' based on how their bodies block Wi-Fi signals (www.theregister.com)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The Sapienza computer scientists say Wi-Fi signals offer superior surveillance potential compared to cameras because they're not affected by light conditions, can penetrate walls and other obstacles, and they're more privacy-preserving than visual images.

[…] The Rome-based researchers who proposed WhoFi claim their technique makes accurate matches on the public NTU-Fi dataset up to 95.5 percent of the time when the deep neural network uses the transformer encoding architecture.

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[-] [email protected] 41 points 3 days ago

they're more privacy-preserving than visual images.

hhhhwat. How can they identify you and also be privacy preserving? 🤔

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

They can see you're a person but not exactly who you are.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

How is that a "fingerprint"?

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Well they can identify you are the same person but not your identity.. So it's like a disenbodied fingerprint.

I suppose they could potentially make some database and train an AI on it someday to match to actual identities, but usefulness would be pretty limited at only 95% accuracy. That's a false reading 1/20 times, so I suspect it would fail bigly to accurately recognize people from large data sets.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

That's a false reading 1/20 times

And when has something like that ever stopped anyone?

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Well okay you're not wrong, there is always some sucker out there.

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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025

549 points (100.0% liked)

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