Scientists in Germany have demonstrated a startling new form of surveillance: identifying people using nothing more than ordinary WiFi signals. By analyzing how radio waves bounce around a room, researchers can effectively “see” and recognize individuals — even if they are not carrying a device and even if their phone is turned off.
these are not just motion sensors. these are much more accurate than that.
The motion sensing is more accurate in terms of fundamentally detecting movement, but if you’re going from that to assuming it can identify who you are, no it doesn’t do that. It can recognize a person as the same person it saw in the room yesterday, based on their gait and their effect on the local wifi signal, but it has no way of knowing if the pattern belongs to Old Man Wilson or Old Lady Jenkins, because there’s no database tying those patterns to people’s identities. And besides, the patterns are specific to that one signal environmnent anyway. It’s not like a fingerprint or a facial image you could record at home and then match to someone walking around in a store, which has a different signal environment.