Ok now what router do I gotta buy and what firmware do I have to flash to plug this into Home Assistant?
this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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and this is why you should flood your home with as many APs as possible. I have 17 APs running in my 1000sqft house.
can't find shit if it's too noisy.
"Oh my goodness, this is a nightmare" typed everyone into their government approved location recording devices that can show them cats and boobs.
Gimme cat boobs.
At this point I'd prefer the Chinese routers.
If you read the article ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3719027.3765062 ) they are testing this in an EXTREMELY controlled enviroment and directed subjects... I have my doubts that this could provide any insight on whether this is even feaseble for public surveillance, let alone effective...
It gets more accurate with more access points, too. So corporate and education settings will be the easy places for this to get implemented.
I can tell you as someone who read the papers on very early deepfakes and AI video generation with amazement followed by dread, this is going to be feasible on a large scale in a short period of time. Researchers do stuff on an absolute shoestring budget usually, it's incomparable to what large companies and governments have at their disposal. There are already consumer products that were able to become fairly precise motion sensors with just a firmware update. Next gen devices will be built with motion fingerprinting in mind, I can almost guarantee it.
The question with mandating US made routers may be either to protect citizens from foreign attacks - or to make sure every US router has a router with a government-approved backdoor.
On which option would you bet?
Why not both?
"Identify" seems like a very misleading word in this context. Isn't it just detecting and locating? Or am I misunderstanding and they can tell me and my roommate appart?
Height and body mass
That's cool and all but if true, why use an animated photo instead of a real life example?
a real life example? you mean like a photo of a person next to a router?
I'm not sure what you think an "example" would look like. It's not taking a photo of you, it's measuring what's distinctive about the way you personally mess up radio signals and how it differs from how other people mess them up. Internally it's just a ton of numbers.
I assume they want to take those numbers and make a visual representation like a radar return or ultrasound image. Probably wouldn't really look like anything but still it'd be pretty sick to impress your friends by looking at your 2nd screen filled with green matrix vertical scrolling shit and be like: "the cat wants out."
Ill just start wearing a mask full time when this happens. Fuck this.
You will be identified by the unique features of the said mask. And if you happen to move in public, by your gait properties.
Pretty sure this is old news? It's basically sonar, which The Dark Knight predicted in the film.
Edit: a word
The first time I heard about this was in 2013 and, in 2019, I had a local government management class where wifi sensing in busy downtown areas and stadiums was discussed as a plus side to municipal wifi installations. In the latter case it was described as being available not too far in the future.
Right? Im pretty sure this is a few years stale and already incorporated in some isps routers
https://www.xfinity.com/hub/smart-home/wifi-motion
https://www.originwirelessai.com/isps-can-do-more-with-wifi-sensing/
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/27/1088154/wifi-sensing-tracking-movements/
The statement from the article was the unlike previously, they used current consumer equipment, and could uniquely identify a specific person. I believe previous versions could just identify that there was "A" person. I don’t know that all that is true, but it is what the article says, and my vague memories line up.
Any reason this wouldn't work with cell towers?
Yes, it wouldn't really.
Right now the way this works is that a human body absorbs a certain about it wifi signal, so of the signal strength in a room dips and comes back up, someone walked through the room, for example. Couple this with what IPs and MAC addresses the router is connecting to, and Verizon can tell "human with laptop," or "human watching TV." So just "human body" or dog/cat are what it can detect. Verizon does try and sell this as a feature, as in a shit security feature.
So for cell towers, they're too far from people in an already chaotic environment to really be useful. Trees, cars, and a million other things can throw off trying to detect already minute changes in signal density. Not to mention that the signals from cell towers are much stronger, so harder to detect the changes.
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Despite what others have said. It could in theory. But could it work with ordinary cell towers today, probably not. I base this on the accuracy of current location tracking by cell towers. They still use triangulation from my understanding, and aren't highly accurate at that. The space your phone could be in is large enough for many people to be. So the granularity just isn't there.
This is probably because of the large range they cover compared to the power levels they use. But in theory if the density of towers were higher, and the power levels were increased, they could probably do it in at least some locations with the perfect conditions.
There is another potential issue, which is the frequency. The lower the frequency, the less it will interact with an obstacle including people.
I imagine resolution decreases with range
Edit: resolution not revolution
Revolution should increase the closer you get to a billionaire.
I think the main advantage with the wifi-based approaches is that they are usually used in a relatively static/calm indoor environment with a stable channel response and your motions are disturbing that, compared to a quickly changing outdoor environment (e.g. a city) where it would be much harder to distinguish individuals. Also, you are typically closer to the access points, making the power/SNR higher. Regarding mobile communication though, the trend is towards higher frequencies and smaller cell sizes which also give greater spatial resolution (and higher power) and some funky near-field effects can be used to get beam forming on crack: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10147 So perhaps it could work even better, wouldn't be surprised
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Product idea: clothing with jaged edges and radio absorbing plates.
Funnily enough, indoors, this would probably make you more visible as the only area with no reflections. Stealth works outdoors because the sky does not have a radar return.
You can buy faraday bag cloth. It’s expensive.
Or just DIY using tinfoil
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