Can we stop downplaying privacy issues please?
There needs to be a balance, location information will be very useful for a lot of things, but only if we have it fully implemented. I want things to sense when I fall and call for help for me. (If I was at a big risk I'd have a button, but for the average young person the risk is non-zero but very small). I want my home automation stuff to figure out where they are and configure themselves. I want my routers to suggest that I'd get better coverage by moving it.
Yes there is privacy concerns and they need to be addressed, but don't lose the good with it.
The Verge includes a whole section on stuff you agree to when purchasing a new laptop when reviewing them. Maybe it's a good idea for us to start insisting on some level of privacy regulation on new tech. This is purely regulatory right, nothing preventing things like VR--just preventing FB from knowing everything you're doing while using their VR headset, and selling that information to others. Maybe that creates an economic constraint, but this seems like a choice consumers can make. For example Amazon sells 2 versions of every Kindle: ad supported and not.
It can be asked once at the device level, but regulated information needs to be specified at the highest level (e.g. "location information about an individual"), and then the concrete technical implementation left unspecified.
"Does it, or does it not?" is more important than "How?" Because legislation specifying "How?" will always lag technology by decades.
(But then again, this probably should have been done in the mid-90s, once it was apparent which way cookies were going)
Who on earth is actually not an advocate for privacy?
> I want things to sense when I fall and call for help for me.
There's no need to sacrifice privacy to achieve this. [0]
> I want my routers to suggest that I'd get better coverage by moving it.
This is really more an issue of proprietary software than a privacy concern, no?
> Yes there is privacy concerns and they need to be addressed, but don't lose the good with it.
Communications are by default expected to be private. Highly public and non-private communications are advertised as such since the use case is so specific and often times, nuanced. In almost all circumstances there is hardly any "good," at all without best-practices privacy protections included.
With this technology, it will be integrated into your router (and clients?), so turning those off will mean to turn off WiFi altogether. Added to that, I'll bet that most people wouldn't even begin to imagine that WiFi could be used for sensing people, and they'll continue using WiFi without being aware for the grave privacy implications.
It's rather unreasonable to think that you won't be able to turn off band on router. Especially given fact that 60Ghz is heavily shielded by _doors_, so any usable router would require fallback 2.4/5/6 Ghz connectivity.
Even if Neighbor 2 turns off their router, Neighbor 1 could passively use the radio waves from Neighbor 3's router to surveil reflections from Neighbor 2, including keyboard typing, heartrate/breathing, location and physical activity.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27123493
Wrapping my house in tin foil is sounding a lot less conspiracy theorist now! Actually my house is going to be stuccoed - I wonder if they are using a metal mesh that I can ground. Hmm...
It makes it suddenly ubiquitous when all new WiFi devices use the new standard.
This standard makes my wifi router into an internet connected, closed source blob, light bulb and camera that is impossible to obscure (without killing my internet connection).
Sure, I can wire my whole house for ethernet. And, while I’m behind the drywall, I might as well rip off all the drywall put a layer of Al.
Here’s a business idea - drywall with aluminum fibers embedded in. For those of us who don't want our sexy times recorded by our router.
EDIT: made wifi’s ability to see through walls explicit per _jal’s comment.
QuietRock has drywall that combines soundproofing with RF shielding (steel plate), but it's expensive and targeted at military use cases, https://www.quietrock.com/sites/default/files/QuietRock_530R.... Aluminum radiant barrier can be layered with standard drywall.
There is conductive carbon paint for RF shielding, e.g. http://www.emfrf.com/shielding-of-electric-fields-in-a-resid... & https://www.zokazola.com/emf_reduction.html
Other materials: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29902926
The community would then share privacy-enhancing I/O profiles for every kind of device. If years later e.g. my adversarial lightbulb pivots to brokering kompromat SIGINT, I want to filter that out, and I want not to be the first one to write a filter like that..
Does it change the internal state of the lightbulb’s logic? No.. but hopefully it would even be able to simulate the state loop of the lightbulb well enough to guess what to filter out.
Of course there may also come a time when somebody starts to sell $20, 60 ghz-spectrum-only-visible “human activity fakers” to disrupt the collection of such data. Maybe with a “Honey, I’m home!” package being the most popular, lol
Your creepy neighbor in the apartment next door is getting a new toy.
500 terahertz = 600 nm (visible light)
60 gigahertz = 5 mm
6 gigahertz = 50 mm
5 gigahertz = 60 mm
2.4 gigahertz = 125 mm
- Unless 2.4 and 5 GHz are taken off the standard, my router will see me through the walls.
- At 60 GHz, if I have wifi, my router can see me
- To make our concerns clear to you, even at 125 mm resolution, you can tell if I like my wife to drill my bottom with a strap on. Or you can tell if I piously say my prayers at night (something that is increasingly political). Or if the immigrant next door spanks his kids. Or if his 15 year old daughter is “exploring” her body.
And for what benefit exactly?
So an ad agency can track me and know Im struggling with my diet, hovering over the fridge door?
Plenty of non-immigrants (won't even dignify that with a label like Americans, because immigrants can become Americans too) spank their kids or hit their wives etc....
I think your fears are real, but I also think it's important to be careful with your examples :)
The ancients had a solution for this (brick walls).
(Visible) Light has a frequency of around 400-790 THz, which explains why it has a inherently better resolution.
> Li-Fi connections are broadcast over the air through a light-emitting diodes (LED) broadcaster and support rates up to 100Gbit/s ... Li-Fi can also serve to identify an object’s indoor position more accurately than Wi-Fi or GPS used today (less than 2cm and less than 3 degrees of orientation while it is providing real-time localization (less than 34ms). This accuracy is vital in multiple applications such as navigation In-Door Robots and Drones, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Gaming, among others ... it cannot go through walls, and thus a private local area network (LAN) can be created by lighting up a closed room ... Any organization that needs to keep information within the four walls, such as military bases and banks, can use the technology to keep data restricted to a single room.
> They claim visible light travels faster than radio waves
I wasn't able to find it on the lifi website but seems like some poor copywriter got something wrong
> their thousand dollar router can only do 100Mb/s
Who's they? In any case, since lifi.co is advocating Li-Fi as a whole so it makes sense they talk about theoretical speeds, whereas a specific router from some manufacturer might not be able to reach those speeds, considering how new the technology is
In the end, I imagine Li-Fi doesn't have much of a future outside of niche markets because it has to compete with wifi which is everywhere (and it can't supplant wifi because e.g. it doesn't work in your pocket)
Another big advantage of LiFi is that the usage of light allows LiFi connections to occur almost instantaneously because light travels at extremely fast speeds. This results in faster transmission of data and faster internet connections – about 100 times faster than speeds achievable by WiFi.
https://lifi.co/lifi-products/lifimax/
$1098 Guaranteed fast data transfer with 100 Mbps download & 100 Mbps upload.
I hope then you can dissable the lower frequencys, because now you have 5 or more APs in your appartement.
Why is that an ignorant statement? It's comparing to what one might consider the "gold standard" of spying, so it seems quite a relevant thing to consider if one is after an objective estimate of how much worse wifi sensing might be...
Occupancy sensing and other surveilence have no place in a wireless communications specification.
> The link-rate per stream is 44 Gbit/s, with four streams this goes up to 176 Gbit/s.
Yes, it can't penetrate walls, but is huge for point to point communication. Think VR headset bandwidth, file transfers between devices, wireless backhaul between buildings. It's not just for spying on your cat.
I think it's important to remember that it's not magic, it's just radio waves. You can "sense" with a lot more resolution if you use a camera and light bulb. There are plenty of eyeballs, cameras, and lights all around you right now. Even worse, someone could be looking in your window with binoculars.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ay