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Comment by rvasa | Hacker News Reader

Oh the possibilities of this - may be with enough data - you can just wander around a suburb and figure out which houses are currently occupied and which ones are not. - improve aged care by monitoring walking patterns - combine it with some more ingenious technology for localised sound -- you can beam music as I walk around the house (or block out sounds)? - a bit more sensitivity and we can even probably pick up a person while they are having or just about to have a heart attack?

I am sure the privacy folk out there are having multiple heart palpitations.

All I want to say is "bring it on"

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And maybe predict domestic violence before it happens.

I'm not sure if I qualify as one of the "privacy folk" or not, but I would say "As long as the police cannot compel you to install the thing and switch it on, or have an AI system issue search warrants in seconds based on what the machine reports." Unfortunately I think we will have both of those things 20 years from now.

There is no need to force anybody to install and turn on anything - they could just passively monitor the signal of your wireless router, our that of your neighbor or of your cellphone. Or they could actively send such a signal and analyze it if they don't care about being detected. In the end it is some kind of (passive) radar and you will probably have to actively jam or block it in order to prevent someone from monitoring you.

An AI system issuing warrants defeats the entire purpose of warrants. The entire purpose is to put human oversight into the system.

Whether you consider this a fatal objection to the idea or a problem to be solved is an exercise for the reader. (The future is weird.)

It seems easy enough to reduce leakage or fuzz the signal.

I don't have the background to try to pull the limits up out of the white paper, but I think the current implementation is more or less looking for movement in 1 dimension (towards and away from the receiver). So plenty of time to decide whether radio waves are revealing anything that sight and sound are not.

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