Tag: technnology

Now They Can Actually Use WiFi “To See People Through Walls”

If you truly wanted complete and total privacy, you would need to give up nearly all of the technology that you are currently using.  I wish that wasn’t true, but this is the reality of the world in which we now live.

The “Big Brother surveillance grid” is constantly growing and evolving all around us, and those who are using it to watch, monitor, track, influence and control us have an insatiable appetite for more data.  They are constantly pushing the envelope, and most people don’t seem to care.  But if we don’t stand up for our rights now, eventually we will find ourselves living in a society where there is absolutely no privacy at all.

In fact, many would argue that we are already there.

Recently, I was horrified to learn that researchers have been working on a way to use WiFi to look through the walls of our homes to see what we are doing.  The following is a brief excerpt from a Vice article entitled “Scientists Are Getting Eerily Good at Using WiFi to ‘See’ People Through Walls in Detail”…

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a method for detecting the three dimensional shape and movements of human bodies in a room, using only WiFi routers.

To do this, they used DensePose, a system for mapping all of the pixels on the surface of a human body in a photo. DensePose was developed by London-based researchers and Facebook’s AI researchers. From there, according to their recently-uploaded preprint paper published on arXiv, they developed a deep neural network that maps WiFi signals’ phase and amplitude sent and received by routers to coordinates on human bodies.

As we have seen with so many other highly intrusive surveillance technologies, those that have developed this method are touting the benefits that it could have…

The researchers ague that their Wi-Fi approach to imaging humans in households could be applied to home healthcare, where patients may not want to be monitored with a camera in places like the bathroom or with other sensors and tracking devices.

No matter how old I get, I don’t ever want anyone using any technology to monitor me while I am taking a dump.

If that makes me old-fashioned, so be it.

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This AI Knows Who You Are and Who All Your Friends Are (And Is Telling the IRS)

A Bay Area tech company wants to sell AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance software to determine not just who you are but track who your friends are, too.

Vintra is a San Jose-based firm whose “co-appearance” or “correlation analysis” software can, “with a few clicks,” according to the Los Angeles Times, take any individual on a surveillance camera and backtrace him to those he’s seen with most often. From there, the software can take people deemed “likely associates” and locate them on a searchable calendar.

The Times reports that AI-enabled co-appearance technology is already in use in Communist China as part of that country’s Orwellian “social credit” digital report-and-control scheme, but Vintra appears to be the first company to market it in the West.

It’s already in use by the U.S. government:

The firm boasts on its website about relationships with the San Francisco 49ers and a Florida police department. The Internal Revenue Service and additional police departments across the country have paid for Vintra’s services, according to a government contracting database.

The IRS needs to know who your friends are because reasons. Creepy, authoritarian reasons.

Back in December, I wrote about the time facial-recognition software got a New Jersey woman forcibly removed from a Rockettes show at Radio City Music Hall around Thanksgiving because she works for a law firm engaged in a suit against a restaurant owned by the same parent company, MSG Entertainment, that owns Radio City. The lawyer, Kelly Conlon, was not in any way engaged in the long-running suit.

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Miss Car Payment? Future Ford Vehicles Could Repossess Themselves

Ford Motor Company filed a US patent application that shows autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles could potentially repossess themselves if their owners miss lease or loan payments.

The idea of self-driving cars repossessing themselves might sound dystopian, but it is not surprising that automakers are considering this technology to ensure payment. Repossession is a common practice, and as we’ve described recently, cracks are beginning to form in the subprime auto loan market (read: here & here).

While this patent application was first filed in Aug. 2021 and formally published on Feb. 23, it could be years before Ford implements such a technology.

The patent, titled “Systems and Methods to Repossess a Vehicle,”explains how a future lineup of Ford vehicles would be capable of “[disabling] a functionality of one or more components of the vehicle.”

If a driver misses a car payment, the vehicle will disable air conditioning, radio, GPS, and cruise control to irritate the driver.

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