It’s no secret that WIFI and Bluetooth are tools companies and governments can use to spy on you. Even when location switches are turned off there is no place to hide.
Particularly WIFI is a handy tool to determine where you are, what kind of neighbors you have, monitor spending habits and health status. At the end of the day all gathered data lead to targeted pricing of products or worse. And not in supermarkets alone.
Living in a wealthy neighborhood, you literally pay the price. Bad luck and living in a impoverished area, insurance companies can refuse your application.
What happens with digital and changeable price labels in supermarkets will occur online as well. Ever tried to book a flight online? I always change my IP address to get a better price. A UK IP address generates lower fares than e.g. a Turkish one.
But a game changer is coming up. Changing your IP address will soon be not enough.
Thanks to AI the spying business is now developing at dazzling speed.
To catch you with their greedy hands all companies need is ordinary WiFi to identify you with near perfect accuracy.
German scientists predict that ordinary WiFi routers soon will be able, driven by AI, to secretly recognize and track humans with near perfect accuracy.
WIFI and Bluetooth receptors are scanning around picking up all WIFI and Bluetooth signals surrounding you.
Scientists recently demonstrated this startling new form of surveillance to identify people using nothing more than ordinary WiFi signals. What’s on the brink goes much farther than location determination.
By analyzing how radio waves bounce around a room, researchers were able to effectively “see” and recognize individuals. Even when they are not carrying a device and phones are completely switched off.
The researchers showed that you do not need much more than standard WIFI routers to identify people by analyzing how radio waves reflect on their bodies.
With this technique in hand they believe ordinary WIFI networks could become a vast powerful new form of invisible surveillance. Using standard wireless signals and artificial intelligence. The scientists demonstrated a system capable of identifying people with striking accuracy, even if those individuals are not carrying an active device.
According Cybersecurity Expert Professor Thorsten Strufe from Kastel Kit’s Institute of Information Security and Dependability, “measuring and monitoring the propagation of WIFI radio waves is sufficient to create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present”
The technique is similar to a normal camera. The difference in this case is that instead of light waves radio waves are used for the recognition.
As said, turning off your smartphone is not enough to avoid detection. According to the researchers, nearby wireless devices connected to the network still generate enough signal activity for the system to work.