This silent, invisible monitor in homes, offices is robbing people off privacy — and it's not camera

It raises the danger of wi-fi becoming a quiet, invisible surveillance system, warned the lead professor of the German study.

‘End-to-end encrypted’ — people and companies are going lengths to protect and lock data exchanged between electronic devices. This is being done to protect a person’s fundamental right to privacy.

However, a study in Germany has found a quiet, invisible monitoring system in people’s immediate living spaces that is secretly leaking information to the outside world and that too without any encryption.

Scientists say it is not a camera or applications on the phone accused of listening to people's conversations — rather, it is an ordinary Wi-fi modem pushed into a side shack of some furniture and out of sight for most part of the day.

Scientists found that combining a wireless standard wi-fi and an artificial intelligence system, could identify people with a striking accuracy, even if they are not carrying a phone or their hotspot is off.

As per professor Thorsten Strufe from KIT's Institute of Information Security and Dependability (KASTEL), this combination technology is comparable to a camera except the fact that a camera uses light waves and this wireless combination uses radio waves.

It raises the danger of wi-fi becoming a quiet, invisible surveillance system, warned the lead professor.

What did the study find?

As per researchers at the German school, the devices on a wireless network send feedback data to the router called the ‘beamforming feedback information (BFI)’.

This happens when radio waves emitted by the router bounces back from human bodies and other objects, registering every obstruction as data.

Later, this information is transmitted without any encryption and anyone in the close vicinity can read it.

As per the study, these signal reflections can create multiple views of a person, allowing AI systems to learn and recognise individual identities.

It will only take a few seconds to identify a person and that too from different angles, said the researchers.

In their experiment, they looked at the data obtained from 197 participants and found that the system identified these people with nearly 100 percent accuracy.

Concluding their findings, the researchers said though the system is powerful, it can be used by cybercriminals or authoritarian communities to monitor movement in a place or track citizens without their consent.

As per an article published in The Conversation, automatic license plate readers have been installed all across the United States and recently they have been found connected to AI systems with experts suspecting them to hold vast, searchable databases.