People have been left shocked after it was revealed that your Wi-FI router could be spying on movement around the house without you even knowing.
This comes after a new report claimed that the router signal can be used to track a person’s movements around a room.
The report was published by a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University after they conducted an experiment using standard WiFi routers to attempt to detect the location of people inside a room.
It turned out that the experiment was successful, leading many to wonder whether this discovery could lead to ethical and privacy complications.
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How does the WiFi router track a person’s location?
The signal that is transmitted from a WiFi router acts as a sort of sonar which can be used to analyze the difference in density between various signals.
This means that it can paint an image of where people are located within a room.
While the feature isn’t perfect, using AI it has the general ability to pinpoint the whereabouts of individuals.
So, what are the privacy implications around the WiFi tracker feature?
While the WiFi router doesn’t use any cameras or microphones to track a person’s location, there are fears around the fact that it could potentially be used to determine whether or not someone is home.
According to a study by a team of researchers from Southwest Petroleum University and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China this year, the public is being warned that ‘Wi-Fi sensing can capture sensitive information such as user movements, locations, and even breathing patterns. This capability, while beneficial for legitimate applications, opens the door to various security vulnerabilities’.
It’s also thought that some devices may have this function active by default, meaning customers might not even be aware that their router is tracking their movements at home.
Companies have taken action on this matter, with firms such as Xfinity’s Wi-Fi Motion making sure that the feature is off by default and must be enabled in the Xfinity app.
This means that only users can directly control whether or not to turn the sensor on.
In an interview with MIT Technology Review last year, Ray Liu, who is the founder of Origin Wireless and the former IEEE president, said, “This is a technology that can help change the world. Nevertheless, we as a society need to draw a red line.”