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I submitted this article with the title: "5G is for sensing, not communication" It'll surely be changed at some point. I didn't think this would go to #1 with
by blurbleblurble 5y ago
I submitted this article with the title:
"5G is for sensing, not communication"
It'll surely be changed at some point. I didn't think this would go to #1 within 20 minutes of my posting it. I chose the title out of frustration, to be frank, as a tongue in cheek protest of the stifled, polarized, repressed, sad state of public understanding of what RF technologies are capable of and our collective inability to have substantive conversations about these capabilities, let alone organize around issues of accountability and transparency in their deployment.
It's a reference to the article submitted a few days ago about a future Wi-Fi sensing standard [1]. I just saw that article, went to the comments and didn't see one single comment mentioning 5G.
Look at the last sentence of the abstract:
> Our results in realistic settings with five subjects suggest that accurate recognition of activities and environmental situations can be a reliable implicit service of future 5G installations.
My "academic speak" brain looks at this as a researcher essentially raising a huge flag, saying to us "hey, in case you weren't paying attention, we're making a collective decision to allow passive sensing technology everywhere".
I'd like to think we could have that kind of conversation before mm-wave beamforming antenna arrays were installed on every other street corner in the country, backed by proprietary hardware and software.
But at the rate things are going, we're on track to have the conversation after the fact. When all of our devices are hooked in, when we're dependent on the standards, when the consequences are immediately in front of us and our institutions are lined up to exploit the emerging applications.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901587
- phendrenad2 5y agoLast few days on HN have been slow, bad luck! As for 5G being used as a surveillance grid, I guess... But that only works in densely populated areas, where a few facial recognition cameras on every block would also do the trick (and that already exists, at least in the UK).
- 34679 5y agoThink about any neighborhood dense enough for modern cell coverage. Then imagine a database that records all point to point EM anomalies. One could use such a database to determine when all persons leave their homes and where they went throughout the day, even without any person carrying a connected device.
- consumer451 5y agoWe already have a system for that in the US. Just in the visible spectrum. https://www.cato.org/blog/judge-allows-warrantless-aerial-surveillance-over-baltimore https://www.cato.org/blog/judge-allows-warrantless-aerial-su...
- google234123 5y agoThis article is only cited by 3 people according to ieee. Your frustration is probably just paranoia at this point.
- blurbleblurble 5y agoWell then check out this whitepaper from the 5G 2021 Meeting: "5G Localization and Context-Awareness" https://www.5gitaly.eu/2018/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/5G-Italy-White-eBook-5G-Localization.pdf https://www.5gitaly.eu/2018/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/5G-It... Or how about this one, "5G Network-Based Passive Radar". I don't have access to the full text, but the abstract tells me enough: > This paper presents the pioneering results of successful target detection using a fully operational and cooperative 5G cellular network as a source of illumination in a passive radar system. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9661315 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9661315 Or this one, a high level technical roadmap: "Enabling Joint Communication and Radar Sensing in Mobile Networks -- A Survey" https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07559 https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07559 Another one: "High-Accuracy Localization for Assisted Living - 5G systems will turn multipath channels from foe to friend" (300+ citations) https://wides.usc.edu/Updated_pdf/witrisal2016.pdf https://wides.usc.edu/Updated_pdf/witrisal2016.pdf There are at minimum dozens of peer reviewed articles about both active and passive sensing and localization applications of mm-wave antenna arrays of all sorts, including those involved in the 5G project. I can't list them all, but here are some keywords you can use in google scholar: - device free localization - passive localization - perceptive mobile networks - passive sensing - passive identification - joint communication and sensing Just add "5G", "mobile networks" or "mm-wave antenna array" and you're good to go
- LinAGKar 5y agoThat should be "not just communication".
- blurbleblurble 5y agoI agree, in hindsight