WhoFi and Power Meters: Surveillance Begins at Home

“The houses have eyes now.”
– Eva Wiseman

The idea of one’s home as a castle is, increasingly, only true for actual castles – provided they’re off the grid. For the rest of us, devices are encasing us in surveillance boxes. Two recent articles bring home just how unprivate the home actually is.

First, Electronic Frontier Foundation contributors Hudson Hongo and Adam Schwartz explained that power meters – yes, power meters – are more than innocuous metal boxes we haven’t looked at since we bought the house. In California, where “government” and “overreach” have long been synonyms, it seems that even local power companies have gotten into the spy game.

EFF found that for ten years, Sacramento’s utility district (SMUD) targeted primarily Asian customers who seemed to be using more power than officials thought was needed. It was based on stereotypes that Asians tend to live collectively. SMUD was also looking for customers who grow weed illegally. The utility’s analysts didn’t even try to hide their motives: Among the 33,000 tips SMUD passed on to local law enforcement, a house that used 4,000 kWh was described as “4K, Asian,” and another noted with suspicion “the multiple Asians that have [been] reported” as living there.

Those nastygrams are exhibits in a lawsuit EFF filed on behalf of an Asian American advocacy group and individual residents. The complaint is simple: Order SMUD to stop searching its entire customer database without cause and prevent Sacramento police from performing dragnet searches (think entire ZIP codes), limiting them to court-warranted searches within the confines of active criminal investigations.

In other words, do what the Fourth Amendment has always required. Not to mention, SMUD should start following California’s own law prohibiting such privacy violations. In the meantime, the state might consider changing its motto from “Eureka” to “Yikes.”

The second story is even creepier. Writing in The Register, Thomas Claburn gave Black Mirror writers what might be great material for Season 8. Earlier this year we wrote about a disturbing new Wi-Fi capability discovered by deeply naïve researchers: The ability to sense bodies.

“Wi-Fi sensing,” as the broader field is known, is something the Wi-Fi Alliance should not have started promoting in 2020, but did anyway. Turns out Wi-Fi can do a lot more than get you addicted to your phone. In addition to sensing bodies, it can see through walls to map rooms and recognize human gestures, including sign language. And now? Now apparently Wi-Fi can determine the actual identity of the humans whose bodies it senses.

Or as the Pandora-like academics who cracked the code like to call it, “WhoFi.” If you don’t feel like diving into signal processing equations, we’ll break it down: Wi-Fi waves carry information about what happened to them while they were bouncing around. Signal strength or weakness, delays, whether the signal was twisted or scattered – all of that can be fed to AI to determine the features that make our body composition unique to us, right down to our bones and organs. And all this time you were preoccupied with getting fingerprinted. Get with the times.
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Finally, we’ll close with our decision to nominate the paper’s authors for “Achievements in Doublespeak.” Despite repeatedly describing their technique as a biometric method for re-identifying people, they insist that it can be made “privacy-preserving.”

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