There seems to be a lot of FUD about this. Make no mistake, the malicious and privacy invasive applications are already being used; they just don't follow a IEEE spec and aren't associated with WiFi directly.
If a maliciously controlled router wants to track you it already can because your phone, smart watch, and laptop already broadcast themselves.
This technology may not seem useful to the purpose of WiFi on it's face but that couldn't be further from the truth. Knowing the population of a room in terms of devices but also people is useful for WiFi deployment planning and power level optimization. 2000 people with 2 devices is different from 4000 individual people.
People already have WiFi enabled lights and other sensors so providing a standard for object & people detection will make those use cases even better.
The hypothetical in this is that this suddenly opens the door to RF-based physical sensing, when every attacker that can gain from this is already using it, just via custom equipment.
I interpret it as eliminating the barrier to entry to those that know how to set up custom equipment. I haven't tried, so I don't know how large that barrier is, but it seems safe to say there's a very low probability a random person could accomplish it now vs when it's default hardware and requires no technical expertise.
Elmer Fud is a character from the Warmer Brothers Bugs Bunny animated series of children's cartoons and used as a mnemonic device. I assume the ELMER acronym is some set of metrics used to judge the validity of a claim to determine if it is FUD or not.
>People already have WiFi enabled lights and other sensors so providing a standard for object & people detection will make those use cases even better.
Yet another reason I prefer Zwave for my home automation communications. Sure you could probably use it in the same way, but it won't be handed to you on a silver platter like the wifi stuff discussed here!
If a maliciously controlled router wants to track you it already can because your phone, smart watch, and laptop already broadcast themselves.
This technology may not seem useful to the purpose of WiFi on it's face but that couldn't be further from the truth. Knowing the population of a room in terms of devices but also people is useful for WiFi deployment planning and power level optimization. 2000 people with 2 devices is different from 4000 individual people.
People already have WiFi enabled lights and other sensors so providing a standard for object & people detection will make those use cases even better.