I don't feel that this article is a fair summary of the paper. And the title is just clickbait.

The paper says, in a somewhat contrived scenario, with dozens of labelled walkthroughs per person, they can identify that person from their gait based on CSI and other WiFi information.

This is a long way from identifying one person in thousands or tens of thousands, being able to transfer identifying patterns among stations (the inference model is not usable with any other setup), etc.

All the talk of "images" and "perspectives" is journalistic fluffery. 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz wavelengths (12cm & 6cm) are too long to make anything a layperson call an "image" of a person.

What creepy thing could you actually do with this? Well, your neighbor could probably record this information and tell how many and which people are in your home, assuming that there is enough walking to do a gait analysis. They might be able to say with some certainty if someone new comes home.

That same neighbor could hide a camera and photograph your door, or sniff your WiFi and see what devices are active or run an IMSI catcher and surveil the entire neighborhood or join a corporate surveillance outfit like Ring. Using the CSI on your WiFi and a trained ML model is mostly cryptonerd imaginiation.

Indeed. I'm confused by this line from the article

> a study with 197 participants, the team could infer the identity of persons with almost 100% accuracy – independently of the perspective or their gait.

The paper seems to make it clear that the technique still depends on gait analysis, but claims it's more robust against gait variations.

It feels rather more than a little bit creepy to realize that Comcast et al, and thus the US government (if you live there), laundered through 3rd party data brokers, knows if you're sleeping and knows if you're awake. Knows if you've been bad or good, for ICE/ATF/DEA/SEC's sake.

no, dumbass this has been done for decades.

It's known as your "hand"