Ban Passive WiFi Gait Identification — Protect Constituent Privacy Now

Pass legislation immediately to prohibit the passive identification of individuals through WiFi Beamforming Feedback Information signals. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology just demonstrated that ordinary WiFi routers can identify specific people by their gait with 99.5% accuracy — no phone, no camera, no consent required. This is surveillance of everyone, everywhere, all the time, and it is currently completely legal. The technology works through walls, requires no special hardware, and exploits unencrypted signals that any nearby device broadcasts automatically. A café router can identify you as you walk past on the sidewalk. A compromised home router can log who is moving through your house without your knowledge. IEEE 802.11bf has already standardized this capability into future routers, meaning passive gait surveillance is about to become a default feature of consumer WiFi equipment. Cameras watch faces. License plate readers track cars. Now WiFi identifies bodies. The convergence of these systems is eliminating any meaningful anonymity in public life. I want to see a bill that criminalizes unauthorized passive biometric identification via WiFi signals, mandates encryption or suppression of BFI data in commercial deployments, and directs the FTC and FCC to act on existing deployments. This is urgent. The hardware is already in millions of homes and businesses.