IIRC, when Meta bought out iRobot, it slipped out that they were using Roombas to collect the square footage and entire layout of your house to add to your data sets. So this doesn't seem surprising at all. Good thing I configure my own router and firewall.
this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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That's it, I'm gonna start violently beating my meat at my router if this is what they're going for.
Assert dominance
You get it.
Christoffer Nolan predicted this!
I clearly need watch more Batman.
If I was a capitalist, knowing I am few and and my power only comes from the resources I own, resources stolen from the masses. I would use my stolen wealth to safe guard my own class interests against the masses. Hence we see surveillance capitalism.
Nothing new for infosec people..
This technology has been publicly demonstrated about 3 years ago, but I imagine it has been done years and years back. It's really nothing mind blowing, just the way waves work, workaround believe it or not is the tin foil your walls.
There is now a free home assistant plugin to implement it at home lol. Crazy shit. Imagine what's possible with classified tech.
I've seen YouTube videos of people able to record the image of the the vibration of a potato chip bag through a window to recreate the audio from the room.
That's pretty neat
"Oh my goodness, this is a nightmare" typed everyone into their government approved location recording devices that can show them cats and boobs.
wearing a smartwatch that constantly outputs an identifier.
It is easier to just give up and submit, I'll grant you that.
Huh? No cats on mine , weird.
Sounds faulty
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My meta-quest 3s is constantly scanning my home floor plan and I'm sure it's getting shipped off to "Big Surveillance".
Arguably that's a bit difference because to do that you have to explicitly do it (room setup) and you view the result (visual preview with semi-transparent triangles over your place). You can also read the ToS and I believe in some case specify if you allow the information to be sent back to the Meta. I'm not saying it's OK, only that it's explicit and it's part of the "normal" usage of the device.
I also know that someone once demonstrated that you can do this with just a phone camera and it's gyo and get pretty good results. That was back in 2016 before VR was much of a thing.
I guess these days you could just do it with a camera and generate a Splat from it.
A VR headset is basically a phone with lenses, so yes. That's why cardboard and free promotional gifts of lenses snapping on phones work.
My point though isn't about the technical abilities but rather about the social expectations. If you buy a device that does something intrusive but you know that in order to deliver the main value it will do that, it's OK. It's part of the social contract. If somehow though a device is intrusive but it's not expected, either because it was thought to be impossible to do or unrelated to it's original purpose or both, then it's a big problem, a breach of the social contract.
Mass data mixed with machine learning pattern identification means what already exists will lead to broken as fuck capabilities for those who own everyone. Ie. Not us.
Ok now what router do I buy and what firmware do I flash to plug this into Home Assistant?
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If you read the article ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3719027.3765062 ) they are testing this in an EXTREMELY controlled enviroment and directed subjects... I have my doubts that this could provide any insight on whether this is even feaseble for public surveillance, let alone effective...
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and this is why you should flood your home with as many APs as possible. I have 17 APs running in my 1000sqft house.
can't find shit if it's too noisy.
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The question with mandating US made routers may be either to protect citizens from foreign attacks - or to make sure every US router is a router with a government-approved backdoor.
On which option would you bet?
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