Could A Surveillance Operation See Your Emotions From Outside Your House?

I’d think not right now, but the time is probably coming someday:

“The whole thing started by trying to understand how we can extract information about people’s emotions and health in general using something that’s completely passive—does not require people to wear anything on their body or have to express things themselves actively,” says Prof. Dina Katabi, who conducted the research along with graduate students Mingmin Zhao and Fadel Adib.

The system, called EQ-Radio, works by generating a low-power wireless signal and measuring the time it takes the signal to reflect from various signals in its vicinity. Since the reflection time from people’s bodies vary as they inhale and exhale, and as their hearts beat, it can distinguish humans from other objects that generate static reflections, according to a paper the team plans to present next month at the Association for Computing Machinery’s International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.

Then, the system learns to distinguish heartbeats, which cause faster but smaller changes in reflections, from breathing, which leads to slower but larger differences…

“We are able to extract breathing and heart rate in a very passive way without asking the user to do anything except for what he does naturally,” says Katabi, who in 2013 was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” for her work on wireless networks.

Both sets of measurements are then fed into a machine-learning process that observes people in emotional states including anger, joy, and sadness, along with their heart and breathing rates. Once it’s trained, EQ-Radio is about 87% accurate in recognizing emotions in people it observed during training and more than 70% accurate in others, the researchers say.

If it can be done from a house next door, or from the street, it will be done, and nobody will ask “May I?” I expect one day the technology will be commonly known that will allow someone to be able to “see” neighbors in their houses next door, listen to their conversations, and even read their emotions.

From there, eventually the technology will escape to China, where cheap, but effective knockoffs will be turned out, and pop up on ebay. Then hobbyists will begin experimenting with it. At that point, other people, realizing their neighbors may be doing it to them, will get the equipment, and check out their neighbors. As more people do it, more people will get into it, and eventually everyone will be watching everyone else, watching them.

Nobody will be able to say anything, because everybody will be breaking the law. The officer would ask, “Well, how do you know they are illegally spying on you?” You’d have to answer, “Well, I was illegally spying on them when I saw them do it.” You can’t do that, so you’ll go out the door and fake smile at your neighbor, who will fake smile back, as both of you know that the last night you were each watching one another spy on each other.

The future is going to be a weird, dystopian place one day, as technology begins to give everyone superpowers.