Surveillance has officially gone invisible.

Cameras? Optional. Phones? Irrelevant. Wearables? Outdated. The next wave of biometric tracking doesn’t need your consent—or even your attention. It just needs Wi-Fi.

In a breakthrough that feels like it was lifted from a cyberpunk script, researchers at La Sapienza University of Rome have created WhoFi, a system that uses nothing more than the way your body bends Wi-Fi signals to identify and track you with up to 95.5% accuracy. No phone in your pocket. No camera in the corner. Just the ambient hum of everyday wireless networks quietly logging your biological fingerprint.

Here’s how it works: as Wi-Fi signals travel through a space, they’re subtly distorted by everything they pass through—including you. These distortions, measured as Channel State Information (CSI), contain unique patterns based on your size, shape, posture, and movement. With the help of a transformer-based AI model—the same architecture that powers today’s most advanced language models—WhoFi decodes those patterns into a biometric ID.

That means the mere act of walking through a room can now betray your identity.

Re-identification tech isn’t new. It’s how surveillance cameras follow you from one street corner to the next, even if you change clothes. But WhoFi blows that paradigm wide open. It doesn’t just watch. It senses. It feels your presence through walls, in the dark, across networks.

And it’s not some distant, theoretical threat. The groundwork for Wi-Fi-based sensing has already been laid. Since 2020, the IEEE 802.11bf specification and initiatives from the Wi-Fi Alliance have been turning routers and access points into low-key environmental sensors. Now, with tools like WhoFi, those sensors are becoming biometric scanners.

To some, it may sound like a leap forward in ambient intelligence—a future where homes, offices, and public spaces automatically adapt to who you are. But to others, it’s the ultimate surveillance Trojan horse: no lens, no consent, and no off switch.

Who needs cameras when your body is a signal?

We’re entering a world where the air itself is listening. And it knows who you are.