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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Future Proof Extra with Jonathan McRae. Proudly supported by Research Ireland on Newstalk. For better or worse, we've become accustomed to the idea that we are surveilled. Our phones track us, CCTV, cameras are everywhere. But if you don't carry your phone and you avoid cameras, can you still be fully private? Well, apparently not. That's according to our next guest.
Felix Morsbach is a privacy and security researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Chapter 2: What are the implications of surveillance in modern society?
He joins me now. Felix, tell me a little bit about your work and your interests.
So over the past few years, we've been doing a bit of research in the area of privacy and smart cities. And what we mean by that is that in whatever we envision our future cities to look like, one thing is for certain that there will be a lot more technology in it.
then let it be traffic monitoring to suggest you the best route dynamically, or also just being about, let's say, occupancy tracking in a train to tell me which carriage I should board in on a train ride to not be crowded in the train. And if we want to do that, there's one easy way to do this.
If we put video cameras everywhere and we can do all these calculations by applying some fancy models, doing some AI stuff, or whatever you think. But it would require... video cameras. And rightfully so, a lot of people don't think that this is a good idea because it would create a lot of privacy tension in our cities and we might want to be mostly anonymous if we walk through our cities.
Before you continue there, you know, I think everybody would love the benefits of being able to know which train carriage wasn't full and so on. But I wonder how many people fight against the presence of cameras to do a job like that. I mean, in Germany, you And do people really resist the installation of cameras? Because it feels like it's not something we talk about enough here in Ireland.
And I know in the UK, they have more CCTV cameras per square foot than almost anywhere else in the world. Do we see a big fight against this inevitable installation of technology in our smart cities?
So at least for Germany, I would say yes. We see it like to a decent amount. So for example, a few years ago here in Karlsruhe, the city where I live and work, we had the scenario that they wanted to place video cameras on one of our hotspots in the city to have like early response times for emergency services and law enforcement if there's like a fight breaking out or whatever.
And there was a huge protest from civil rights organizations and also the population. They said, yeah, but we don't want to be surveilled during the day. We don't want to be put under principal investigation all the time. Which led to a lot of discussion about, could we achieve the same kind of utility? We would call it a utility. Everybody wants to have fast emergency response time.
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Chapter 3: How does smart city technology impact privacy?
No one talks about that. No one argues against that. But do we really need to have video cameras for that? And which sparked a lot of interest in trying to propose alternative sensing technologies. Like, do we really need to have video cameras? Or would there also, for example, be a thermal imaging camera? Would that be sufficient?
That was the solution that was proposed a lot here in Karlsruhe, for example.
So a thermal imaging camera, you don't get to see people's faces. You just see thermal hotspots and then you know if there's something happening, but you don't necessarily identify the people.
Exactly. This is the kind of reasoning that is behind that idea. And you can make the same argument with a lot of different other centers. For example, you think about autonomous driving. A lot of people talk about LiDAR sensors, which is like a super fancy, cool new technology, which is very nice. But obviously, it's different to video cameras.
So we expect that we cannot identify people with that. But if you think about what you actually need to identify someone, for example, you don't really need to see their faces. And I think you all know examples where you identified or recognized someone in public where you didn't really see their face.
Imagine walking through the city and you see someone walking in front of you, like 100 meters in front of you or something. And you kind of know the person. You don't really know. You cannot see the face, but you know who that is. It might be an old friend or a colleague or someone.
But without knowing the face, without seeing the face, you see the way that he walks or the way that what his posture is, the physique of his body. And you kind of... already recognize them, right? So I guess everybody had this situation at one point. So this turns out that we can also, there's other features besides our faces, which make us very much identifying.
And one promising one is the way we walk, what we would call gate recognition. And this you can do perfectly fine with thermal cameras. And so there's no trouble. I have no trouble identifying you on a thermal imaging if I have a gate recognition system.
Okay, so thermal doesn't give you privacy. LiDAR presumably is very similar because that gives high accuracy and high resolution imagery, right?
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Chapter 4: What are the privacy tensions created by video surveillance?
So we said, okay, let's maybe test whether this holds for all the things. So we built a small setup, did a study where we invited a bunch of people and recorded them with a very vast array of sensors. So there were thermal cameras, radar, depth cameras, LiDAR, and all the things that you can think of. And also one of them would be Wi-Fi.
And as you rightfully said, so like Wi-Fi, what does this really mean, like Wi-Fi sensing? And it turns out I can identify you based on how your body interacts with the Wi-Fi signal. What? Yes, it sounds scary and it's a bit scary and it's a bit crazy, but let me walk you through how this works.
So what we mean by Wi-Fi sending is not that we say we identify the phone that you're carrying or something like this. This will be trivial, right? If I see the phone in your pocket and I know that it's connecting to my Wi-Fi, I know that you're in the proximity.
But if you think about how wireless communication works on a very, very abstract level, it's a sender sending out some electromagnetic wave to a receiver, which then the sender is encoding some kind of information based by altering the signal slightly, like shifting the amplitude or something like this.
But as soon as physics being physics, as soon as the electromagnetic wave passes through any kind of matter, it changes. It's changing a little bit. And this happens independent of what kind of matter it passes through, but it happens differently enough and differently in intensity depending on what it passes through.
So what the receiver then does is trying to correct for this error, what we would call it. He calculates the error and trying to estimate what the signal actually looked like when it left the sender's device. And this works fine. You know that you can still have Wi-Fi connection through a concrete wall. It might not be as great, but it works to some extent.
And what we are interested in is this specific error term, like this idea that what the receiver calculates on what I need to change to the signal that I receive to actually reconstruct the original signal. And this is called error correction, and this is very old, has been done for decades now. It's nothing special.
The thing is that depending on what kind of matter this signal passes through, this error term looks differently. If my wave passes through a concrete wall, it will have a different error term than whether it passes through a wooden desk. Or... a human body. I can see where this is going. You can see where this is going.
Yeah, so you have this system of sending and sort of receiving of two devices and anything that passes in their way. It's kind of like the transit method of how we identify planets or exoplanets against a star. There's sort of a wobble in the signal that comes as the planet is passing through the light of the star, that we infer the presence of a star.
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Chapter 5: How can alternative sensing technologies replace video cameras?
Felix Moisbach. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.