{"id":20417,"date":"2022-04-07T02:15:37","date_gmt":"2022-04-07T09:15:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/?p=20417"},"modified":"2024-01-23T09:47:22","modified_gmt":"2024-01-23T17:47:22","slug":"google-radar-chip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/google-radar-chip\/","title":{"rendered":"Google’s Radar Chip: Real-Time Biometric Data Collection"},"content":{"rendered":"

Digital surveillance comes in many forms. The traditional kind, where governments spy on you<\/a> as you move around the Internet, is the easiest to take measures against. A good VPN<\/a> will help obfuscate which sites you visit and provide added encryption for part of the connection.<\/p>\n

Far more difficult to fend off is the surveillance of most online advertising<\/a>. As numerous PIA blog posts have discussed, the websites you log in to routinely gather substantial amounts of data<\/strong>. This information is typically aggregated by companies like Facebook and Google into detailed profiles of who we are and what we do.<\/p>\n

If current surveillance and tracking capabilities weren\u2019t enough, we may have to worry about miniature radar chips tracking our real-time behavior<\/strong>. This is what Google\u2019s Project Soli<\/a> is about and the capability is being built into most of Google\u2019s products, including their smartphones and smart home products.<\/p>\n

New Technology, New Tracking<\/h2>\n

More recently, technological advances have meant that video surveillance cameras are now so cheap and powerful that they can be deployed on a huge scale in cities<\/a> and public buildings. The video cameras<\/a> found in offices and home automation systems are also a risk, as are smart speakers<\/a>. As we\u2019ve seen, Wi-Fi speakers can eavesdrop on conversations<\/strong> and silently send data outside the home.<\/p>\n

Digital technology is notable for the speed of its development, so it comes as no surprise that new ways of tracking our actions are being developed, often with the best intentions on the part of the engineers working on them.<\/p>\n

For example, since 2014, Google has been working on Project Soli<\/a>, a very low-power, miniature 60 GHz radar device on a chip that can easily fit into a typical smartphone. It comes from Google\u2019s Advanced Technology and Products division (ATAP), which jointly created a connected jacket<\/a> with Levi\u2019s. The jacket is still available<\/a>, but doesn\u2019t seem likely to spawn an entirely new field of connected clothing yet.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Google\u2019s new radar chip looks much more promising than smart clothing because of its extensive range of uses, including more problematic ones\u2026 like collecting real-time biometric data<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The Radar Chip Is Already In Our Phones and Homes<\/h2>\n

The challenges in producing the chip are detailed in a paper<\/a> published in the ACM Digital Library. There is also a video presentation<\/a> by the lead author of the paper.<\/p>\n

The main problem was turning a technology used for detecting large objects like planes and ships into something that could fit inside a smartphone and modified to work for extremely small movements<\/strong>. That meant iterating the basic design elements until they fit inside a chip measuring just 6.5mm by 5mm, and that needed minimal levels of power to work.<\/p>\n

Having solved the hardware challenge, the team moved on to the first application: recognizing dynamic hand gestures<\/strong>. The four gestures were:<\/p>\n