Right on. The whole "mm wave radar is detail rich but gives privacy" line is a contradiction. Any data that is detailed enough to be useful is detailed enough to be a privacy concern. While it might not be the same as leaking nude photos from someone's camera, radar data is something that needs to be carefully thought out. Radar data from a car can provide information about people's driving behavior even without location data- do they follow too close, do they make reckless lane changes into tight spots, do they exceed the regular flowing traffic speed, etc. Radar data from inside a building used to track people can tell when you are at your desk or somewhere else, who you congregate with in the break room, how long you spend in the bathroom, etc. If it's detailed enough to assist you, that data can also be used to monitor you.
whatever happened to that meme about common ccd cameras picking up uv images that make out details through eg swimsuits, but hopefully filtered and removed in software before making it to the images?
Cameras usually include an infrared filter (also called a "hot mirror" or "IR cut") that reflects infrared radiation. Mostly because not blocking IR leads to wrong colours for scenes like sunsets where a disproportionate amount of IR radiation is there.
Many smartphones (used to?) exclude this filter on the selfie-camera because no matter how hot you think you might be, it's not going to be an issue.
If you want to check an IR remote for function, try with the selfie camera of your phone and not the normal one and make sure you are trying in a dark environment because the LED on the remote is going to be rather dim either way.
As an aside, the IR filter is often removed[0] from many cameras when using them for astrophotography. Canon[1] sell dedicated astro cameras that are modified in this way, along with other modifications.
I recall the panic over that back in in the day, IIRC it was near-visible infra-red, not UV - if you didn't have sufficient IR filtering over the sensor, were using flash (and the flash included a decent amount of IR), and the subject was wearing something thin, you'd potentially get unintended skin detail with the IR reflection.
As I understand more or less a solved problem on modern cameras such as on your smartphone... instead of a bulb you tend to have white LED for your flash that doesn't really give off useful (any?) IR, and there's better/more consistent IR filtering on the sensor.
I still have a Sony CD camera (as in disk not ccd) which has near IR and a IR led. Fun to play with for night recording (its intended use) and you can see though thin clothes a tiny bit but range is very limited. Skin patterns much less due to lacking contrast. Resolution in that mode is also lacking so detail is not really a thing. I can understand the problem and I think that is the reason my IR camera in my laptop has a moire pattern in the hardware to make it almost useless to the common eye. But that last part is just a guess.
Those camera manufacturers quickly eliminated that capability, likely via optical filtering. That was about 20 years ago. Consumer-grade cameras do not have that ability nowadays (bad publicity).
50/50 on privacy. Sure, privacy is cool but I pity the people whom must endure seeing the shapely flabs and curves of everyday people. That's got to have a toll on anyone's psych over time, as an "occupational hazard".
I mean, the material has a bug that wasn't discovered until recently, so we fix the bug and re-deploy the material. It's that simple. Just embed some carbon fibers or something in the swim suit, there are tons of ways to block UV.
It's like if your car seatbelts have a bug you issue a product recall. Same thing.
Not to mention changing materials would likely have continuous costs, and will impact the materials properties and longevity - potentially in ways that just don't add up to a feasible product.
And then there's the fact that this is a hugely international business, so unless we convince the whole world to do this, we'll be impacting supply lines and flexibility there too.
The whole undertaking seems like it would have an absurd scope - just to avoid adding IR filters that cameras need anyhow to achieve accurate color reproduction, and therefore most cameras already include!
Most people cannot, believe that they cannot, or would not even if they could. We can be sure of that because despite of billions of cameras in phones, pocket cameras or webcams being out there, the web is not flooded by pictures like these.
Putting filters into cameras definitely works. It is not an obstacle to the determined but it prevents most of the abuse most of the time.
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With decent processing a mm-wave picture would be good enough that you could recognise a person, so I don't think there is any inherent anonymity. The image resolution is a function of both wavelength and aperture and a mm-wave antenna can extend over a significant number of wavelengths (ie. large aperture). A stable timebase would further allow processing across time, enabling synthetic aperture.
Also, a person is not a randomly shaped object. If the processing is specifically tuned to detecting and identifying people an awful lot of degrees of freedom can be eliminated, giving more detail in those features that do identify a person.
I think you are still off about the privacy aspect. At the source, a return from a single radar pulse is pretty uninformative. But a single pixel on a camera sensor is also uninformative. Even at the source, an aggregated set of radar returns is still a privacy concern on the level of an aggregated set of camera pixel values. Not operating in the light domain doesn’t make the privacy concerns go away, it just means that laypeople aren’t going to understand the risks as intuitively.
