Secretive Company Launches World’s Most Accurate Location-Tracking Tech
Jemima McEvoy, writing for the Tech publication The Information, published an exclusive report about a “secretive” Tech company named ZaiNar that claims “We know everything, everywhere, all at once is.”
The company has been working for nine years to develop superior tracking technology that can track people’s locations even inside buildings, something that satellite-based current GPS tracking technology cannot do.
The company is now coming out of the shadows in the pursuit of contacts to use its technology, as the company is now valued at around $1 billion.
Daniel Jacker, the CEO and co-founder of ZaiNar invited McEvoy to see the first-ever public demonstration of their technology which they claim is “the most accurate location-tracking tech on the planet, capable of pinpointing an object’s whereabouts within inches—indoors and outdoors—from a great distance away.”
What I am going to do with the rest of this article is report on this technology, as well as other recent technologies coming out of the AI spending frenzy, to illustrate what the TRUE dangers are of this emerging technology, as opposed to the AI hype surrounding it that tends to grab the headlines and therefore minimizes the actual dangers that this technology poses for all of us.
I’ll give you the spoiler to this article now: We are NOT powerless against this emerging technology. The solutions remain the same and quite simple: just “unplug” and stop using their products and services.
We have multiple generations now that have grown up in this technology and falsely believe that it is essential to our lives. They have no memory of the not-so-distant past that the older generations lived through, where we did not even carry around cell phones nor have access to the Internet for most of our lives growing up.
It is no surprise, therefore, that new movements among the younger generations are gaining steam around the concept of “unplugging” from the digital, artificial world, and spending more time in the REAL world with REAL life.
Secretive ZaiNar Exits Shadows, Targets $5 Billion in Deals for GPS Alternative
From The Information (Subscription needed.)
ZaiNar says it has developed innovative, ultraprecise tracking tech that will teach robots to see and help power the physical AI era. It will also freak out everyone who worries about digital privacy.
Excerpts:
A couple of weeks ago, Daniel Jacker, CEO and co-founder of ZaiNar, made me an alluring offer: Would I like to see the first-ever public demonstration of the technology his startup had spent nine years laboriously developing in anonymity? He described it as the most accurate location-tracking tech on the planet, capable of pinpointing an object’s whereabouts within inches—indoors and outdoors—from a great distance away.
Sure, Google Maps and Apple’s Find My feature are pretty terrific, but even in the best cases, they typically can only determine someone’s location to within dozens of feet and sometimes can’t find a device’s location at all if it’s inside or underground.
I knew Jacker had lined up a cadre of major investors, including Steve Jurvetson and Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, and had revealed the startup’s existence in February by announcing they’d valued the company at $1 billion.
I couldn’t possibly turn him down. So Jacker, 37, and I met at a 20,000-square-foot warehouse in Belmont, Calif., previously occupied by GoPro.
When we entered a ground-floor room divided by thick walls and cluttered with metal racks, Jacker handed a smartphone to one of his engineers, whom he’d enlisted to help with the demo. The device was connected to a 5G network through four antennas installed on the walls.
It should’ve been very difficult to pinpoint its exact location without adding specialized equipment to the device or the room; plus, the warehouse’s interior metal roof would’ve made traditional GPS tracking challenging. But on a laptop monitor, ZaiNar software showed it as a tiny blue dot on a map of the warehouse floor.
As the engineer began to walk around with it, I kept waiting for the blue dot to disappear—or perhaps lag behind his movements. It never did, not even when he slipped into a narrow hallway between two anechoic chambers—rooms that use special tiles and foam to block out sound, satellite connections and wireless internet.
Jacker said his technology can track any phone, car, drone or robot in almost any environment as long as it’s roughly within a mile of a 5G base station, antenna or other network receiver.
The one exception: He and his four co-founders haven’t yet figured out how to make it work underwater.
He framed his company’s technology in cinematic terms:
“We know where everything, everywhere, all at once is.”
Jacker sees the startup’s tech as an alternative to GPS-based tracking. Every device that can connect to wireless internet, like Wi-Fi and 5G, sends out radio signals to stay on the network.
Zainar’s software uses those signals to track a device’s location within 4 inches, according to Jacker. The software works indoors using private Wi-Fi and 5G and outdoors using 5G networks operated by mobile carriers.
ZaiNar’s technology uses a specific signal transmitted through radio waves called a sounding reference signal, long part of wireless technology. A device can send out this signal as much as 500 times a second, and since it transmits so frequently, it’s useful for tracking a moving device, like a drone or a robot.
Apple recently added a feature that allows users to limit the precision of location data shared with cellular carriers. However, device makers like Apple and Google cannot prevent their devices from emitting the radio signals ZaiNar is analyzing, Jacker said, which means its technology could constantly monitor them anytime they’re connected to a network.
At ZaiNar’s Belmont warehouse, I couldn’t help but feel a little disturbed as I watched the blue dot weave across that laptop screen.
Sure, the technology was impressive, but the little dot represented a person. And we, as people, already exist in a world where our digital privacy has been steadily eroded for decades. ZaiNar’s technology could undermine it even further, leading to more intrusive forms of marketing, government surveillance and other possible abuses.
Since ZaiNar’s technology can granularly track a device’s movement using the signals a device broadcasts to stay online, it makes permissionless tracking very easy. (A user can’t turn off this type of location tracking the way they can other location services on a smartphone, though they could evade detection by putting their devices in airplane mode.)
ZaiNar sees this as a major corporate selling point, and while I was reporting this story, a spokesperson for the startup described tracking items like phones and cars “without cooperation from those devices” as a large part of the company’s “key IP moat.”
Jacker said he has firm boundaries for his technology’s use.
The company does not do deals in Russia and China and does not integrate with Chinese firms such as Huawei or ZTE, both of which the U.S. has identified as national security threats because of their connections to the Chinese military.
But what about an organization like the U.S.’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement? Jacker said he wouldn’t ever allow the federal agency to, for instance, use ZaiNar’s tracking for immigration raids.
“That’s crossing a line for us,” said Jacker, saying it would be “too Holocausty” to consider.
But he could see ICE using ZaiNar technology for other operations.
“But border security? Totally fine,” he said.
Notice how this 37-year-old former Stanford student thinks he alone has the power to decide who and under what circumstances can use this technology!
But this entire system relies on two wireless technologies: 5G through cell phones, and Wifi connections. If you do not use either of these, you cannot be tracked, it is as simple as that. I have not used Wifi in my places of residence for many years now, using only network cables to connect to the Internet.
And I do not use a cell phone to talk to people, which makes a lot of people very upset because they don’t want to spend the time to use more secure methods of communication.
The one “device” that constantly communicates with “the network” that most people do not even consider, is their vehicle. From the article:
In an initial test of the idea, they placed a 4G antenna on a concrete wall bordering Campus Drive, the road that loops through campus. As each car drove by, they found they could detect it through the wall using the radio signal emitted by the car’s tire pressure sensor.
Make sure the vehicle you drive is NOT connected to the Internet. Many modern cars, especially Teslas, probably do not even give you that option, because then the cars would cease to function altogether.
source vaccineimpact.com