We built a system with the most humanitarian application imaginable, helping people in need, and it was good. Turns out, it's hard to make money at that and the business people recast things into a new product that could suppress dissent in authoritarian countries, which they sold there. I'm positive it's been used to hurt people.
Ethically, all the people that make generic infra like roads or computers or sdr software are not responsible if someone else does evil with their product.
Because people enjoy tinkering with radio and these sorts of projects have become possible in the amateur space now that high quality Radio hardware is so cheap. I doubt the people who work on this have nefarious intent.
Smartphones are super useful for everyone, radar not so much.
That said would be nice to someone like google just added a layer on google maps of all objects you can track. There are companies that do all sort of tracking, just not as cheaply as this.
At a minimum, passive radar could be useful to augment more conventional types of cameras in a home security system, especially for someone with acres of land with a lot of trees, etc.
No one knew how personally useful radio transmission could be when it was in the exclusive domain of inventors and governments. Radar is not very personally useful yet. It has lots of non-military and non-professional applications that will open up as it becomes cheaper and more accessible.
Restricting code like this will make zero difference to governments or any motivated, well funded, capable group. It just hampers the rest of us.
I'm pretty sure he asked because it's not uncommon to see mmwave radar on flagship smartphones, especially on devices that don't have lidar. Many cars also have radar for parking assist or automatic parking.
Active illumination isn't always safe. Russians in Ukraine have (or at least at one point had) a conundrum where if they turn on the radar to detect incoming HIMARS missiles then the radar gets targeted by HARM missiles.
In a domestic authoritarian context, an herbal extract salesman could detect when illumination is shone on the house in preparation for a heist.
We built a system with the most humanitarian application imaginable, helping people in need, and it was good. Turns out, it's hard to make money at that and the business people recast things into a new product that could suppress dissent in authoritarian countries, which they sold there. I'm positive it's been used to hurt people.
Ethically, all the people that make generic infra like roads or computers or sdr software are not responsible if someone else does evil with their product.