When people talk about 6G, they talk about speed. What gets less attention is that 6G networks are being designed to do something no previous mobile network could: sense the physical world around them.
The technology is called ISAC — Integrated Sensing and Communications. Rather than just transmitting data, 6G base stations will use reflected radio signals to detect objects, measure distances, track movement, and map environments in real time. The network becomes, effectively, a city-wide radar system.
ETSI, the European standards body responsible for shaping 6G, has published a report identifying 19 security and privacy vulnerabilities in ISAC systems — 15 of them focused on data protection. The findings are worth reading carefully, not because they stop 6G, but because they define the risks being built into infrastructure that billions of people will depend on.
The most significant: 6G sensing doesn't require consent or even a device. Radio waves penetrate walls. Someone in their home — with no phone, no account, no connection to the network — can still be detected, tracked, and profiled. ETSI calls this the "uninvolved parties" problem: people who never agreed to be sensed, because there was no mechanism to agree.
The report also flags AI as a force multiplier for these risks. Advanced models can extract "highly sensitive information from sensor data" far beyond what was explicitly measured — inferring behaviour patterns, occupancy, health indicators. The sensing data becomes a secondary surveillance channel even when the network is operating as intended.
On the attack surface: criminal actors could exploit 6G signals to map buildings or track individuals without any access to the network itself. The signal is the vulnerability, and it propagates through physical space whether anyone intends it to or not.
ETSI's recommendation is Security by Design — embedding privacy protections during standardisation rather than retrofitting them afterward. Whether that happens depends on political will in a window that is closing fast. The standards being written now are the infrastructure of the 2030s.
Source: Heise — 6G becomes radar: ETSI warns of risks from environmental sensing · ETSI Report GR ISC-004
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