> Unfortunately it's kind of hard to truly restrict its usage.
Is it? You require any wireless device to have open source firmware and then people can a) inspect what the existing firmware is doing and b) replace it if it's doing anything they don't want it to.
It's a matter of replacing the existing obscurity-focused laws discouraging them from doing this with the security-focused ones that require them to.
The benefits in terms of right-to-repair and ability to patch vulnerabilities in devices the OEM has abandoned redound on top of this.
Totally, I agree that wireless devices doing sensing applications ought to be transparent about that.
That said, wireless devices are basically "light bulbs" in whatever spectrum they operate in. It's very hard to restrict people from driving by with a "camera". I believe these kinds of applications are called "passive" in the literature, and 5G is especially designed with this in mind. WiFi has been known to be good for this for a while.
In order to facilitate more privacy preserving communications that are less sensing friendly we would need highly directed packets using stuff like microwave lasers etc., so as to reduce the ambient radiation.
So there are two issues here. One is, you buy a Wi-Fi device at the store and it spies on you and sends all the data to somebody else's cloud. That one's quite solvable with open source firmware. The other is, they're not using your device, they're using their own.
Restricting someone from having a device that can do that is basically a lost cause. Anyone could make one using a variety of existing commodity equipment or use SDR with multiple antennas. It doesn't matter what some future Wi-Fi device does in that respect because if it's their device they can do whatever they want. If that's your threat model you either need a law that bans them from doing that or a Faraday cage around your building.