Live data from Hacker News

Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

xfinity.com

141–150 of 517 posts

Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

#141

Sensing is (sadly) part of Wi-Fi 7. If you have a recent Intel, AMD or Qualcomm device from the past few years, it's likely physically capable of detecting human presence and/or activity (e.g. breathing rate). It can also be done with $20 ESP32 devices + OSS firmware and _possibly_ with compromised radio basebands.

Commercial use of WiFi sensing predates WiFi 7 (a notable example is Philips smart bulbs with presence detection). AFAIK WiFi 7 just includes an amendment by the 802.11bf working group to improve performance.

Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

#142
post #134

> Subject to applicable law, Comcast may disclose information generated by your WiFi Motion to third parties without further notice to you in connection with any law enforcement investigation or proceeding, any dispute to which Comcast is a party, or pursuant to a court order or subpoena. Sounds like, at least in some limited circumstances (using the provided WiFi AP, having this feature turned on, etc), ISPs are goi…

Comcast has remote control of all of their equipment so they will just turn it on for you if they get a court order or a big enough check from an adtech company. Wifi imaging is a bit like a silhouette and generally accurate enough to work out gait and height which could give a good indication of which people are in what locations in a home. That is some very scary power in the hands of a corpo.

they only have some level of control over DOCSIS modem. if you install the cheapest/simplest DOCSIS modem, and connect it to your own wireless access point that is NOT controlled by Comcast - they wont know anything.

They will only see traffic coming from 1 local IP - of your wireless AP

Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

#143

In case anyone is skimming the headline and comments: It's not enabled by default. This is an optional feature that you have to find, turn on, and then select up to 3 WiFi devices to use as reference signals: > Activating the feature > WiFi Motion is off by default. To activate the feature, perform the following steps: The actual title of the article is "Using WiFi Motion in the Xfinity app".

"...for you." --Bane

These days it is never safe to assume that opting-in does anything more than making some of the information that's being collected regardless available.

Although I actually agree with you that it probably isn't doing anything by default to the extent that it isn't doing anything yet because it's new they haven't worked out how to monetize it.

Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

#144

> Subject to applicable law, Comcast may disclose information generated by your WiFi Motion to third parties without further notice to you in connection with any law enforcement investigation or proceeding, any dispute to which Comcast is a party, or pursuant to a court order or subpoena. Sounds like, at least in some limited circumstances (using the provided WiFi AP, having this feature turned on, etc), ISPs are goi…

You can turn the customer AP off; however, the Comcast Customer Shared WiFi is always on. This is true even for Comcast Business accounts. You're expected to be a hotspot for their other customers. Which is one of the main reasons I bought my own modem.

just dont buy any device form comcast!

buy your own DOCSIS modem from Amazon and your own wireless AP. Separate AP is needed, because Comcast has some form of control over DOCSIS modem (they can reboot and send config to your modem)

problem solved

Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

#145
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution here shouldn't be technical; it should be legal. If we rely on the technical path, Comcast can achieve the same by how many active IPv6 addresses are in use. Even if you aren't using your phone, the device is going to be constantly pinging services like email, and your ISP can use that to piece together how many people are at home. If we rely on legal protection, then not only Comcast, but all ISPs will…

> The solution here shouldn't be technical; it should be legal. I disagree. Solutions should be technical whenever possible, because in practice, laws tend to be abused and/or not enforced. Laws also need resources and cooperation to be enforced, and some laws are hard to enforce without creating backdoors or compromising other rights. "ISPs will be prohibited from spying on their customers" doesn't mean ISPs won't s…

We need more funding for open-source WiFi Sensing counter-measures, e.g. EU research, https://ans.unibs.it/projects/csi-murder/

> this paper addressed passive attacks, where the attacker controls only a receiver, but exploits the normal Wi-Fi traffic. In this case, the only useful traffic for the attacker comes from transmitters that are perfectly fixed and whose position is well known and stable, so that the NN can be trained in advance, thus the obfuscator needs to be installed only in APs or similar ‘infrastructure’ devices. Active attacks, where the attacker controls both the transmitter and the receiver are another very interesting research area, where, however, privacy protection cannot be based on randomization at the transmitter.

https://github.com/ansresearch/csi-murder/

> The experimental results obtained in our laboratory show that the considered localization method (first proposed in an MSc thesis) works smoothly regardless of the environment, and that adding random information to the CSI mess up the localization, thus providing the community with a system that preserve location privacy and communication performance at the same time.

Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

#146
Soon ICE will have given Comcast enough money to provide a live feed of the neighborhoods they are targeting and where all the bodies are that match the height of their targets.

We need to be finding the xfinity wifi hotspots in our neighborhoods, knock on doors, and help people understand the risks they are creating for themselves and their neighbors and how to setup their own routers.

Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

#147

Okay I'm as concerned about privasy as everybody else is here but i also gotta admire that its pretty neat they can actually do that. Are they measuring the signal echo like what radar does? If they controlled both the receiver and transmitter i wouldn't be as surprised to find out they can tell when something crosses between them and form a 2-dimensional mesh (like that episode of Star Trek TNG where geordie detects…

It's far from great for imaging, but it can be done. https://www.zmescience.com/research/inventions/wifi-technolo...

Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

#148
post #13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even better, don't use the Comcast router at all. It's a rip off anyway

Don't they hand out combination modem/routers? What's a cheaper alternative?

I bought a DOCSIS modem+wifi AP on amazon a decade ago for $50. Its been working like a champ and I have control over it.

although for the best control it is recommended to buy modem separately and wifi AP separately, because Comcast can send C&C commands to your modem over the copper cable

Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

#149

In case anyone is skimming the headline and comments: It's not enabled by default. This is an optional feature that you have to find, turn on, and then select up to 3 WiFi devices to use as reference signals: > Activating the feature > WiFi Motion is off by default. To activate the feature, perform the following steps: The actual title of the article is "Using WiFi Motion in the Xfinity app".

I think at least right now this is reasonable: It's off by default, and if you choose to turn it on, they don't use it for anything themselves, but Comcast is disclosing that it may be forced to give the data over with a legal request.

If I was advising Comcast, I'd tell them this is a dumb thing to introduce because just the perception of bad behavior is not worth any particular benefit, but whatever. I can't imagine someone deciding they want a Comcast plan because it offers this, and there's no way for them to monetize it without almost assured legal backlash.

Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

#150
If you ask the Xfinity managers who came up with this idea whether thieves will be able to buy live information on whether your home is empty from hackers on the dark web, the managers will likely say... nothing. What they will do is look at you with a deer-in-the-headlights expression in their shocked faces.

Sigh.

Post reply on HN