281–290 of 517 posts
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They can still deduce this from the traffic patterns.
So use a vpn.
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Own your own hardware is how. Comcast cannot administer my router/AP or modem. Some other ISP's like AT&T force you to use their gateway. I try and avoid these companies or severely limit the functions of the built in gateway.
And how do you force all consumers to buy their own privacy hardware? Edit: sorry my question is not strictly how one person would mangle their hardware so it breaks presence detection, it’s how the tech industry would develop an at scale everyday consumer solution to this problem.
Require that each privacy waiver is individually initialed, per clause, in wet ink.
This shit would end tomorrow if they had to start delivering modems with 1 inch high letters that said "THIS DEVICE WILL TRACK YOUR LOCATION WITHIN YOUR HOME AND SHARE THAT DATA WITH LAW ENFORCEMENT WITHOUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE", and the modem didn't work until you went down to the Comcast store to sign your rights away.
You don't have to force anything except taking this knowledge out of the fine print and prove that your customers are actually aware of the contractual clauses they are subject to.
The tech industry could come together and come up with a privacy standard guarantee that device manufacturers could use (Something as simple as, we will never share data with law enforcement unless legally compelled).
There's a lot of solutions, ranging from technical (firmware update) to social (pass some laws with teeth).
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A much easier alternative is to not enable the feature on your router. It's an opt-in feature. If you don't set it up, they aren't generating the home/away chart like shown in the article.
It's an opt-in feature , for now. If they find some way to sell the data you'll quickly find it difficult to opt-out of.
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> What is the resolution? Can I track my cat through the house? See when they go to the feeder? Count my own bathroom visits? None of the above. The setup process has you select 3 reference devices. You should pick the devices so that your normal motion areas are between the device and the router. The router then watches the WiFi signals from those devices. If they fluctuate more than baseline, it's assumed that some…
For home / away purposes it's easier to just detect if your phone is connected to the network. I built something like that before by shipping the log from my UniFi controller to a RPi and listen for events where my phone's MAC address connect or disconnnect.
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Just get cameras and local storage/processing for them. No need for elaborate Wi-Fi presence detection hacks.
Presence detection without the possibility of images being captured seems a reasonable application to me. So much the better if I could do it with hardware I already have versus installing motion detectors or other sensors.
They can also be programmed to detect people on the floor, so if you have elderly in your house you can know if someone fell, without cameras. They are made for hospitals but are cheap, but not 100% accurate for HR and falls, but reliable enough for security, and cheap.
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Those vendor modems are rentals and expected to be returned in working order. Would you likely get away with it? Sure, nobody is paying techs to diagnose why the WiFi is failing for unit #367326, but cutting traces is definitely crossing some lines.
I wonder what they do with them when they’re returned. Ship em off in pallets to e waste buyers in China I would guess.
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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…
We suffer from a problem that engineers want nothing to do with politics. I 1000% agree we need a digital bill of rights. It pains me every time a “well behaved” website pops up a cookie consent banner for the billionth time after I already consented because the browser wiped all the persistent user identifiers available to it. For my protection -_- I want privacy codified in human law. I didn't vote for standards bo…
> 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…
Kind of, but I'll bet most homes would frequently also appear "empty" any time the occupants are asleep. Not everyone gets up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
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I use a cellular connection for my internet, but my apartment building is wired with Xfinity, and probably 90% of people use it. Naturally, there is no way for me to opt out of this.
Does your apartment lease require that you use Comcast's hardware? When I signed up for Xfinity years ago I wanted to use my own hardware (NetGear cable modem, Buffalo Airstation with DD-WRT). I forget now whether I had to walk through the activation over the phone with a tech - I vaguely recall having to provide some information about the modem, which was one of the models listed as supported on their use-your-own-h…