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Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

xfinity.com

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

#211

Post by dcow »

armchairhacker wrote: post #103
josho wrote: 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…

And how do you technically stop an ISP from using the radio in their hardware to detect small changes in phase angle of signals in your home?

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

#212

Post by aspenmayer »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #204
aspenmayer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these already existing dragnets make oldies like the Clipper Chip seem like a weekend hackathon project. The irony is that all of these metadata leaks and correlation attacks etc were theoretical at the time these technologies were created and developed, unless you’re NSA level compute power, both human and silicon. Now, any script kid has enough info to try to build an array of SDRs to do the same thing, and no…

> any script kid has enough info to try to build an array of SDRs to do the same thing It doesn't particularly matter what hobbyists get up to. It matters what's available at scale on the mass market, what's widely deployed, what data is legally permissible to collect on a large scale, and what data is legal to sell. Law enforcement can't subpoena that which does not exist. The best defense to these sorts of things i…

> Your take is both alarmist and defeatist.

Legal limits on national security agencies are not enforceable due to Five Eyes etc. Allied foreign spies do what American spies don’t. I’m just admitting the political reality of the situation. What you do with that information may be limited, but it’s not a failing on my part that this is the status quo.

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

#213

Post by totetsu »

jacobgkau wrote: post #2

> 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…

One could just keep a rotisserie chicken roasting in the oven to make it seem like someone’s home

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

#214

Post by jcrawfordor »

devilbunny wrote: post #197
lynndotpy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who do this will be a vanishingly small minority. It's not as easy to set up one's own modem as it is their own router, IME. And even then, going with your own router is rare.

> It's not as easy to set up one's own modem as it is their own router, IME. I mean, I suppose it's got the additional step of calling Comcast and giving them the MAC of your modem, but IIRC that's all I had to do after buying one on their approved list. Been at least 7-8 years since I had them, though. You can plug-and-play with a consumer "router", but even then you need to know the difference between WAN and LAN s…

You don't usually have to call any more, there's a captive portal provisioning process. It's not totally reliable and sometimes you might give up after a few tries and call instead.

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

#215

Post by adolph »

jacobgkau wrote: post #2

> 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…

Just don't use your vendor's hardware. Get a cheap cable modem and hang whatever infra you want on the other side. Get a hardware VPN like the Velocloud. Using your ISP's equipment is like using their SMTP.

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

#216

Post by transpute »

SamaraMichi wrote: post #177

Can't help but imagine a reality where this is widespread and people resort to installing radio reflective curtains/decorations that freely move with slight ambient air currents in an effort to scramble the reflections and make it as hard as they can to measure. Something like a belly dance belt around the router could also work.

Other options:

  - Shielded rooms + wired networking
  - Shielded rooms + Li-Fi (wireless with light instead of radio)
Humans who want some rooms of their house to be non-transparent will need either new construction or to retrofit shielding, e.g. QuietRock drywall.

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

#217

Post by RajT88 »

dcow wrote: post #211
armchairhacker wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

And how do you technically stop an ISP from using the radio in their hardware to detect small changes in phase angle of signals in your home?

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.

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

#218

Post by kelnos »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #15

Xfinity won't give folks in certain locales (maybe everywhere in the US?) unlimited bandwidth unless they use their modem/router. This seems like a good reason that practice should be illegal.

I use my own modem/router with them, but I have to pay an extra $30/mo for unlimited download. Complete garbage. I wish there was competition; Comcast is my only realistic option in San Francisco.

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

#219

Post by giantg2 »

newshackr wrote: post #206
giantg2 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is no technical solution for this" This isn't really true. The easiest technical solution to the problem of ISPs using your wifi data is to simply use your own WiFi router which does not send the data to them.

They can still deduce this from the traffic patterns.

They can map your home and motion with traffic patterns?

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

#220

Post by dcow »

josho wrote: post #29
jacobgkau wrote: post #2

> 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…

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 bodies to pave the road to hell by removing every goddamned persistent handle we can find from existence. I didn't vote for the EU to reinvent an internet worse than popup ads by attacking the symptoms not the cause. I would rather have the internet of the 2000s back in a heartbeat than keep putting up with shitty “technical solutions” to corporations having too much power at scale. I don’t care if people break the law: prosecute them when they do and make the punishments enough to deter future law breakers.

There is absolutely something civilized beyond a lawless advertising wild west where the technical solution is to all be masked Zorros.

Why is it that if someone said “we need a legal solution to gun violence” the people that say “no we need a technical solution all people should wear kevlar and carry 9mm pistols” are considered the lunatics but when we ask for a legal solution to rampant non-consensual tracking for the purpose of indoctrinating the consumer class with propaganda we all laugh and say bah the solution must be technical? I don’t get it.

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