Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by citizenpaul » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 5:15 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #313

grafmax wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is our government and regulators are captured by business concerns which profit from our data. The government in turn views mass surveillance as a powerful tool for social control. Although there are many more people whose privacy is violated by these policies than benefit from them, the rich and powerful minority is more organized in its efforts and thus comes out ahead in the balance of power.

> the rich and powerful minority is more organized They show up. I've worked on privacy legislation at the state and local level. Barely anybody calls or writes in support. That means barely anybody would turn up to a contested primary election over it, or donate to a challenger, or organise the foregoing en masse . Contrast that with bread-and-butter or activist issues, where it's immediately clear there is politica…

Or the people elected by other humans could... IDK do their job of representing the people rather than a handful of corporations.

The problem is what I said in other comnents here. This is the fabel of sodom and gomorrah in action. We have no people with any moral compass in charge.

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

#322

Post by jeroenhd » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 5:18 AM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #190

transpute wrote: post #31

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.

Was anyone asking for their network to be able to sense their breathing rate? What does this enable that actually improves people’s lives? This is the kind of stuff that pushes me to pull a Ron Swanson and throw my technology in the dumpster.

The network already could. The standardisation is just making the feature available without hiding it.

The core of the sensing technology is about improving MU-MIMO + OFDM + all the other speed tricks. Human bodies interfere in predictable ways so you need the tech to steer around that. As a side effect, you get detection capabilities for free.

In such a setup, your laptop and router already know where you are. The question is whether or not to offer it to you so you can use that information for things like home automation. Had they not made this part of the protocol, the privacy risks were just as bad, you just wouldn't be aware of them.

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

#323

Post by gxs » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 5:21 AM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #296

gxs wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been asked at work to build less than savory stuff, here are some general observations, none of which are admittedly an excuse: * you get caught up in the moment, hell bent on solving the problem you don’t really think twice * you don’t want to get that stink on you, you don’t want to be that guy that brings this type of stuff up * you are mindful of the fact that you are being very well compensated to build it…

And sometimes, you don't even know what the feature will even be used for. Today it's an automatic subtitle generator for people with hearing difficulties. Tomorrow it'll be an AI training data generator. In a year, the NSA will re-purpose it into a mass surveillance tool.

Exactly

Kind of crazy that I’m being downvoted for just expressing some basic, reasonable feelings

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

#324

Post by citizenpaul » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 5:24 AM UTC

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…

It makes it much more difficult to be profitable if its illegal. This deters the majority of opportunists leaving only the dedicated criminals. And just like thief's people might understand why they steal no one sheds a tear when they go to prison.

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

#325

Post by dcow » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 5:29 AM UTC

lloeki wrote: post #318

dcow wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I want privacy codified in human law Article 12 No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks - Paris, 1948, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Which says nothing about a business profiling customers that walk through the door and selling its profiles to aggregators. It says nothing about requiring consent before soliciting individuals or subjecting them to psychologically manipulative advertisements. Etc. We need more.

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

#326

Post by dcow » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 5:36 AM UTC

jraph wrote: post #320

dcow wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Do yourself a favor and enable the Cookie lists in uBlock Origin. I'm personally grateful that a law requires my consent before tracking me. That means I should not be tracked without me saying OK without monet…

Setting a language preference cookie is not tracking and I will die on that hill. The law requires consent before using a cookie to store even a mundane option that was just directly modified by a user. Collecting a crash report is not tracking a user. Even first party product analytics is not tracking a user.

Tracking a user across domains using a 3rd party aggregator to serve add and do attribution is the evil. And the EPD far overshoots the mark of specifically addressing that evil.

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

#327

Post by vasco » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 5:39 AM UTC

gxs wrote: post #323

miki123211 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And sometimes, you don't even know what the feature will even be used for. Today it's an automatic subtitle generator for people with hearing difficulties. Tomorrow it'll be an AI training data generator. In a year, the NSA will re-purpose it into a mass surveillance tool.

Exactly Kind of crazy that I’m being downvoted for just expressing some basic, reasonable feelings

Maybe you're finding they aren't so reasonable.

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

#328

Post by Dylan16807 » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 5:41 AM UTC

aspenmayer wrote: post #212

fc417fc802 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Legal limits on national security agencies

You're not talking about what they're talking about. They're talking about limiting corporate data collection. If companies don't build this into routers, then 99% of routers won't be collecting this data, and foreign spies won't have any data to steal.

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

#329

Post by Mogzol » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 5:46 AM UTC

boston_clone wrote: post #302

Mogzol wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you still can use your own hardware if you choose to. And that's all that the original comment you replied to was saying. If you choose to use your own hardware, then Comcast won't have control over it and cannot do this wifi motion detection. Of course, most people won't do this, but that's besides the point.

> they only have some level of control over DOCSIS modem they typically issue a modem / router combination unit, and they can control the router and its radios.

Yes, but you can replace that with your own unit they don't have control over.

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

#330

Post by xp84 » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 5:55 AM UTC

dcow wrote: post #220

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…

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…

I think I’m kind of on your side in general, but I have more of the opposite feeling about legal versus technical solutions. If we had no idiotic EU cookie laws, no “consent” bs required, a technical solution would be easy: default segmentation of cookies by what site you are actually visiting, plus all non-first-party ones silently expired after 60 minutes or whatever. It seems like this would be very easy, except for the fact that the number one ad network is also the only browser vendor that matters.

But the attempted legal solutions suffer from being inside the sandbox, meaning all the “cookie management” software is a pile of hacks that barely work, and rely on browsers, as you’ve noticed, to allow their cookies in the service of…limiting cookies. And of course they also suffer from the politicians who wrote them having no clue how any of this works. I suspect if they did, they’d see how dumb it is to regulate that 10,000,000 websites each implement a ton of logic to self-limit their cookies they set (hard to police, buggy) instead of telling 2-3 companies they have to make their browsers have more conservative defaults with how they keep and send cookies back. (easy to prove it’s working with testing).