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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

#381

Post by meindnoch »

dcow wrote: post #326
jraph wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Accept-Language.

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

#383

Post by gen6acd60af »

ethan_smith wrote: post #309
EvanAnderson wrote: post #10

I don't want my ISP doing this to me, but it sounds like something pretty cool to do myself. Does anybody know what the current state of "self-hosting" this kind of functionality is?

Check out ESP32-based projects like ESP32-CSI-Tool or the FreqSense library, which can implement WiFi sensing with minimal hardware and completely under your control.

>Check out ESP32-based projects like ESP32-CSI-Tool or the FreqSense library

Interesting, mind sharing links to these?

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

#384

Post by wil421 »

margalabargala wrote: post #160
boston_clone wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. Not much of this is true. They provide a modem / router combination device at even their cheapest tier. That device can leverage this technology, and the technology isn’t reliant on traffic. They can gather plenty, and can provide it to third parties without our knowledge or consent.

Hmm. That misses the broader reality. What you're missing, is that you are allowed to use your own modem. You can purchase an Arris Surfboard, and use that. They still have control of that modem, but can gather no downstream data. That the devices are not distributed by Comcast personally is not relevant to you being able to do this.

You can’t get top speed or unlimited data with your own modem.

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

#385

Post by wil421 »

slt2021 wrote: post #345
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely that is not true? I thought rental fees were common with using the vendor equipment (something like $10/month). It is a frequently listed as a cost cutting measure to buy your own modem rather than rent from The ISP. A modem is $100-200, so you should be net positive after a year on the investment.

docsis modem costs $30, wireless AP costs another $50, add repeaters if you want. I have been using my setup for 9 years and never paid a dime in rent of equipment. the setup is plug-n-play / one youtube video away

I guess you don’t want the fastest speed or no data cap. We easily surpass the 1TB cap with 4K streaming and WFH video calls.

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

#386

Post by theoreticalmal »

nick__m wrote: post #69
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing the first bit, but I can't turn off the wifi -- only stop broadcasting my "personal" network. And actually, as I went in to make sure that was the case, I saw that broadcasting of my personal network had been forcibly turned back on. Lovely!

If you cannot disable it and you don't trust the wifi but need the service, wrap the isp provided box it in aluminum foil and ground that foil ( no need to try to solder on the foil, an alligator clip is more practical), the wifi will still be on but it will be completely blind. Just make sure it doesn't overheat.

I thought you weren’t supposed to ground faraday cages, is that not the case?

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

#387

Post by harvey9 »

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…

"engineers want nothing to do with politics". Do you mean Comcast engineers see this as a purely technical challenge without caring about implications? In general we are seeing more engineers taking positions on a variety of political issues.

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

#389

Post by nmeofthestate »

cs702 wrote: post #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.

Any service provided by a connected device can be framed as something "people can buy on the Dark Web".

XFinity lets you make HTTP requests to the web via your router. Uh-oh: XFinity decided to sell info on your web requests on the Dark Web.

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

#390

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

dcow wrote: post #300
idiotsecant wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What law do you think mandates those annoying cookie popups?

It would be nice if you could argue, “well, just be a good site and don’t use marketing cookies”, but the ePrivacy Directive requires consent for performance and preference cookies too. Perhaps a liberal reading arguably allows classification of certain statistics and preferences functions to be strictly necessary, like “I wouldn’t provide this service without crash reporting because I’d go insane so it’s strictly ne…

There’s still the question of what law mandates that they are annoying pop-ups? They could be preferences in a menu, for example.

What happened is website operators started to feel entitled to doing whatever they want with cookies on users’ machines and eventually decided to act like petulant children when the rules changed.

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