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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

#391

Post by mbreese »

xoa wrote: post #379
mbreese wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t solve social problems with technical solutions. Technical solutions won’t work without some kind of legal backing to force it.

> You can’t solve social problems with technical solutions. Sure, this has a fair amount of truth to it. However, security is not a social problem, it's an economic one. No one, not even the most well funded and skilled organizations like the NSA, has access to infinite resources. Whether a given attack/data harvesting effort costs $1 million, $10 thousand, $100, $1, or $0.01 makes an enormous difference in impact. C…

I am really struggling to see the technical solution here. This isn’t a security question - security has already been lost. We’re talking about a device in a home that the owner doesn’t control, being able to monitor the presence of a person using either WiFi signals or device identifiers.

The obvious solution is to not use that device. But that’s not necessarily possible for a variety of reasons, not all of them controllable.

So, what is the technical solution to this? Anything that’s going to mask a persons RF signal is probably going to make WiFi difficult to use. Anything at the network level is already lost because we have a potentially hostile device in a critical point in the network path.

Am I missing a different solution?

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

#392

Post by mafuy »

AzzyHN wrote: post #247
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.

If you want to remove the 1.2TB data cap, you can either pay $25/mo and get Xfinity's gateway router "included" OR pay $30/mo to use your own modem/router.

I have to pay more when I do not use their device? Crazy...

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

#393

Post by samch »

johnklos wrote: post #70

I've been telling people for ages to not trust ISP provided hardware. Notice the vague language here which means they reserve the right to share private information for anything that might be called an investigation, or for any dispute which includes them (didn't pay your bill?), or a subpoena. Subject to applicable law, Comcast may disclose information generated by your WiFi Motion to third parties without further n…

This is what precisely why I willingly pay more to Google for their fiber optic service than AT&T for an equivalent, albeit less expensive, plan: Google readily allows me to use my own equipment. I am voting with my dollars on this one.

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

#394

Post by tedd4u »

Dowwie wrote: post #378

I worked in a nascent water tech space recently involving an IOT water flow sensing device installed on a main water line. I worked extensively on detection models capable of distinguishing water fixture use during simultaneous usage scenarios. When your full time job involves a niche domain such as this, a whole new world begins to reveal itself. You can distinguish people based on their patterns of fixture usage. Y…

Thanks for sharing this. Check out this other comment on this page to see what one company says they can do (health baselining etc)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44428654

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

#395

Post by pixl97 »

dcow wrote: post #236
pixl97 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disconnect and ground the antenna and supply your own equipment?

I thought we were talking about a solution that the tech industry could implement and deploy en masse to users, because it’s just, like TLS and browser standards. That’s usually what is being discussed when these give everyone privacy topics come up. The people that care enough to ground their antenna are already using their own hardware. And the ISP will deter hardware modification by charging you for damaged leased…

>Do people pay for tinfoil hats these days?

I don't know, how many people that didn't care much about privacy said things like "There is no way the US government would deport US citizens" 7 months ago.

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

#396

Post by thesuitonym »

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…

> They show up. I've worked on privacy legislation at the state and local level. Barely anybody calls or writes in support.

This is by design. A lot of people talk about RTO in regards to business real estate but there's also the aspect of keeping people so busy and exhausted that they don't show up when it matters.

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

#397

Post by keyringlight »

djhn wrote: post #349
munksbeer wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do yourself a favor and enable the Cookie lists in uBlock Origin. Could you elaborate on this please? I'm sifting through the options and not sure what I'm looking for (disclaimer: I have never once opened the uBlock Origin settings menu in all the years I've used it).

EasyList cookiefilter. Works in uBlock lite as well. It hides all permission notices and consent forms for things you are (presumably) blocking anyway.

I've found you need to remember that you've done this as occasionally I'll get a website that behaves strangely until I link the behavior to uBlock, temporarily disable it and fulfill the cookie notice, then I can enable it and proceed.

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

#398

Post by bl4kers »

AzzyHN wrote: post #247
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.

If you want to remove the 1.2TB data cap, you can either pay $25/mo and get Xfinity's gateway router "included" OR pay $30/mo to use your own modem/router.

I use my own and there's a data cap.

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

#399

Post by KronisLV »

0xEF wrote: post #363
dcow wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is interpretation. The key phrase is "interference with privacy" which is ambiguous yet all encompassing. You say it says nothing toward solicitation or manipulation where I interpret both of those acts as "interference with my privacy." Not saying your version is wrong, by the way, just different from mine as a example of where the protection falls apart. My gut feeling as that no matter how much additio…

> My gut feeling as that no matter how much additional and specific language we add to any bill of privacy rights, there will always be holes or work-arounds due to interpretation and semantics.

Nobody will ever write a perfect law and you’ll always see cases like dark patterns when people try to unsubscribe from things or try to maintain their privacy, until there is proper enforcement and businesses start getting punished for violating the intent of the law. That is also unlikely.

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

#400

Post by pixxel »

mrtesthah wrote: post #193
bdcravens wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scary, but is it any scarier than the status quo before this feature was implemented? The fidelity of the data, perhaps, but it's more or less been the standard that our footprint where we intersect with a third-party is no longer ours to control.

The status quo after January 2025 looks nothing like it did before.

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