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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

#461

Post by jraph »

dcow wrote: post #425
jraph wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? That's new to me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Directive says > The Directive provision applicable to cookies is Article 5(3). Recital 25 of the Preamble recognises the importance and usefulness of cookies for the functioning of modern Internet and directly relates Article 5(3) to them but Recital 24 also warns of the danger that such instruments may present to privacy. The change in the law…

Read: https://gdpr.eu/cookies/ …after you dismiss the cookie banner, of course. I add this not only as a quip but to highlight that even a gdpr explainer website which you’d expect isn’t doing the evil thing of tracking users, has interpreted the relevant laws such that it finds it necessary to promt the user in order to simply explain the gdpr and epd/epr…

The way I read this proves you wrong:

> Cookie compliance [heading]

> To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must:

> Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.

(emphasis not mine, but would have added it)

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

#462

Post by JumpCrisscross »

citizenpaul wrote: post #449
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> THATS LITERALLY THE JOB No, it’s not and it never has been. (Civic engagement and persistent watchfulness on liberties is a universal drumbeat across democracies.) The courts et al are tasked with protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority, or in this case, the engaged. Making the judiciary coëqual was our founders’ attempt at taming this tendency. But nothing knowledgeable ever written has suggested…

Yeah the job of being and elected official is to ignore the population and seize power/money/influence for yourself.... You really are proving my original point though. >(It’s a lot easier to wax lyrical about Sodom and Gomorrah than pick up the phone once a month and attend meetings.) Blame that victim!

> the job of being and elected official is to ignore the population and seize power/money/influence for yourself

Non sequitur.

An elected prioritising a hot-button issue bill over one they like but which has no support is listening to their population.

> Blame that victim!

If an accurate description of choices actively made is blame, sure.

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

#463

Post by qcic »

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.

Put their WiFi router inside a faraday’s cage and wire a modem behind it. That should shave off the $25/mo.

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

#464

Post by zzo38computer »

dcow wrote: post #443
ndriscoll wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that's the point. You don't need those things. The idea that a news article or blog post or e-commerce page could "crash" is ridiculous, and the law shouldn't humor that excuse. There's been standard ways to declaratively define such pages since before scripting frameworks gained popularity. Use those standard ways. If you're really building an app and need to performance test, buy some hardware in your target ra…

You don’t need a shopping cart either. Just make the user write down the skus from your online catalog and send you a purchase order. Products exist on spectrum and the ones that win are typically easier and more convenient to use. If your business is developing the best product it can, it absolutely needs the ability to be convenient and useful. Adding a language select option on a multinational site seems pretty ta…

> You don’t need a shopping cart either. Just make the user write down the skus from your online catalog and send you a purchase order.

I think this is a way to do it, I had thought also of such a thing before. You can send a "computer payment file" which includes the product ID numbers (and parameters if applicable), the total price that the customer expects to pay, a signature, and encrypted data for use with the bank or credit card company (or some specification of store credit, if you are using that instead).

The existing use of "shopping cart" cookie can still be available as an alternative as well though, in case you do not want to use (or cannot use) the "computer payment file"; then it can provide its UI but you can also use your own if you have your own implementation.

> Adding a language select option on a multinational site seems pretty table stakes in my experience. Plenty often the user does not wish to use the same language as their system/browser. Switching your system’s default language just for one site is a huge hassle.

This is true. However, it would also be helpful to be able to change the settings (including languages, and HTTP request headers) per URL prefix, which would also be another way. This does not mean that the setting cannot also be available as a cookie, which will override the Accept-Language header if both are present in the request.

There is also user authentication; cookies are not really the best way to do that either. I think X.509 client certificates are a better way. However, other methods can still be provided for compatibility for users who do want to use it.

And then, there is more other stuff too, they can also be done in other ways.

Note that all of the above stuff means that many things can work with JavaScripts and cookies disabled (or unavailable), but enabling them will provide a way of working that does not require these other things too.

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

#465

Post by ndriscoll »

dcow wrote: post #443
ndriscoll wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that's the point. You don't need those things. The idea that a news article or blog post or e-commerce page could "crash" is ridiculous, and the law shouldn't humor that excuse. There's been standard ways to declaratively define such pages since before scripting frameworks gained popularity. Use those standard ways. If you're really building an app and need to performance test, buy some hardware in your target ra…

You don’t need a shopping cart either. Just make the user write down the skus from your online catalog and send you a purchase order. Products exist on spectrum and the ones that win are typically easier and more convenient to use. If your business is developing the best product it can, it absolutely needs the ability to be convenient and useful. Adding a language select option on a multinational site seems pretty ta…

Language selection seems easy enough: when the user clicks your flag button, show a toggle switch for "Allow a cookie for language preference". When the user toggles it on, present the language options. If they toggle it off, delete the cookie (in a better world, the server could just send a standard language options header and let the browser show a dropdown for per-site language selection, but oh well).

For crash reporting: pop up a dialog asking if they'd like to submit a report (as software used to do). Don't just submit info from their computer without asking.

If literally any physical product breaks, I don't expect the manufacturer to receive telemetry so they can fix it. If I want them to fix it, I'll bring it back to them. I expect that if I don't go out of my way to tell them something, after I buy the thing, we go our separate ways, and they have no idea about anything I do. If their thing breaks, I also have the option of just not telling them and instead telling everyone else that they're crap. They don't need to spy on me for any reason.

I'm really not seeing the issue with asking consent to do things as they're actually needed. You don't need an "I CONSENT TO EVERYTHING" banner, and most of the stuff you want isn't necessary anyway.

Like I said, privacy conscious users block tools like Sentry. It's a perfect example of "no, you don't actually need to spy on me."

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

#467

Post by canyp »

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…

> We suffer from a problem that engineers want nothing to do with politics.

It's not even politics, it's simple ethics.

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

#468

Post by ted_dunning »

reverendsteveii wrote: post #450
lloeki wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

if there are no consequences to violating a law is it a law?

It's probably not a law. It might be a declaration or a proclamation or a resolution.

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

#469

Post by nightpool »

jraph wrote: post #416
nightpool wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct under the GDPR but incorrect under the older ePrivacy Directive. EU sites need to be compliant with both, and so the cookie banners persist.

Are you sure? That's new to me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Directive says > The Directive provision applicable to cookies is Article 5(3). Recital 25 of the Preamble recognises the importance and usefulness of cookies for the functioning of modern Internet and directly relates Article 5(3) to them but Recital 24 also warns of the danger that such instruments may present to privacy. The change in the law…

Language preferences are (in all of the deployments I've seen) legally categorized as functional cookies and not strictly necessary cookies. Same with e.g. dark mode/light mode or other preference toggles

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

#470

Post by heavyset_go »

sleepybrett wrote: post #433
giantg2 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can map your home and motion with traffic patterns?

Good luck to them for those of us who have set up a tailscale exit node in our network and use it whenever they are 'roaming'.

They can see the WireGuard traffic coming in and correlate it with traffic out. WG traffic is easily identifiable.
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