Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

xfinity.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 517 posts

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

#471

Post by JumpCrisscross »

transpute wrote: post #459
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bezos' civic engagement weighs more than my civic engagement Again, I worked on these issues. Bezos and friends never showed up. Nobody showed up. This wasn’t a battle between David and Goliath, it was an empty field to which some generals showed up, looked around and then left. > money is a superpower so the more one has, the more one can take To a limit. The last few years have been a barn full of monied candidat…

Any recommendations on possible regulatory responses to the collection, processing and sale of human motion/activity data collected via WiFi and other RF Sensing?

> Any recommendations on possible regulatory responses to the collection, processing and sale of human motion/activity data collected via WiFi and other RF Sensing?

Research your state's privacy laws and submit a cool and concise complaint to your regulators, e.g. attorney general, consumer protection bureaus, public utility commissions, et cetera. These offices are understaffed and overworked--there is a good chance they haven't noticed this.

If you want to throw cash at the problem, check if Xfinity is pulling this crap in Illinois. (Or another state with a a BIPA [1].) One could argue that one's radar cross section is biometric [1]. That opens up avenues for financing litigation.

Finally, always, call your electeds. U.S. Congressmen and Senators, yes, but also your state legislators. Put it on their radars. (Most offices will put a staffer on a novel issue if more than a couple people call in about it.) If you want to supercharge this effect, find a local party organisation (e.g. such and such town or county D/R committee or club), go to their meeting and try to get it on the agenda.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_...

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

#472

Post by 1970-01-01 »

Score one more point for the tinfoil hat crowd:

1. Black tape over our webcams to keep them from watching us.

2. Cardboard over our windows to keep laser microphones from hearing us.

3. RFID blocking wallets to keep our money safe from them.

4. WiFi motion detectors watching our every move in our own home.

5. Aluminum underwear keeping our private parts from being scanned into AI at airports.

6. Tinfoil hats protecting our thoughts.

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

#473

Post by 1970-01-01 »

Aurornis wrote: post #41

In case anyone is skimming the headline and comments: It's not enabled by default. This is an optional feature that you have to find, turn on, and then select up to 3 WiFi devices to use as reference signals: > Activating the feature > WiFi Motion is off by default. To activate the feature, perform the following steps: The actual title of the article is "Using WiFi Motion in the Xfinity app".

>It's not enabled by default.

Here's how this level of scum works in reality:

At first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3017694

Eventually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39709991

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

#474

Post by lynndotpy »

margalabargala wrote: post #310
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.

What are you talking about? Modems are incredibly simple to set up. You buy it, log into your account on another network or call the ISP, enter your modem's mac address...and that's it. You have to type in the mac or read it off over the phone. There's nothing on device to set up, it's much easier than a router.

I'd definitely appreciate if you know any resources on this. I don't recall the details, since it's been seven years since I last tried, but I remember hitting friction I couldn't get past.

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

#475

Post by jraph »

nightpool wrote: post #469
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…

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

functional cookies would be strictly necessary cookies, wouldn't they?

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

#476

Post by xp84 »

troupo wrote: post #338
xp84 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> If we had no idiotic EU cookie laws The obnoxious cookie banners are not required by "idiotic EU cookie laws". > 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. 1. This was already implemented 2. Tracking isn't limited to cookies only > except for the fact that the number one ad n…

> The obnoxious cookie banners are not required by "idiotic EU cookie laws".

Of course, the alternative is to not use cookies, to not use any web analytics products, or to resolve to argue the semantics of what is necessary before a judge when sued by one of the many lawyers who now advertise (ironically) all over social media with come-ons like "Did you browse FUZZYSWEATERS .COM? Your data may have been improperly used!"

> 1. This was already implemented

Please let me know what browser does what I describe. Close as I can come is configuring a Chromium based browser to just only keep cookies for certain domains, but it's a pain in the butt so I stopped worrying about it a long time ago.

> Oh, so an "easy" solution isn't easy after all. Who would've thought.

But I went on to detail the much "easier" solution where the EU aims its big swinging...list of mandates... at the 2-3 browser vendors rather than involving 10,000,000 small businesses worldwide in the business of trying to guess if they're "GDPR compliant," or could be in breach because they added some snippet of code from a useful web analytics platform that could be said to "track" users.

Do you really think that it is easier and better to regulate millions of people/companies to make them all do a complex thing in good faith AND do it well, than to make those couple of companies sandbox cookie storage in a way that severely kneecaps cross-site tracking?

> 2. Tracking isn't limited to cookies only

Sure, but also I question to what extent anyone is being harmed by "tracking" in the most broad sense of that word. As far as I can tell, the public believes "tracking is a problem" primarily because they resent retargeting ads. That's all. People see a shirt or a chainsaw or an air fryer "following them around" after they browsed for one, and think "that's weird! THEY know!" Despite the fact that most of those things function very simply, do not give a shit who you are, just some ID that your browser saved and is sending back, and which is tied to a list of SKUs you showed interest in.

The more reasonable concern is more around data brokers and the data about a person being sold and aggregated, which mostly gets concerning when it could be used for stalking, targeting political dissidents, etc. The fact that I spent 34 seconds on A product page, then 32 seconds on B, then added B to my cart and then bounced, that is the nature of all of the data being tracked on 90% of websites, they don't traffic in my location data or even want to collect sensitive information. But every website is affected by the GDPR's vague definitions of "tracking." And ironically, I assume partly because all these in-sandbox "CMPs" barely even work, I haven't even observed a decrease in retargeting ads, the #1 thing that people actually observe and are bothered by.

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

#477

Post by nick__m »

theoreticalmal wrote: post #386
nick__m wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

it a safety mesure, the ground coud potentially act as a really crappy antenna but if the foil is touching something conducting on the modem and there is a malfunction, you want that current to go somewhere and the ground is that place.

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

#478

Post by sleepybrett »

heavyset_go wrote: post #470
sleepybrett wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have tons coming in all the time some of it goes out some of it does not.

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

#479

Post by david-gpu »

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.

> And sometimes, you don't even know what the feature will even be used for.

I did some work in the early 2010s that we expected to be used for computational photography, gaming, and little else. Years later, after I had already left the company, its primary use case became image stabilization for quadcopter drones, something that had not crossed our minds at all when we were building that stuff.

Cue in all the drone footage from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. FUCK. FUCK FUCK.

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

#480

Post by transpute »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #471
transpute wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any recommendations on possible regulatory responses to the collection, processing and sale of human motion/activity data collected via WiFi and other RF Sensing?

> Any recommendations on possible regulatory responses to the collection, processing and sale of human motion/activity data collected via WiFi and other RF Sensing? Research your state's privacy laws and submit a cool and concise complaint to your regulators, e.g. attorney general, consumer protection bureaus, public utility commissions, et cetera . These offices are understaffed and overworked--there is a good chanc…

Thank you for actionable comment/advice!
Post reply on HN