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Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion

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

#501

Post by account42 »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #284
HeavenFox wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For home / away purposes it's easier to just detect if your phone is connected to the network. I built something like that before by shipping the log from my UniFi controller to a RPi and listen for events where my phone's MAC address connect or disconnnect.

This doesn't really tell you if someone without your wifi password is rummaging through your house while you're not there. Also wifi is not the right tool for this lol

> Also wifi is not the right tool for this lol

Why? It's already there and reliable.

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

#502

Post by dcow »

const_cast wrote: post #454
dcow wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Pretty sure this exact example is explicitly carved out as a-okay. I think what we're dealing with here is not websites trying to do basic things. Rather, it's every website and their mom thinking they need elaborate analytics to sell plastic garbage. Yes, that elaborate analytics you spread to 20 third parties IS a privacy concern. We should be looking at that.

We’re talking about a language preference cookie. How is that a privacy concern?

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

#504

Post by JumpCrisscross »

close04 wrote: post #493
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…

> Again, I worked on these issues. Working on something means you put in effort, not that it's focused properly or that you even understand the real issues. At best you'll solve your problems without caring or understanding if it solves anyone else's. > Bezos and friends never showed up. Case in point. Bezos and friends don't need to "show up" anywhere you'd know. Their interests are implicitly considered and they're…

> Their interests are implicitly considered and they're transmitted on channels you and I don't have access to. I'm talking about the general issue of asymmetric representation

I’ve worked on other issues that got passed into legislation. In the privacy cases, I was speaking directly to the electeds.

Nobody showed up. They were dead ends unless they could be linked to an issue people care about, e.g. abortion in blue states and Chinese espionage in red ones.

> Most people are assaulted with many, many more attacks on their rights and wellbeing. Those are more immediate concerns

People with strong views on digital privacy tend to be wealthier and better-educated than the average American. Also, the single mother of three working two jobs will show up to town halls and electeds’ field offices when it comes to issues they care about. And it’s impactful.

People do show up and civically engage. Just not on digital privacy.

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

#505

Post by JumpCrisscross »

joquarky wrote: post #487
close04 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no incentive to represent the civically disengaged You're repeatedly misrepresenting or misunderstanding the issue. The tl'dr is that Bezos' civic engagement weighs more than my civic engagement, more than a million of me even. This is one easy way to take the casual and overly general "you're civically disengaged" victim blaming off the table. Your elected representatives already know your interests, they…

From The Onion, but I'm starting to wonder if this is feasible: https://theonion.com/american-people-hire-high-powered-lobby...

What do you think the EFF, NRA and Sierra Club are?

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

#506

Post by jraph »

dcow wrote: post #497
jraph wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean but our ancestor comment describes this clearly. A language preference cookie is not tracking. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726#44431268

You didn't read what I sent. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44434919 The GDPR is different from the ePrivacy Directive. The EPD is responsible for cookie consent. And it has the language addressing preferences cookies.

I did, I quoted stuff from it, but you are not helping. You should quote the things relevant to the point your are making. Especially when you notice people are not picking up. You also keep saying that gdpr is not EPD, but your link is short on details about this and with this point, you lead me to seek information in sections that are irrelevant.

But I see what you are saying now. That page lists the different purposes, including preference cookies (which include language preferences) and strictly necessary cookies, and I know asking consent is not necessary only for strictly necessary cookies (this page says it, I quoted that part earlier).

If that page is right, you are right and I was wrong. Thanks for persisting.

Well, that would be a shame, and that probably would explain why cd.cz makes me pick English each time I visit. I was assuming they could just save this preference in a cookie, but they obviously wouldn't be able to since I didn't provide consent, since I hide the cookie banners and they don't ask for consent later when needed.

Now, that page is not authoritative and I see it criticized here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gdpr/comments/vniefz/strictly_neces...

I guess it it safe to ask consent in doubt, but I'm not yet convinced the language cookie cannot be considered strictly necessary. How can you correctly provide a requested service to a user if you don't use a language they understand, and how storing the language is not for fulfilling an explicit request from them?

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

#507

Post by nullc »

nullc wrote: post #97
nandomrumber wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t turning off SSID broadcast result in devices that have the wifi network saved repeatedly broadcast a request for the AP to identify itself in an effort to establish a connection?

They do that already... sum of all privacy losses. Any time you go out in public your devices are crying out looking for your home AP. If someone can figure out which are you, e.g. by seeing you multiple times in different places they can then go look up where you live based on your home's SSID broadcasts.

Correcting myself: It appears that many modern client devices (at least current Networkmanager in linux, iphones, and grapheneos) have a "hidden" flag on saved SSIDs and only probe for hidden ones, so the ancestor post is correct for a least these devices.

Older and less sophicated clients, -- that don't explicitly have a 'hidden flag' for saved SSIDs will probe continually for all SSIDs they know.

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

#508

Post by [deleted] »

lrvick wrote: post #135
puppycodes wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

im very skeptical of the accuracy claimed. The layout and complexity of objects in most homes to do this is way to awkward to work reliably. For someone breathing or a heartbeat you need much higher GHz signal. Usually this is done at 30ghz to 60ghz. The power flux leaving the antenna has an inverse square drop off rate which makes this basically impractical unless your standing directly in front of it.

I have personally tested wifi imaging from a cheap old 2.4Ghz linksys router that was accurate enough to tell if my hand was open or closed, maybe 10 years ago.

[deleted]

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

#509

Post by idiotsecant »

mbreese wrote: post #281
idiotsecant wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So use a vpn.

With a VPN, your ISP may not know where packets are going, but they can still see packets moving. So, unless your VPN is injecting dummy data to mask all patterns (possible, but not common), your ISP is going to have a good idea if someone is home or not.

Creating useless traffic on a random schedule is pretty trivial.

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

#510

Post by sudodudeo »

dotancohen wrote: post #308
toss1 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>We suffer from a problem that engineers want nothing to do with politics. More on point, we suffer from a problem that far too many people of all walks of life want nothing to do with politics. Plato made the most accurate point 2300 years ago: "The penalty for not being involved in politics is you will be ruled by your inferiors." And, even though you may not be interested in politics, politics is ALWAYS intereste…

It should be noted that Mein Kampf's first three chapters are pretty much a call for the common citizen to start becoming more interested - if not involved - in his local politics. I am of the opinion that this is the reason that the book was banned. The antisemitism in the book is far more restrained than I was expecting. But the call to hold politicians accountable to the people - that was a surprise.

This is an insane take on a book that literally advocates for genocide, and pushes race theory as a cause for Germany's downfall after ww1, and justification for the subsequent murder of millions.
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