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> Subject to applicable law, Comcast may disclose information generated by your WiFi Motion to third parties without further notice to you in connection with an
by jacobgkau 1y ago
> Subject to applicable law, Comcast may disclose information generated by your WiFi Motion to third parties without further notice to you in connection with any law enforcement investigation or proceeding, any dispute to which Comcast is a party, or pursuant to a court order or subpoena.
Sounds like, at least in some limited circumstances (using the provided WiFi AP, having this feature turned on, etc), ISPs are going to be able to tell law enforcement/courts whether anyone was home at a certain time or not.
- Ashkee 1y agoIt’s tricky when privacy gets tangled with law enforcement requests. If you want better control over your data, tools like HiFiveStar can help you monitor what’s being shared. It made me feel a bit more on top of my online footprint.
- 57473m3n7Fur7h3 1y agoAnd also how many people are currently in the house, right at this moment. Maybe even which rooms of the house those people are in.
- schiffern 1y agoWiFi can also be used to detect heartrate and breathing, which can leak additional ad-targeting information related to activity, arousal, or agitation. https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/24/7/2111 https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/24/7/2111
- shostack 1y agoI am curious if, with the number and quality of signals they can capture from this, how uniquely they can identify individuals and determine things like age, gender, weight, etc. Particularly when analyzed probabalistically with other household level data they likely have.
- josho 1y agoThe 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 be prohibited from spying on their customers. Ideally the legislation would be more broad and stop other forms of commercial/government surveillance, but I can't imagine a world where Congress could actually achieve something that widely helpful for regular citizens.
- dylan604 1y agoWhat if I left my device at home?
- aspenmayer 1y agoWith enough signals, gait recognition for example is possible, and those same signals could be corroborated with presence or absence of concomitant device signals to determine if your device is moving with your person, and if not, to then flag this for enhanced monitoring if evasion is suspected.
- landl0rd 1y agoThe point is every single thing I own should be "on my side". My car should not store my location history. My wifi router should not track presence and movement. My printer should not add any watermarks or telltale dots. My stuff should actively make it difficult or impossible for hackers, advertisers, or law enforcement to recover any useful information. This means, respectively: ensure personal info is stored securely so hackers can recover little. Don't transmit info to remote servers to limit what advertisers get. And just store as little as possible in the first place because this is the legal means to have little to subpoena or discover. Useful info, when absolutely necessary, should be locked behind a password, as constitutional rights preclude law enforcement from making someone disclose it.
- timewizard 1y agoYou can turn the customer AP off; however, the Comcast Customer Shared WiFi is always on. This is true even for Comcast Business accounts. You're expected to be a hotspot for their other customers. Which is one of the main reasons I bought my own modem.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jhowison 1y agoYou can turn off the shared hotspot: https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/disable-xfinity-wifi-home-hotspot https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/disable-xfinity-wif...
- lrvick 1y agoAnd they can turn it right back on again.
- SoftTalker 1y agoYou can unplug your modem when you're not using it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- slt2021 1y agojust dont buy any device form comcast! buy your own DOCSIS modem from Amazon and your own wireless AP. Separate AP is needed, because Comcast has some form of control over DOCSIS modem (they can reboot and send config to your modem) problem solved
- jiveturkey 1y agofor comcast business you can get the modem that doesn't have wifi at all.
- DaSHacka 1y ago
- snarf21 1y agoCurious: What about adding a small battery powered WiFi device to your dogs collar? Would that look like a person moving around the house? What about a WiFi controlled mini drone that flew around you house? [Note: this should be illegal]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- AStonesThrow 1y ago[dead]
- Aurornis 1y agoA much easier alternative is to not enable the feature on your router. It's an opt-in feature. If you don't set it up, they aren't generating the home/away chart like shown in the article.
- vel0city 1y agoThis technology doesn't rely on you actually having a WiFi device on you. It can detect presence/motion by changes to the standing waves of the EM propagation throughout the room. As the salty water meatbags move from room to room we change how the reflections and scattering patterns of 2.4 and 5GHz waves move. Studying these changes and some calibration, you can even determine small changes (like is the person on the left side of the room breathing, are they standing or prone, etc). In their docs, they show using the WiFi connection from a printer to determine motion sensing and have the option to exclude pets.
- puppycodes 1y agodefinitly an atrocious violation of privacy, but in reality discerning between an animal, something blowing in the wind, and a person moving would be very hard without a dedicated calibrated array for that to hold up in court. I'm aware they have "exclude animal" but theres no way its at all accurate. Using your mobile data and internet traffic is far easier and already deeply integrated into off the shelf law enforcement products. Those progams are even more terrifying than this by an order of magnitude.
- casper14 1y agoSpot on, device tracking is much better than wifi sensing
- lrvick 1y agoComcast has remote control of all of their equipment so they will just turn it on for you if they get a court order or a big enough check from an adtech company. Wifi imaging is a bit like a silhouette and generally accurate enough to work out gait and height which could give a good indication of which people are in what locations in a home. That is some very scary power in the hands of a corpo.
- slt2021 1y agothey only have some level of control over DOCSIS modem. if you install the cheapest/simplest DOCSIS modem, and connect it to your own wireless access point that is NOT controlled by Comcast - they wont know anything. They will only see traffic coming from 1 local IP - of your wireless AP
- boston_clone 1y agoHmm. 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.
- margalabargala 1y agoHmm. 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.
- lynndotpy 1y agoThe 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.
- seany 1y agoWould be curious how that works with larger family with pets. Depending on the week we're 5-7 people and 2-4 dogs. With a single AP the noise beyond "something happened" would be pretty rough I think.
- wat10000 1y agoYou should assume that any information a company has about you will be turned over to law enforcement in that case. They don’t have a choice, they’re required to cooperate. The purpose of that clause isn’t to allow them to cooperate with law enforcement. That’s a given. It’s to avoid problems with you when they do, so they have something to point to and say “we did warn you.” Law supersedes private contracts. They could write “we will never give your information to law enforcement” but all that means is that they’ll be forced to break the contract when that happens.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- al_borland 1y ago“Comcast does not monitor the motion and/or notifications generated by the service.” Sounds like the above claim amounts to nothing more than, “trust me bro.” Or, rather, that that nothing stops them from monitoring it, other than the cost, as they haven’t monetized it yet.
- taneq 1y agoOr someone else monitors them?
- sleepybrett 1y agoThey don't MONITOR it, but they do log and store it all for years and years and will turn it over or sell it to anyone who asks.
- totetsu 1y agoOne could just keep a rotisserie chicken roasting in the oven to make it seem like someone’s home
- adolph 1y agoJust don't use your vendor's hardware. Get a cheap cable modem and hang whatever infra you want on the other side. Get a hardware VPN like the Velocloud. Using your ISP's equipment is like using their SMTP.
- conradev 1y agoCan't they already do this with the data of which devices are connected when? Motion data doesn't identify you in the way that device data does
- usefulcat 1y ago> Sounds like, at least in some limited circumstances (using the provided WiFi AP, having this feature turned on, etc), ISPs are going to be able to tell law enforcement/courts whether anyone was home at a certain time or not. Kind of, but I'll bet most homes would frequently also appear "empty" any time the occupants are asleep. Not everyone gets up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
- miki123211 1y agoThey already can. If they have access to your router and its logs, they can simply check whether your mobile device was in WiFi range at that time. Sure, mobile devices can be turned off, but at that point, so can routers. In 99.9% of circumstances, it's a "nothing burger" from a law enforcement perspective, except maybe for detecting actual crime occurring when no residents are home.
- pdonis 1y ago> using the provided WiFi AP Which you can simply not do if you don't trust your ISP not to misuse it. Which is why I never run my ISP's router, I run my own instead.
- gloosx 1y agoLaw enforcement could tell whether you're home at certain time or not for decades before WiFI Motion. However with WiFi motion, if you're in some kind of a big building, like a hotel or huge office building, they will be able to tell exactly the room number and spot you're occupying.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoThey could also do that with the surveillance feeds and actually confirm its you and not the night custodian.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoCouldn’t you do this already? I have an electric meter on the side of my building with a public facing display of kwh usage. The water company has a similar hookup for measuring flow. Both could be used to determine occupancy in theory.