Posted by bearsyankees 11 hours 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.
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.
I want privacy codified in human law. I didn't vote for standards bodies to pave the road to hell by removing every goddamned persistent handle we can find from existence. I didn't vote for the EU to reinvent an internet worse than popup ads by attacking the symptoms not the cause. I would rather have the internet of the 2000s back in a heartbeat than keep putting up with shitty “technical solutions” to corporations having too much power at scale. I don’t care if people break the law: prosecute them when they do and make the punishments enough to deter future law breakers.
There is absolutely something civilized beyond a lawless advertising wild west where the technical solution is to all be masked Zorros.
Why is it that if someone said “we need a legal solution to gun violence” the people that say “no we need a technical solution all people should wear kevlar and carry 9mm pistols” are considered the lunatics but when we ask for a legal solution to rampant non-consensual tracking for the purpose of indoctrinating the consumer class with propaganda we all laugh and say bah the solution must be technical? I don’t get it.
Do yourself a favor and enable the Cookie lists in uBlock Origin.
I'm personally grateful that a law requires my consent before tracking me. That means I should not be tracked without me saying OK without monetary risks.
Tracking a user across domains using a 3rd party aggregator to serve add and do attribution is the evil. And the EPD far overshoots the mark of specifically addressing that evil.
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
But the attempted legal solutions suffer from being inside the sandbox, meaning all the “cookie management” software is a pile of hacks that barely work, and rely on browsers, as you’ve noticed, to allow their cookies in the service of…limiting cookies. And of course they also suffer from the politicians who wrote them having no clue how any of this works. I suspect if they did, they’d see how dumb it is to regulate that 10,000,000 websites each implement a ton of logic to self-limit their cookies they set (hard to police, buggy) instead of telling 2-3 companies they have to make their browsers have more conservative defaults with how they keep and send cookies back. (easy to prove it’s working with testing).
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 political capital at the very least on the board.
The problem is what I said in other comnents here. This is the fabel of sodom and gomorrah in action. We have no people with any moral compass in charge.
I genuinely wonder if people would wind up spending less money if they had to pay for services than if they get exposed to ads that lead them to buy more things. But either way, once ads and "free with ads" are gone, there's much more room for other competitors.
Or can instagram only be free if ads are targeted to detailed profiles of individuals built over decades as they are tracked across the whole internet?
So it's not about the perceived effectiveness of advertisements that you feel as a user, it's about the rather more unique product that they sell to advertisers that really raises their revenue.
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 interested in you.
There are 24 states that require ID to view porn sites. The laws are being completely ignored by popular websites that are not based in the US.
I’m not sure the lack of a global hegemony is a “problem”.
https://reason.com/2025/01/24/age-verification-laws-meet-vpn...
> ”Google searches for online tools like VPNs have surged in Florida after Pornhub, one of the world's largest adult websites, blocked access to users in the state," CBS News reported earlier this month. "Since the end of November, Google searches for VPNs have surged in the Florida, according to Google Trends. From the week of Dec. 22 - 28 to Dec. 29 - Jan. 4, searches nearly doubled. Since then, the numbers have gone even higher."
How is the this a problem for ISPs coöperating with law enforcement?
* 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 you don’t want to lose your job
* you know it’s going to fall on deaf ears - maybe they will pay lip service, maybe they won’t but either way nothing will happen
* in the back of your mind you figure someone else is fighting the good fight
On and on, so many different things can go through your mind, who knows which it’ll be on any given day, on any given project
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.
Kind of crazy that I’m being downvoted for just expressing some basic, reasonable feelings
I disagree. Solutions should be technical whenever possible, because in practice, laws tend to be abused and/or not enforced. Laws also need resources and cooperation to be enforced, and some laws are hard to enforce without creating backdoors or compromising other rights.
"ISPs will be prohibited from spying on their customers" doesn't mean ISPs won't spy on their customers.
> this paper addressed passive attacks, where the attacker controls only a receiver, but exploits the normal Wi-Fi traffic. In this case, the only useful traffic for the attacker comes from transmitters that are perfectly fixed and whose position is well known and stable, so that the NN can be trained in advance, thus the obfuscator needs to be installed only in APs or similar ‘infrastructure’ devices. Active attacks, where the attacker controls both the transmitter and the receiver are another very interesting research area, where, however, privacy protection cannot be based on randomization at the transmitter.
https://github.com/ansresearch/csi-murder/
> The experimental results obtained in our laboratory show that the considered localization method (first proposed in an MSc thesis) works smoothly regardless of the environment, and that adding random information to the CSI mess up the localization, thus providing the community with a system that preserve location privacy and communication performance at the same time.
ISPs will always have the ability to at least deduce whether a connection was used, the MAC address, and it there is WiFi, unfortunately whether people are physically present.
If we look at the roadmap for WiFi/phones/etc, they will soon gain the ability to map out your home, including objects, using consumer radios.
This isn't really true. The easiest technical solution to the problem of ISPs using your wifi data is to simply use your own WiFi router which does not send the data to them.
Comcast cannot administer my router/AP or modem.
Some other ISP's like AT&T force you to use their gateway. I try and avoid these companies or severely limit the functions of the built in gateway.
Edit: sorry my question is not strictly how one person would mangle their hardware so it breaks presence detection, it’s how the tech industry would develop an at scale everyday consumer solution to this problem.
Require that each privacy waiver is individually initialed, per clause, in wet ink.
This shit would end tomorrow if they had to start delivering modems with 1 inch high letters that said "THIS DEVICE WILL TRACK YOUR LOCATION WITHIN YOUR HOME AND SHARE THAT DATA WITH LAW ENFORCEMENT WITHOUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE", and the modem didn't work until you went down to the Comcast store to sign your rights away.
You don't have to force anything except taking this knowledge out of the fine print and prove that your customers are actually aware of the contractual clauses they are subject to.
The tech industry could come together and come up with a privacy standard guarantee that device manufacturers could use (Something as simple as, we will never share data with law enforcement unless legally compelled).
There's a lot of solutions, ranging from technical (firmware update) to social (pass some laws with teeth).
Every house should look like a party of 50.
Invest in potatoes
I guess you could put it in a cage. Maybe I should go door to door selling privacy cages. Do people pay for tinfoil hats these days?
Encryption is a technical solution trying to solve the problem of people being able to steal your data/money without your knowledge.
The law/police are the solution to the 5 dollar wrench problem, where you are very aware of the attack but unable to physically stop it
The law is there to enforce the “rule of law”
It’s a little ambiguous because the phrase is in English and doesn’t match up 1:1 with the common vernacular, but I want the “rule of law” to enforce that the rules are real, not to prevent someone from testing their existence
The parent commenter was highlighting that law enforcement can compel them to provide the data.
The customer has to opt-in to WiFi motion sensing to have the data tracked. If you see something appear in an app, you should assume law enforcement can compel the company to provide that data. It's not really a surprise.
> If we rely on legal protection, then not only Comcast, but all ISPs will be prohibited from spying on their customers.
To be clear, the headline on HN is editorialized. The linked article is instructions for opting in to WiFi motion sensing and going through the setup and calibration. It's a feature they provide for customers to enable and use for themselves.
> The customer has to opt-in to WiFi motion sensing to have the data tracked.
- Is this true if Law Enforcement gets a subpoena?
- Is this true if Law Enforcement asks "nicely"?
- Can Xfinity activate it without the user knowing?
- Does it explicitly notify the user when the setting has been changed? (e.g. done by LE, hacker, or an abusive partner)
- Is this a promise and a promise that by default it will stay off?
- Is the code to perform this feature pre-installed and able to be trivially (or even non-trivially) activated by hackers?
Your honor, they clearly opted in to us spying on absolutely everything they do or think.
Not for long, there’s money to be made by adding this to the cops’ customer lookup portal.
Yea, at least in the US you have almost zero consumer rights around this.
Once they find some marketing firm to sell the data to suddenly it will be come opt-out in a new update and most people will blindly hit agree without having a clue what it's about.
I expect more than a few commenters here will disagree with you. Some rather vehemently.
To those that do so, I'd encourage you to read the novel Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow. While it's fiction, in the book, Doctorow makes a pretty compelling argument for the notion that when it comes to privacy, we can't win by "out tech'ing" the governments and corporations. We're simply too heavily out-resourced. If I'm interpreting his message correctly, he is saying basically what Josho is saying here: that we have to use the political/legal system to get the privacy protections that we care about enshrined into law and properly enforced.
Now, is that going to be easy? Hell no. But after reading the book I was largely sold on the idea, FWIW. That said, the two approaches aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. But I do believe that those of us who care about privacy should focus more on using our (knowledge|skills|resources) to try to foster change through politics, than on trying to beat "them" with better tech.
YMMV, of course. But if you haven't read the book, at least consider giving it a shot. Probably Doctorow makes the argument better than I can.
It should be both, one serving as a backup to the other. Theft is illegal, yet we lock our doors.
"Best we can do is letting all the AI companies hoover up your data too"
Isn't this basically impossible with IPv6 Privacy Extension Addresses?
Laws can be broken. Laws of physics cannot. Best to utilize both a legal and physical defense.
Why not? Just run your own router instead of the one your ISP tries to give you.
do not buy any device from comcast you dont fully control!
A legal precedent easily leads to a technical block.
Technical solutions tend to last longer. Legal solutions have a habit of being ignored when they become inconvenient.
The legal default should be that collecting this sort of data should always be illegal without informed consent and never used beyond the remit of that consent. As inconvenient as it sometimes is, the world needs GDPR.
"Motion is detected based on the amount of signal disruption taking place between the Xfinity Gateway and your selected WiFi-connected devices, so motion from small pets (around 40 pounds or less) can be filtered out while keeping you notified of large movements more likely to be caused by humans."
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.
It’s almost a legal impossibility and would be a bad move geopolitically to give up this full take capability and it is not happening. It’s wishful thinking to believe otherwise.
Is that not literally the entire purpose of the legal system?
> will likely not do anything that isn’t implemented by standards bodies, such as WiFi standards
I imagine beamforming techniques are only going to become more commonplace over time.
> Once Comcast has the data, it is available to law enforcement via the Third Party Doctrine
Unless they were legally obligated to purge it from their servers after a few weeks. Or if they employed E2EE so as not to have access to the data in the first place.
> Is that not literally the entire purpose of the legal system?
The legal system is subverted by the national security apparatus by necessity and by design. The information gathered by ISPs is necessary to prevent interference with ground-based radars around airports, and is necessary for fraud detection and internal security of the network. It would be feasible to make it so that this information would be gathered and retained only for a short period of time to establish and maintain network integrity, such as handshakes and other bits and bytes exchanged and retained inherent to the protocols used. The legal doctrines that establish the legality of full take surveillance have been argued before FISA courts, so an act of Congress or a test case would likely be necessary to prompt any legal reexamination of the relevant issues. However, national security issues are not really able to be resolved legislatively, because executive orders will always enable that which cannot be done on the books, which presupposes that which is done is done by the book to begin with.
What is done in the shadows must stay obscured due to means and methods, and this ideology isn’t amenable to change, political or otherwise. There is not much else to say on that point as it is observational and experiential based on my lived experience and history of interactions with law enforcement, national security professionals, and private security as a service provider and former licensed security guard, as well as being a victim of police overreach and charge stacking. I’ve worked with law enforcement and been work for law enforcement. I’ve fought the law to a draw, and I’ve fought the law and lost due to bad calls by refs. I’m working on becoming a better citizen and community member so that I can be a helper. More than that, I can’t say. The future is hopeful and yet the challenges are real, and changing. Old guards are giving way to young Turks. It’s an interesting time to be alive.
> > will likely not do anything that isn’t implemented by standards bodies, such as WiFi standards
> I imagine beamforming techniques are only going to become more commonplace over time.
The beamforming and other technologies used with modern WiFi are what enable the motion detection “for free” because the WiFi signals act as radar signals, the contours of the perturbations of which are already baked into the WiFi protocol. It’s insecure by design against this side channel attack.
> > Once Comcast has the data, it is available to law enforcement via the Third Party Doctrine
> Unless they were legally obligated to purge it from their servers after a few weeks. Or if they employed E2EE so as not to have access to the data in the first place.
You would have to reimplement the standards to make everything that squawks rotate their identifiers regularly, ideally after every transmission. It’s possible I suppose. I don’t think the political will is there to mandate this, and there are not that many people who work on these kinds of problems. Look at who created TOR. You’d have to run that kind of system everywhere, and only use it for everything, and that system would have to be part of the protocol or otherwise unable to be disabled by end users. Otherwise, you’re at the status quo we have now, where the weak links are the first to break.
If this sounds like a stretch, the weak links are always people, not protocols or pipes. That’s why this is magical thinking. As principled as you and I are, bad guys don’t have principles. Those who fight bad guys have principles, and they also have more coffee and mathematicians and hashrate.
Congress will never rule against the national security apparatus because there is no political will to do so. I can count on one hand the folks in Congress who are on relevant committees to even consider legislation on these matters who is in any way critical at all, and they largely agree with you that something needs to be done. But they don’t have the votes to do anything because the issues aren’t relevant to voters. No one cares the way you or I do, or they would probably become lawyers or politicians, as well as soldiers and broadcasters.
If you think something constructive and positive needs to be done, I would likely agree that the impetus for change exists. I’m all ears.
The irony is that all of these metadata leaks and correlation attacks etc were theoretical at the time these technologies were created and developed, unless you’re NSA level compute power, both human and silicon. Now, any script kid has enough info to try to build an array of SDRs to do the same thing, and no one will care when they do besides the feds who cry foul about their turf being stepped on by plebeians. The public will never care because their eyes will already have glazed over once you mention MAC addresses and SSIDs.
It doesn't particularly matter what hobbyists get up to. It matters what's available at scale on the mass market, what's widely deployed, what data is legally permissible to collect on a large scale, and what data is legal to sell.
Law enforcement can't subpoena that which does not exist. The best defense to these sorts of things is often to place legal limits on collection, retention, and sale.
Your take is both alarmist and defeatist.
Legal limits on national security agencies are not enforceable due to Five Eyes etc. Allied foreign spies do what American spies don’t. I’m just admitting the political reality of the situation. What you do with that information may be limited, but it’s not a failing on my part that this is the status quo.
You're not talking about what they're talking about. They're talking about limiting corporate data collection. If companies don't build this into routers, then 99% of routers won't be collecting this data, and foreign spies won't have any data to steal.
The technical solution seems strictly preferable
Legal "protections" only protect you up the moment a warrant is issued, if that
Unless you put your own gateway (layer 3 switch, wifi ap, linux router) in front of it.
Putting your phone in airplane mode doesn't make it think you have left the house.
> If you’d like to prevent your pet’s movement from causing motion notifications, you can exclude pet motion in your WiFi Motion settings by turning on the Exclude Small Pets feature. > Motion is detected based on the amount of signal disruption taking place between the Xfinity Gateway and your selected WiFi-connected devices, so motion from small pets (around 40 pounds or less) can be filtered out while keeping you notified of large movements more likely to be caused by humans.
There are a multitude of pre-existing ways of achieving the same result. One would be simply looking at the ft^2 listed on the public tax documents for the given address.
So I was really assuming any useful analysis would require them to be the actual man in the middle by owning and controlling your router. In which case address family does not matter.
you also cant associate it to a person automatically. the burden of proof is high - how many jurors have tech at home they know nothing about and maybe got hacked?
The solution can be technical, but only if it is also sneaky. Blocking or disallowing certain information is one thing but making that information worthless is better. A simple AI agent could pretend to ping all sorts of services. It could even do some light websurfing. This fake traffic would nullify any value from the real traffic, destroying the market that feeds this surveillance industry.
I see a UI that allows homeowners to fake certain people being in the house when they are not, either replaying traffic or a selection of generic bots that mimic the traffic of various cohorts.
The solution is to not use the internet if you care about your privacy.
Us humans love building the Torment Nexus.
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.
They will only see traffic coming from 1 local IP - of your wireless AP
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.
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.
Most people use the hardware that is provided with the service by default. Last time I checked, there's not even an additional rental fee.
https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/list-of-approved-ca...
I can't believe I'm defending Comcast on the internet but here I am, I guess between them and you I'm siding with the entity currently being less of an ass to me?
Of course, most people won't do this, but that's besides the point.
they typically issue a modem / router combination unit, and they can control the router and its radios.
I mean, I suppose it's got the additional step of calling Comcast and giving them the MAC of your modem, but IIRC that's all I had to do after buying one on their approved list. Been at least 7-8 years since I had them, though.
You can plug-and-play with a consumer "router", but even then you need to know the difference between WAN and LAN sides. So the extra effort seems minimal.
Most people don't know how to set up either one. I know when the fiber techs came to my house to set me up they were greatly impressed at my (fairly basic; I don't do this for a living) networking knowledge.
Edit: thanks for the downvote! The few I clicked on their website have weak ratings but they are rated much better on Amazon.
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.
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.
Which is one of the main reasons I bought my own modem.
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
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.
[Note: this should be illegal]
> If you’d like to prevent your pet’s movement from causing motion notifications, you can exclude pet motion in your WiFi Motion settings by turning on the Exclude Small Pets feature. > Motion is detected based on the amount of signal disruption taking place between the Xfinity Gateway and your selected WiFi-connected devices, so motion from small pets (around 40 pounds or less) can be filtered out while keeping you notified of large movements more likely to be caused by humans.
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.
If they find some way to sell the data you'll quickly find it difficult to opt-out of.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is scary, particularly considering how the current administration wants to weaponize everything they possibly can.
Yes. It's an invasion of privacy inside peoples' homes.
If anyone knows a way around this, please share! I want to connect my Xfinity ONT directly to my UniFi router.
https://www.slashdot.org/story/25/06/26/2124252/comcasts-new...
Apparently you can get 1/2gbit ethernet only modems without wifi. You don't save any money over using their equipment.
I did it several months ago, including the optional adding an outbound firewall rule dropping forwarded UDP/TCP 53 traffic (I tried the redirect rule suggested there first, but it didn't work and the firewall ruleset failed to load, so a drop will have to do. I didn't bother investigating why, because everything on my LANs is configured to use the router as their only nameserver anyway).
I also added a rule dropping it from the router itself in case something breaks, for example if it suddenly decides to start honouring the DHCP-received nameserver addresses (my ISP) despite being configured not to.
EDIT: The article doesn't make this clear, but the bootstrap section is only necessary if you specify upstream nameservers by name (e.g. "https://dns.cloudflare.com/dns-query"). This is not required. For example, you can configure a manual upstream of "tls://1.1.1.1" like I did, and then it doesn't need to do any DNS lookups at all, so does not need to be configured with bootstrap servers, so will not break if you add the 2 firewall rules I mentioned.
[1] https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/dns/dot_dnsmasq...
I think they're referring to when you leave your home. Your device(s) will be constantly broadcasting probe requests for the hidden network.
The away-from-home probe requests wouldn't be that useful for mapping, but your AP/router is equally useful for mapping with or without broadcasting the SSID. Hiding your SSID just means it sets the SSID to null in the beacon frames but it's still sending out beacon frames with its far-more-unique MAC address. If you're on linux you can see this pretty easily by running `sudo iw dev wlan0 scan`. The "hidden" wifi networks will have their SSID as "SSID: \x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00" but all the other information including MAC address is still there. Personally it seems there are two "hidden" wifi networks within range of my bedroom.
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.
Naturally, there is no way for me to opt out of this.
Other people have mentioned that not using Comcast's stuff means that certain features won't be available, but I don't care. I don't have huge bandwidth needs, for instance.
Sigh.
I'm not about to find out. I really liked Hyatt, too.
Normally the pathway for this kind of thing would be:
1. theorized
2. proven in a research lab
3. not feasible in real-world use (fizzles and dies)
if you're lucky the path is like
1. theorized
2. proven in a research lab
3. actually somewhat feasible in real-world use!
4. startups / researchers split off to attempt to market it (fizzles and dies)
the fact that this ended up going from research paper to "Comcast can tell if I'm home based on my body's physical interaction with wifi waves" is absolutely wild
The ability to do this is a necessity for a comm system working in a reflective environment: cancel out the reflections with an adaptive filter, residual is now a high-pass result of the motion. It's the same concept that makes your cell location data so profitable, and how 10G ethernet is possible over copper, with the hybrid front end cancelling reflections from kinks in the cable (and why physical wiggling the cable will cause packet CRC errors). It's, quite literally, "already there" for almost every modern MIMO system, just maybe not exposed for use.
The 15-year path was roughly:
1. bespoke military use (see+shoot through wall)
2. bespoke law-enforcement use (occupancy, activity)
3. public research papers by MIT and others
4. open firmware for Intel modems
5. 1000+ research papers using open firmware
6. bespoke offensive/criminal/state malware
7. bespoke commercial niche implementations
8. IEEE standardization (802.11bf)
9. (very few) open-source countermeasures
10. ISP routers implementing draft IEEE standard
11. (upcoming) many new WiFi 7+ devices with Sensing features
> There is one area that the IEEE is not working on, at least not directly: privacy and security.. IEEE fellow and member of the Wi-Fi sensing task group.. the goal is to focus on “at least get the sensing measurements done.” He says that the committee did discuss privacy and security: “Some individuals have raised concerns, including myself.” But they decided that while those concerns do need to be addressed, they are not within the committee’s mandate.
Because we all know, of course, the Constitution only applies to the federal government, right? If mega-corporation USA Inc uses its shell company Comcast to violate the Supreme law of the land in a treasonous manner, then you are of course SOL asa mere citizen since they aren’t the federal government and the Constitution does not apply to them.
In case it want clear, that was sarcasm.
In case people missed it:
https://theconversation.com/from-help-to-harm-how-the-govern...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/even-government-thinks...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/28/government...
Even within tech circles, lots of people aren’t worried about privacy and even have indoor cameras in their homes.
None of the above.
The setup process has you select 3 reference devices. You should pick the devices so that your normal motion areas are between the device and the router.
The router then watches the WiFi signals from those devices. If they fluctuate more than baseline, it's assumed that something is moving around in the area.
It's a threshold detection that can serve as a crude motion sensor for home/away purposes.
They can also be programmed to detect people on the floor, so if you have elderly in your house you can know if someone fell, without cameras. They are made for hospitals but are cheap, but not 100% accurate for HR and falls, but reliable enough for security, and cheap.
> 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".
These days it is never safe to assume that opting-in does anything more than making some of the information that's being collected regardless available.
Although I actually agree with you that it probably isn't doing anything by default to the extent that it isn't doing anything yet because it's new they haven't worked out how to monetize it.
If I was advising Comcast, I'd tell them this is a dumb thing to introduce because just the perception of bad behavior is not worth any particular benefit, but whatever. I can't imagine someone deciding they want a Comcast plan because it offers this, and there's no way for them to monetize it without almost assured legal backlash.
This is the kind of stuff that pushes me to pull a Ron Swanson and throw my technology in the dumpster.
The core of the sensing technology is about improving MU-MIMO + OFDM + all the other speed tricks. Human bodies interfere in predictable ways so you need the tech to steer around that. As a side effect, you get detection capabilities for free.
In such a setup, your laptop and router already know where you are. The question is whether or not to offer it to you so you can use that information for things like home automation. Had they not made this part of the protocol, the privacy risks were just as bad, you just wouldn't be aware of them.
Commercialization gives consumers and regulators the opportunity to express their opinions on the sudden and unsolicited transparency of the walls, floors and ceilings of their homes and businesses.
What's the economic value of remote collection of human behavioral signatures without consent, integrated with AI and robotics and "digital twins"? We're not there yet, but if the technology continues improving, what's the future value of "motion capture" of humans without body-worn sensors?
In theory, this will enable "Minority Report" user interfaces. 3D gestures could be combined with "AI" voice interfaces. Biometric authentication (e.g. heart rate) could replace passwords. Walk into a room and it adapts itself to your preferences. Etc.
There are lots of "cool" Jetsons sci-fi use cases, but ONLY IF the data and automation are entirely under control of the human subjects, e.g. self-hosted home server, local GPUs, local LLM, local voice recognition, etc.