This reminds of an MIT-licensed library that was Vibe-coded and released three weeks ago. The source is available here: https://github.com/ruvnet/wifi-densepose

Next step it will just be a feature they offer and whether you know of it, use it, or want it, it'll always be on in the background due to you signing a terms of service that lets them. And then it'll not just be in a xfinity router but your tv, phone, etc. Just makes me want to live in a cabin in the woods.

Is Xfinity licensing Wifi Motion™ from Cognitive Systems?[0]

"WiFi Motion, Cognitive’s Wi-Fi Sensing solution, is an innovative software platform that leverages AI and sophisticated algorithms to transform existing Wi-Fi signals into a motion sensing network."

Another company operating in this space is Origin Wireless. They demonstrated breathing detection with WiFi in 2017[1]. They've since partnered with ISPs to offer a WiFi Sensing "TruShield" home security service.[2]

[0]https://www.cognitivesystems.com/

[1]https://www.engadget.com/2017-10-09-origin-wireless-motion-d...

[2]https://www.originwirelessai.com/trushield/

Xfinity is the worst service I'd ever used.

I'm boring. I want a pipe, like a water pipe for data, and I'll do the rest. This makes them actively combative.

Ignoring the whole TV/landline stuff they keep pushing as that's too easy a target, they are actively hostile about just using internet.

It was way cheaper to use their modem. About $15/mo. Why? Because they want a huge hotspot network in every house. They swear it won't affect speed, but as I never got close to advertised speeds, I didn't believe that. They also act as their 'cell network' that they try to push, and basically call you an idiot for declining. In fairness their cell network is pretty cheap, but I'm just not interested.

I chose to pay more to use my own modem, and they absolutely hounded me, stopping just short of calling me stupid about once a month. Maybe it was commissioned sales people searching for people like me as a given, and getting mad when I rebuffed.

And let's not even talk about data caps. Which, by the way, using their modem exempted you. Why? I naively assume because they can't differentiate hotspot data from yours. Maybe I'm wrong.

The whole service is dystopian. I moved since luckily to a rural, middle of nowhere area that does their own fiber. It has zero of those issues, and costs about half as much for twice the speed. It makes you realize how scummy they really are.

One more reason not to use an ISP router, although in this case most of us are at minimum carrying around GPS homing beacons in our pocket so the carriers already know where we are.

Given that your ISP is monitoring your DNS, is wifi motion (usage is probably as valuable) really that bad?

Are there any kits to place my comcast modem in a faraday cage?

Looking forward for Wifi singnal scrambling. I mean if we take things like Spectre seriously (I don't to a large degree), this would certainly qualify as well.

Worth mentioning that unlike some ISPS Xfinity does let you use your own DOCSIS modems, which is the ideal way of using an ISP. ISP provided gateway's WIFI is not ideal for privacy, security and performance.

Comcast in general has a long history of snooping around and messing with users' traffic. Not that the alternatives are much better. Regular folks are screwed on this matter.

But perhaps for HNers setting up your own trusted WIFI AP and routing it (and all other traffic) through an internet gateway that routes your traffic over a secure channel (whatever that is for you, Tor, VPN services, VPN over your own cloud/vps,etc..) is ideal. It goes without saying, your DNS traffic should also not be visible to the ISPs.

Keep in mind that they sell all this data (including the motion data) not just to law enforcement but to arbitrary well-paying data brokers and other clients.

I'm sure people will want to make it seem like Comcast is doing something evil here, but they're not:

> Comcast does not monitor the motion and/or notifications generated by the service.

> This feature is currently only available for select Xfinity Internet customers as part of an early access preview.

> WiFi Motion is off by default.

Features like this at Comcast are typically one or two engineers on a random team coming up with a cool idea, testing it out, and if it works, they ask if they can roll it out en-masse. If it's just a software or server/backend thing and it doesn't have any negative impact, it gets accepted. Despite their terrible customer service and business practices, they do some cool stuff sometimes. They also release a fair bit of home-grown stuff as open source, which is expensive and time-consuming, but [they hope] it attracts engineers.