Posted by bearsyankees 6/30/2025
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.
> 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.
This doesn't mean that they can't monitor motion (e.g. as compelled via NSL). This product sorely needs E2EE.
The tech is very cool, the initial pitch was to fine tune wifi performance to get the best bandwidth\coverage ratio for a particular customer. But indeed, during testing we quickly discovered that we can map apartments and houses to some extent. You knew when someone was on the toilet for example.
It is clearly just monitoring RSSI and everybody's acting like this is some spooky radar based technology.