Comcast is promoting WiFi-based motion detection as a part of its new Xfinity Shield home protection platform, allowing routers and wireless devices to detect people moving through a home without cameras or motion sensors.
And of course all the data will be kept, and sold for profit
Soon they’ll add cameras as well that you can hang up in your kids rooms, totally safe, Comcast will make sure the data will be as profitable ad possible, they’ll find the right target audience for it
You had a typo in there but it still works. It’ll be profitable by sending you directed ads based on when you’re home and what rooms you’re in most.
Can they do it with any router, or only the Xfinity branded devices?
Looks like it’s a feature of the router they provide you if you don’t bring your own.
One more reason I’m glad I bought my own modem and router
just beware this is their implementation but it is possible to detect movement in wifi signal without special equipment. netgear, tp-link and a few more were found to have backdoors in them for authorized remote access via ssh. opnsense, pfsense, ipfire, openwrt i believe haven’t been found to include these backdoors, so basically don’t trust any closed/proprietary source routers.
At this point, if I didn’t build it and install the OS, it isn’t secure enough for my home.
I, for one, am looking forward to a plugin to do this with OpenWRT and Home Assistant for my own purposes.
I’m not sure about OpenWRT, but you can do WiFi motion detection with an ESP32.
Yeah, I found that one. Still, I’d prefer it to be built into my WAPs instead of having to use separate hardware, even if I do have extra ESP32s sitting around.
I mean, maybe if I could just tack it on as an extra function on some other device I was already going to be using an ESP32 in, but (especially in microcontroller-land as opposed to full preemptively-multitasking PC land) that sounds like maybe more complexity than I want to deal with.
Wow measuring presence by WiFi attenuation through the walls? That’s a lot more than motion. They’ll be able to tell when there’s a party at your house, or which rooms you use the most, or how often you cook dinner at home, or how long you spend in bed each night.
