The 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.

Comcast 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.

And also how many people are currently in the house, right at this moment. Maybe even which rooms of the house those people are in.

One could just keep a rotisserie chicken roasting in the oven to make it seem like someone’s home

> 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.

> 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.

You 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.

“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.

They 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.

Curious: 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]

Just 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.

You 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.

Would 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.

definitly 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.

Can'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