Would You Want Wi-Fi Tracking Your Movement in Your Own Home? Comcast Xfinity Is Betting You Do.

“When enabled, you can receive push notifications about activity in your home and enjoy added peace of mind,” reads the marketing fluff from Comcast’s Xfinity. I’m not confident that Comcast and I have the same idea of what “peace of mind” constitutes.

The concept of my own home’s Wi-Fi tracking the location of everybody as they move from kitchen to living room to toilet does the opposite of providing peace of mind. It fills me with dread.

But hey, Comcast is offering it for free, if you’re so inclined. So are you?

how it works

Without knowing anything about it, my first inclination was that WiFi Motion works by tracking the devices that people keep glued to themselves as they move about the home, whether in their hands or their pockets. Not so.

Check out the diagram above. You set up WiFi Motion by connecting two or three stationary Wi-Fi-capable devices in your home. They form an oval zone between them. That’s your motion-sensing territory.

Whether a person has any devices on themselves or not, when they walk within this territory the connected Wi-Fi devices sense that a physical object (the person’s body) has interrupted the wireless signals traveling between the devices.

WiFi Motion then sends you a notification alerting you that a person has been detected moving in the area. WiFi Motion keeps a log of peoples’ movements for seven days, after which they’re no longer accessible to view by the Xfinity account holder.

Xfinity is quick to point out that WiFi Motion “is not a home security service and is not professionally monitored.”

If anything, that makes me more skeptical and likely to skip it. While I’m not thrilled at the idea of an actual home security service such as SimpliSafe being able to track motion via its monitor sensors, at least they’re only triggered when I arm the system to “away.”

And it’s all in the service of having it monitored, if you pay for it, to alert you in case of break-ins, flooding, and fires. Having Wi-Fi spy on me without committing to saving me seems like the worst of both worlds.