by mapi
“With your Tiles connected to the Xfinity Home app, you can use your Voice Remote to ask where your stuff is and see the last known location right on your TV.”
“Tile uses Bluetooth to ping its location, reporting back to a paired smartphone whenever that’s in range. By pairing your Tile account with your Comcast Xfinity X1 account, that location data is shared. After that, you simply press and hold the microphone button on the remote control and as for the location of a specific Tile or whatever it’s attached to.”
“All a person has to do is speak into their remote and ask a question like, Xfinity Home, find my wallet, or Xfinity Home, locate my saxophone. The system will recognize keywords like find, locate, or where as trigger phrases for the Tile integration, and the command has to include the actual name of the Tile as it’s registered in the app.”
As the above video illustrates, Xfinity identifies Bluetooth enabled devices, giving Comcast unimaginable snooping abilities. Comcast’s “Personalizing and Controlling Your Home Network With Xfinity xFi” gives homeowners a glimpse into which devices are connected or were previously connected to their home network.
Comcast allows homeowners to view the Mac address of nearly every device without a warrant!
“Access the hostname or MAC address in your device’s settings. If the default name displayed is a long string of numbers and letters, it’s likely the MAC address.”
Comcast is so eager to help customers identify any smart device’s Mac address that they setup an Xfinity xFi FAQ which walks them through how to identify them.
Comcast and homeowners can read the Mac addresses of Apple, Android, Windows, Macintosh/Apple (OSX), Windows PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One. By leaving your Bluetooth setting on, you are letting everyone read your devices’ Mac address.
Think about that the next time you are invited over for a family dinner or to a friend’s party.
But the story doesn’t end there, Comcast also offers customers XfinityX1 Eye Control “which pairs with an existing eye gaze system and allows viewers to change the channel, set a recording, search for a show and more, all with a glance.”
Xfinity and Tile know where your lost items are in real-time, which opens up a myriad of privacy issues.
If your cable TV company can identify every devices Bluetooth signal and Mac address and they can track a person’s eye movements, then we have entered into a new world of stay-at-home family surveillance the likes of which we have never seen.
Letting corporations track objects or read every devices Mac address in real-time is a hackers dream come true. If you value your family’s privacy, deactivate your voice-activated Xfinity remote and protect your Bluetooth devices from prying eyes.