BBC to sniff wifi signals for unlicensed iPlayer use

Brit here. This country can be a bit strange, sometimes.

The BBC is currently funded by a TV licence, an annual fee mandated by the Government/Treasury. As of now, if you watch broadcast TV live, be it BBC or a commercial alternative, you require a TV licence. There's been a loophole that permits catch-up watching via iPlayer, the BBC's own on-demand brand, without a valid TV licence.

When TV signals were analogue, detector vans would apparently drive around and be able to check if a household was watching TV without a licence. The digital switchover effectively rendered these trucks useless. Anecdotally, a large majority of British households have a TV licence, it's considered by many as a utility bill.

There's a sort of precedent with the TV detector vans, I guess, and this is just a modern remix. I'm horrified, personally, and I'm figuring out what to do next. The cynic in me is wondering whether this news was quietly released around the launch of the Olympics so it could be buried. I don't know. I do know as a network installer I'll have to gen-up on the specifics of wireshark et al because I'm going to get calls.

On a personal note, I moved to a semi-rural location in 2012 and cancelled my TV licence (I don't want TV, nor iPlayer). I heard horror stories from family and friends about how the TV licence folks would plague me with calls, letters, intrusive visits, etc. Sum total so far is a letter each year on the anniversary of me moving in asking if I'm still sure I don't need a licence. I don't, and I tell them via their website, and that's it.

So correlating packet sizes between the Wifi and destination network's logs is really the problem here. That is crazy. What stops them from collaborating with any other company like this? So if someone has malware installed that sends packets out to some site deemed illegal, the user is automatically assumed to be in violation of some terms?

> Why aren't people protesting?

Because while traditional detector vans are technically feasible the reality is that they're bullshit - TVL has the largest civilian database in the UK and they just visit people who don't have a licence and haven't made a declaration that they don't watch live tv as it's broadcast.

So people don't protest this new thing, because it's unlikely TVL are actually sending any vans out.

A different question is why do we keep the pretence up? They pretend to have a fleet of detector vans, we don't call them on the bullshit.