Ask HN: Why and how did Comcast figure out I'm moving?

> but my name isn’t on those listings.

But your address is, and you also say this:

> Today I got a letter from my current ISP, Comcast

Which means Comcast has your current address. It is not hard to look up, in their own database, a name when given an address from a rental listing website.

> Also, why would they want to do this?

Their marketing department likely saw it as a "customer retention" activity. By offering to make the transfer of your Comcast account to your new location easy and effortless (they hope) their belief would be that they might retain you as a customer.

It is unlikely they were even aware of the nefarious seeming aspects of the practice.

> Which means Comcast has your current address. It is not hard to look up, in their own database, a name when given an address from a rental listing website.

Yes, this is exactly what I imagined, which is why I wrote, "I suppose Comcast could deduce their customers’ behavior by scraping rental sites," but perhaps it wasn't totally clear.

> Their marketing department likely saw it as a "customer retention" activity. By offering to make the transfer of your Comcast account to your new location easy and effortless (they hope) their belief would be that they might retain you as a customer.

This makes sense.

Did you start the process of permanently forwarding your mail at the USPS yet? Even if you haven't pulled the trigger on it yet, did you start? This happened to me when I started (but never actually moved).

I figured they were tied into the marketing feed that gets updates when people register for "all in" forwarding.

Comcast handles terabytes of telemetry data daily from customer-premises equipment[0]. They could have internal machine learning models for customer retention / churn reduction from the data you're generating, whether bandwidth usage, sites visited, etc. Some model(s) may have inferred that you had a higher likelihood to move and or churn. You can train such models from historical data of people who have moved in the past, and if there's a chance that people who move tend not to care about their subscription anymore, cancel it, or renew it after a long period, there is lost revenue to be minimized. A provider will then engage you, either through email or via a customer support representative if the revenue per customer is high.

This does work and organizations pay close attention to it. If you have a retail bank that makes around $1,000 per customer with 6% churn rate and 10 million customers, this adds up to quite a chunk of change.

It could also be a coincidence due to the current trend of people moving around, and sending emails like this to remove one cognitive process from someone who already has many things to sort out.

[1]: https://www.nctatechnicalpapers.com/Paper/2019/2019-what-can...

It’s just customer retention.

They are mysterious about why your router works in other locations to discourage you into looking into how cable modems work. It’s pretty easy to steal cable. Google “rooted cable modem”

Huh, I had no idea about this. Thanks.

What was your lease period? If you get a note every 12 months, that would explain it.

Most people are auto paid to the end of a billing cycle, idk that comcast gives credit. So moving in before the end of their cycle it should work.

You say you move with your comcast router- if its a rented device, why shouldnt they be able to recognize the MAC address and connect?

I'm breaking the lease and moving out mid-cycle, and I bought the router independently (not rented from Comcast).

" I can’t shake the suspicion that the primary reason for sending such a letter is not to remind me that they exist and are an ISP option at my new residence, but rather to let me know that they figured out on their own that I will be moving. "

Really? Really? Like, seriously?

You may want to look into a lawsuit based on them being a low-key bully....

I'm assuming you mean to imply that I'm being overdramatic by suspecting something nefarious is going on when it isn't. That might be true, yes, thanks for your input.

I get those mails as well from Comcast, though I'm not moving and haven't moved in the last 4 years. I think they just send them out at random.

Could be a coincidence for sure. I've never received one previously though.