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I feel it's an Orwellian privacy issue. If you capture Bluetooth signatures in myriad places, you should be able to track where people are going with relative e
by sundvor 10y ago
I feel it's an Orwellian privacy issue. If you capture Bluetooth signatures in myriad places, you should be able to track where people are going with relative ease. Increasing the range without adding security features (if that's the case) would do nothing to ameliorate such concerns.
- 0x6c6f6c 10y agoThe tracking capability of Bluetooth is nothing next to GPS and cellular triangulation though. In an Orwellian sense, Bluetooth is not the largest threat in a mobile device.
- Kadin 10y agoA GPS receiver doesn't broadcast, and cellular triangulation is only possible if you control the cellular infrastructure (meaning either you are a government-level adversary or you have a set of Stingray-type devices). That's a fairly high bar. You could track people around a fairly good area, like a shopping mall, using off-the-shelf, inexpensive Bluetooth hardware and just keeping track of where various IDs turn up. Indoors, that's probably much more accurate tracking than you could perform using cellular triangulation. It's more like the kind of tracking you do using RFID tokens in a warehouse. I don't know if it's a problem per se, but it's something people should be aware of; many devices are constantly broadcasting a unique identifier almost all the time unless they take steps to turn it off.
- sangnoir 10y ago> I don't know if it's a problem per se, but it's something people should be aware of; many devices are constantly broadcasting a unique identifier almost all the time unless they take steps to turn it off. I can't tell whether you're referring to Bluetooth, WiFi, or both. WiFi is worse (longer range) and I suspect more widely used and likely to be left on on phones.