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Now that the privacy pendulum is swinging the other way I'm curious if Apple will ultimately be the undoing of this thing they helped create. If devices using

Now that the privacy pendulum is swinging the other way I'm curious if Apple will ultimately be the undoing of this thing they helped create. If devices using iOS 13 start broadcasting a constantly changing bluetooth ID as a part of the new "Find My" feature these systems won't be able to track users from beacon to beacon or know how long you were in range of a single beacon. This will probably wreak havoc on traffic counters and other infrastructure that use bluetooth bacons to do things like monitor highway congestion and foot traffic

eunoia 7y ago
> If devices using iOS 13 start broadcasting a constantly changing bluetooth ID They've always done this. I think you have your threat model inverted. Beacons aren't tracking phones around stores. 3rd party SDKs installed in apps are tracking user's indoor location via beacon triangulation and uploading that data. A subtle, but important difference.
- r00fus 7y ago
  Shouldn't Apple ban apps using those SDKs? Is it identifiable from a source scan or binary trawl?
  - eunoia 7y ago
    I think so, seems to be the logical progression of their crackdown on particularly egregious 3rd party analytics implementations.
  - dpkonofa 7y ago
    The issue is that there are legitimate uses for this type of code, though. For example, I have my home set up with tons of automations that change, for example, the color of the lights when I'm in the kitchen vs. when my wife is in the kitchen. She prefers warm lighting and I prefer the daytime lighting. It's the same technology, it's just being misused in these commercial instances, in my opinion. People don't actually know that they're agreeing to this type of usage.
  - graeme 7y ago
    In ios 13 they added bluetooth and wifi access as privacy toggles. Does this prevent this sort of tracking by apps if turned off?
wkavey 7y ago
This is incorrect. Your phone detects the beacons, not the other way around, and then forwards the notifications to {insert app here}, and then the app sends information (beacon id, user_id, ...) to their servers. I actually implemented a nearly identical system for my senior design project, except we targeted the smart home ecosystem. Basic use cases would be automatically turning on/off lights or having a music stream/temperature preference/... follow you as you move throughout your house and enter/leave rooms. All implemented by an app on your phone detecting strategically placed beacons.

eunoia 7y ago

> If devices using iOS 13 start broadcasting a constantly changing bluetooth ID They've always done this. I think you have your threat model inverted. Beacons aren't tracking phones around stores. 3rd party SDKs installed in apps are tracking user's indoor location via beacon triangulation and uploading that data. A subtle, but important difference.

r00fus 7y ago
Shouldn't Apple ban apps using those SDKs? Is it identifiable from a source scan or binary trawl?
- eunoia 7y ago
  I think so, seems to be the logical progression of their crackdown on particularly egregious 3rd party analytics implementations.
- dpkonofa 7y ago
  The issue is that there are legitimate uses for this type of code, though. For example, I have my home set up with tons of automations that change, for example, the color of the lights when I'm in the kitchen vs. when my wife is in the kitchen. She prefers warm lighting and I prefer the daytime lighting. It's the same technology, it's just being misused in these commercial instances, in my opinion. People don't actually know that they're agreeing to this type of usage.
- graeme 7y ago
  In ios 13 they added bluetooth and wifi access as privacy toggles. Does this prevent this sort of tracking by apps if turned off?

wkavey 7y ago

This is incorrect. Your phone detects the beacons, not the other way around, and then forwards the notifications to {insert app here}, and then the app sends information (beacon id, user_id, ...) to their servers. I actually implemented a nearly identical system for my senior design project, except we targeted the smart home ecosystem. Basic use cases would be automatically turning on/off lights or having a music stream/temperature preference/... follow you as you move throughout your house and enter/leave rooms. All implemented by an app on your phone detecting strategically placed beacons.