8 ms·

In the bluetooth settings it literally states: "To improve device experience, apps and services can still scan for nearby devices at any time, even when Blueto

In the bluetooth settings it literally states: "To improve device experience, apps and services can still scan for nearby devices at any time, even when Bluetooth is off." This can be completely turned off in scanning settings. The article title is kind of clickbaity.

thefounder 6y ago
I wonder, what apps and services it helps improve? Why would you want to turn bluetooth off but not really turn it off?
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  Perhaps one loves Google and would like to help them increase their understanding of the world. on edit: changed you to one and your to the.
  - mtgx 6y ago
    Fair point. So what would be the percentage of people that buy Android phones and can identify themselves as "loving Google" AND wanting to allow Google to track everything about what they do to "improve the world"? 5%? Less? If so, then maybe this should be opt-in for those who love the company so much, rather than opt-out?
  - kuzimoto 6y ago
    I don't think anyone should "love" Google. Sure I enjoy using some of their services, but at the end of the day they will sell every single detail they can gather about you to make money. That's not something to "love" even if they are using it for other interesting things.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      neither do I, but the question was why anyone would want to track bluetooth devices available even when bluetooth turned off and that extremely unlikely reason was the only one I could think of.
      - kuzimoto 6y ago
        Okay, well I completely misread your comment haha.
- dariusj18 6y ago
  Probably apps like Tile, that don't need to have full Bluetooth connectivity, but still want to scan for Tiles every once in a while.
- izacus 6y ago
  Some uses I know about: 1.) Indoor location (uses beacons to improve accuracy). This is transparent to app developers which used fused location provider and just results in very accurate locations. 2.) Bluetooth fast pair - https://developers.google.com/nearby/fast-pair/spec https://developers.google.com/nearby/fast-pair/spec This is for feature parity with Apple "magical" AirPod pairing. You open the headphone case and immediately the popup appears asking you to connect them. 3.) Nearby APIs for device-to-device comms without internet https://developers.google.com/nearby https://developers.google.com/nearby 4.) Instant tethering for feature parity with Apple macos + iPhone tethering - https://support.google.com/pixelbook/answer/7504779?hl=en https://support.google.com/pixelbook/answer/7504779?hl=en
  - thefounder 6y ago
    So you disable bluetooth...and then you are expected to pair with bluetooth headphones/airpods or connect to other devices(i.e mac) ?
  - ttty 6y ago
    If I disable Bluetooth I don't expect these features to be working...
- ajross 6y ago
  Any unboxing experience. I mean, naively this means that the doodad you just bought (like the IoT Sous-vide heater I got for Christmas) requires you to fumble with your settings to turn BT back on before you can pair it. Now, sure, I'm sure the response of the people here is "But I turned it off because I want to have to use settings to turn it back on." And that's fine. But that's not the use case for most users, I strongly suspect. Having a phone that just works with crazy kitchen gadgets is something of real value.
  - miscPerson 6y ago
    I’m suspicious of your reasoning. Do you have any support that users who turn off a feature — such as Bluetooth — want it to continue to “just work”? That seems opposite of their expressed intent in turning the feature off.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
    I think you are right. I don't like it, but as a user, I appear to be in a minority. My wife is not concerned about tracking nearly as much as I am. She was ok with ads disappearing from her Kindle, but she does not want to fiddle with anything. And to be perfectly honest, the older I get, the harder it is for me to devote time to do that as well. I even accepted BT pairing in car. That said, I already placed a line in the sand on BT for oven/fridge/toaster/younameit.
- gumby 6y ago
  > Why would you want to turn bluetooth off but not really turn it off? A typical case I used to see is "let me switch off bluetooth so that my car doesn't keep connecting while I connect it to your phone" combined with "hey, how come my watch isn't connected to my phone?" Now it works as the user expected. This isn't how you or I might expect it to work but I suspect it satisfies most users' mental models. This isn't intended to praise or condemn the behaviour, I'm simply responding to your question.
- maccard 6y ago
  my Bluetooth headphones don't support pairing with multiple devices. The easiest way to stop them from pairing with my phone when I want them to pair with my PC is to turn Bluetooth off on my phone. functionally, I don't care whether Bluetooth is off or not, I just want my headphones to pair with my PC. this has the added bonus of being easy to undo (turning on Bluetooth pairs with my headphones again)
  - thefounder 6y ago
    >> this has the added bonus of being easy to undo (turning on Bluetooth pairs with my headphones again) I still seem to miss the "added bonus" compared with disabling the bluetooth completely.
    - maccard 6y ago
      sorry, I meant that it was an added bonus compared to keeping Bluetooth turned on and unpairing my device through the settings menu in my phone.
rvz 6y ago
Another point to make is that iOS also made it a bit harder for the user to completely turn off bluetooth and wifi from the control center since iOS 11, possibly allowing scanners and beacons to pick up these devices from passers by. Unless you directly get into the setting screen and switch it off. Sure Apple keeps Bluetooth/Wifi on for 'Find My' services but I'm pretty sure it will also be used for the contact tracing technology use case since many users will falsely believe that it is completely off when pressing the switches on the control center.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  It seems a bit overblown to suggest that iOS is hiding this, when it openly warns you what it's doing when you use those Control Center buttons (messages shown quoted below) and leaves the buttons highlighted in a non-disabled state (in contrast to the disabled state that Airplane Mode usually displays one centimeter above): > Disconnecting Nearby Wi-Fi Until Tomorrow > Disconnecting Bluetooth Devices Until Tomorrow Apple made a point about how these new toggles meet their users' needs more effectively than the pure on/off toggles available in Settings > Wi-Fi / Bluetooth, and they've been right for all of my use cases since then.
  - pottertheotter 6y ago
    I bet if you stopped 100 people and asked them to turn off Bluetooth or WiFi using the control center, and to pay attention to the messages you quoted, 100 of them would read those messages and see the colors of the buttons go from blue to white and tell you it means those services are completely deactivated. It absolutely does not warn you that it is keeping some of those services going in the background.
    - lonelappde 6y ago
      The average person will never have any idea how anything works, but will have opinions and contradictory requirements like "give me a richly personalized and streamlined experience without knowing anything about me". That's one of the big challenges of privacy in tech.
zepto 6y ago
Except this is a lie. It’s not being done to ‘improve device experience’.
- cptskippy 6y ago
  Using devices with GPS + WiFi to identify and catalog the relative geographic location of SSIDs is beneficial to other devices with WiFi capability that can benefit from Geographic location but lack GPS. The same is true of Bluetooth beacons.
  - dhimes 6y ago
    Such as? My watch, for example, uses the gps from my phone (if I would let it, that is). And are you implying that Google is cataloging my SSID even though I have it "hidden?"
    - cptskippy 6y ago
      You're fixated on it being about you specifically and your devices and direct benefits. If your phone's WiFi detects an SSID at a location and 10 other devices confirm your findings, then when I come along and connect to that SSID, with my non GPS enabled Tablet,my experience can be enriched with coarse location contextualized information. The same is true of IP addresses. > SSID even though I have it "hidden?" A hidden SSID is only hidden when it's not being used. That is to say if you setup your AP to not broadcast it's SSID then it's only invisible so long as you have no clients connected to it. As soon as a client connects to your "hidden" AP then it's SSID is broadcast to everyone and their mother.
      - dhimes 6y ago
        As soon as a client connects to your "hidden" AP then it's SSID is broadcast to everyone and their mother. Interesting. I've never seen it show up before. EDIT: I probably just wasn't looking for it.
        6y ago
_trampeltier 6y ago
I have to say, I did not know that, you have to go to an extra menu. I really hate all todays OS, how they fool all user. On the other side, Apps like Wiggle.net do not work since Android 9 because they limited WiFi scanning.
- izacus 6y ago
  I just setup a Pixel and it asked about this during the initial setup.
  - hanche 6y ago
    It's easy to miss stuff on initial setup. Here you got a shiny new device, you're eager to get it up and running so you can start enjoying your purchase. It's extremely easy in that setting to miss the small print. Even if it ain't that small.
- dmos62 6y ago
  It's easy to hide these things behind It Just Works (tm). Give me a device that doesn't "just work". I want actual freedom in what my peripherals are doing.
  - Angostura 6y ago
    If you want actual freedom, you have to take time to look at all the menus.
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      .. and construe terms in the worst possible double-speak way: purchase means rental, off means "spy on you mode", ...?
    - franga2000 6y ago
      Except more and more options are being taken away by Google, so there's no menu (not even developer setting?!?) that could give you any sense of freedom back. For examples (not all privacy-related), see clipboard permissions, background usage rules, Firebase notifications, WiFi scanning... The only way to get freedom back on Android is to either run a very old version (bad!) or undo all the bad changes in an AOSP fork (difficult).
ohmyblock 6y ago
But to 95% of users turning off Bluetooth means using the toggle, doesn't it?
kerng 6y ago
Even if they state that somewhere in a hidden menu, its inappropriate and disrespectful.
CalChris 6y ago
Does improving device experience mean phoning home to Google to you? When I do something to opt out, that should opt out. It is disingenuous to structure the preferences this way.
OrgNet 6y ago
I don't see this setting in Android 10... does it mean that it is now "impossible" to completely turn it off?
- wartijn_ 6y ago
  I second this. On my Android One phone (so pretty much stock Android) with Android 10, all it says is: "When Bluethooth is turned on, your device can communicate with other nearby Bluetooth devices."
sabujp 6y ago
It's not at all clickbaity since "apps and services can still scan for nearby devices at any time" doesn't clearly indicate what's happening with that information. It should be better said as "To improve USER experience, apps and services can still scan for nearby devices at any time and extrapolate/derive/get location data, even when Bluetooth is off." This clearly indicates to someone that turning off bluetooth from the pull down menu doesn't make you invisible via blueooth which is what I've always expected.
hcnews 6y ago
You can't ask every user to RTFM. I have been toggling off bluetooth and location for a while to save battery but haven't noticed it. So, I am guessing a lot of users don't end up noticing it as well. There are two issues with this implementation: 1. It's not privacy first. Toggling bluetooth should turn off everything. 2. It eats up battery/system-resources for a functionality that I don't want, causing me to have less control over my purchased device.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Apple seems to have figured out a compromise. There is an icon for turning off data to a radio (wifi or Bluetooth, for example), and an entirely different icon for if the radio is completely off. If you have an iPhone, you can see this by turning off wifi and also your cellular connection. The wifi icon will change from color to black-on-white, while the cellular icon will change from color to white-on-black. This indicates that the wifi connection can still be used for things like AirDrop, but the cellular connection is off.
  - samatman 6y ago
    That's better than nothing, but my response to your post was to try it on my phone and then mutter to myself "okay, I guess" I don't think most iPhone users browse HN to glean hints about the meaning of such opaque affordances, I had no idea that was what was happening when I turned off WiFi. I just figured it was actually off.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      I managed to figure it out. Maybe because I noticed the colors were different. I suspect other people have figured it out, too, since my ex-girlfriend describes me as, "the single most stupid person I've ever met."
diebeforei485 6y ago
Off should mean off. They could do what Apple does, perhaps.

thefounder 6y ago

I wonder, what apps and services it helps improve? Why would you want to turn bluetooth off but not really turn it off?

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
Perhaps one loves Google and would like to help them increase their understanding of the world. on edit: changed you to one and your to the.
- mtgx 6y ago
  Fair point. So what would be the percentage of people that buy Android phones and can identify themselves as "loving Google" AND wanting to allow Google to track everything about what they do to "improve the world"? 5%? Less? If so, then maybe this should be opt-in for those who love the company so much, rather than opt-out?
- kuzimoto 6y ago
  I don't think anyone should "love" Google. Sure I enjoy using some of their services, but at the end of the day they will sell every single detail they can gather about you to make money. That's not something to "love" even if they are using it for other interesting things.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    neither do I, but the question was why anyone would want to track bluetooth devices available even when bluetooth turned off and that extremely unlikely reason was the only one I could think of.
    - kuzimoto 6y ago
      Okay, well I completely misread your comment haha.
dariusj18 6y ago
Probably apps like Tile, that don't need to have full Bluetooth connectivity, but still want to scan for Tiles every once in a while.
izacus 6y ago
Some uses I know about: 1.) Indoor location (uses beacons to improve accuracy). This is transparent to app developers which used fused location provider and just results in very accurate locations. 2.) Bluetooth fast pair - https://developers.google.com/nearby/fast-pair/spec https://developers.google.com/nearby/fast-pair/spec This is for feature parity with Apple "magical" AirPod pairing. You open the headphone case and immediately the popup appears asking you to connect them. 3.) Nearby APIs for device-to-device comms without internet https://developers.google.com/nearby https://developers.google.com/nearby 4.) Instant tethering for feature parity with Apple macos + iPhone tethering - https://support.google.com/pixelbook/answer/7504779?hl=en https://support.google.com/pixelbook/answer/7504779?hl=en
- thefounder 6y ago
  So you disable bluetooth...and then you are expected to pair with bluetooth headphones/airpods or connect to other devices(i.e mac) ?
- ttty 6y ago
  If I disable Bluetooth I don't expect these features to be working...
ajross 6y ago
Any unboxing experience. I mean, naively this means that the doodad you just bought (like the IoT Sous-vide heater I got for Christmas) requires you to fumble with your settings to turn BT back on before you can pair it. Now, sure, I'm sure the response of the people here is "But I turned it off because I want to have to use settings to turn it back on." And that's fine. But that's not the use case for most users, I strongly suspect. Having a phone that just works with crazy kitchen gadgets is something of real value.
- miscPerson 6y ago
  I’m suspicious of your reasoning. Do you have any support that users who turn off a feature — such as Bluetooth — want it to continue to “just work”? That seems opposite of their expressed intent in turning the feature off.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  I think you are right. I don't like it, but as a user, I appear to be in a minority. My wife is not concerned about tracking nearly as much as I am. She was ok with ads disappearing from her Kindle, but she does not want to fiddle with anything. And to be perfectly honest, the older I get, the harder it is for me to devote time to do that as well. I even accepted BT pairing in car. That said, I already placed a line in the sand on BT for oven/fridge/toaster/younameit.
gumby 6y ago
> Why would you want to turn bluetooth off but not really turn it off? A typical case I used to see is "let me switch off bluetooth so that my car doesn't keep connecting while I connect it to your phone" combined with "hey, how come my watch isn't connected to my phone?" Now it works as the user expected. This isn't how you or I might expect it to work but I suspect it satisfies most users' mental models. This isn't intended to praise or condemn the behaviour, I'm simply responding to your question.
maccard 6y ago
my Bluetooth headphones don't support pairing with multiple devices. The easiest way to stop them from pairing with my phone when I want them to pair with my PC is to turn Bluetooth off on my phone. functionally, I don't care whether Bluetooth is off or not, I just want my headphones to pair with my PC. this has the added bonus of being easy to undo (turning on Bluetooth pairs with my headphones again)
- thefounder 6y ago
  >> this has the added bonus of being easy to undo (turning on Bluetooth pairs with my headphones again) I still seem to miss the "added bonus" compared with disabling the bluetooth completely.
  - maccard 6y ago
    sorry, I meant that it was an added bonus compared to keeping Bluetooth turned on and unpairing my device through the settings menu in my phone.

rvz 6y ago

Another point to make is that iOS also made it a bit harder for the user to completely turn off bluetooth and wifi from the control center since iOS 11, possibly allowing scanners and beacons to pick up these devices from passers by. Unless you directly get into the setting screen and switch it off. Sure Apple keeps Bluetooth/Wifi on for 'Find My' services but I'm pretty sure it will also be used for the contact tracing technology use case since many users will falsely believe that it is completely off when pressing the switches on the control center.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
floatingatoll 6y ago
It seems a bit overblown to suggest that iOS is hiding this, when it openly warns you what it's doing when you use those Control Center buttons (messages shown quoted below) and leaves the buttons highlighted in a non-disabled state (in contrast to the disabled state that Airplane Mode usually displays one centimeter above): > Disconnecting Nearby Wi-Fi Until Tomorrow > Disconnecting Bluetooth Devices Until Tomorrow Apple made a point about how these new toggles meet their users' needs more effectively than the pure on/off toggles available in Settings > Wi-Fi / Bluetooth, and they've been right for all of my use cases since then.
- pottertheotter 6y ago
  I bet if you stopped 100 people and asked them to turn off Bluetooth or WiFi using the control center, and to pay attention to the messages you quoted, 100 of them would read those messages and see the colors of the buttons go from blue to white and tell you it means those services are completely deactivated. It absolutely does not warn you that it is keeping some of those services going in the background.
  - lonelappde 6y ago
    The average person will never have any idea how anything works, but will have opinions and contradictory requirements like "give me a richly personalized and streamlined experience without knowing anything about me". That's one of the big challenges of privacy in tech.

zepto 6y ago

Except this is a lie. It’s not being done to ‘improve device experience’.

cptskippy 6y ago
Using devices with GPS + WiFi to identify and catalog the relative geographic location of SSIDs is beneficial to other devices with WiFi capability that can benefit from Geographic location but lack GPS. The same is true of Bluetooth beacons.
- dhimes 6y ago
  Such as? My watch, for example, uses the gps from my phone (if I would let it, that is). And are you implying that Google is cataloging my SSID even though I have it "hidden?"
  - cptskippy 6y ago
    You're fixated on it being about you specifically and your devices and direct benefits. If your phone's WiFi detects an SSID at a location and 10 other devices confirm your findings, then when I come along and connect to that SSID, with my non GPS enabled Tablet,my experience can be enriched with coarse location contextualized information. The same is true of IP addresses. > SSID even though I have it "hidden?" A hidden SSID is only hidden when it's not being used. That is to say if you setup your AP to not broadcast it's SSID then it's only invisible so long as you have no clients connected to it. As soon as a client connects to your "hidden" AP then it's SSID is broadcast to everyone and their mother.
    - dhimes 6y ago
      As soon as a client connects to your "hidden" AP then it's SSID is broadcast to everyone and their mother. Interesting. I've never seen it show up before. EDIT: I probably just wasn't looking for it.
      - 6y ago

_trampeltier 6y ago

I have to say, I did not know that, you have to go to an extra menu. I really hate all todays OS, how they fool all user. On the other side, Apps like Wiggle.net do not work since Android 9 because they limited WiFi scanning.

izacus 6y ago
I just setup a Pixel and it asked about this during the initial setup.
- hanche 6y ago
  It's easy to miss stuff on initial setup. Here you got a shiny new device, you're eager to get it up and running so you can start enjoying your purchase. It's extremely easy in that setting to miss the small print. Even if it ain't that small.
dmos62 6y ago
It's easy to hide these things behind It Just Works (tm). Give me a device that doesn't "just work". I want actual freedom in what my peripherals are doing.
- Angostura 6y ago
  If you want actual freedom, you have to take time to look at all the menus.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    .. and construe terms in the worst possible double-speak way: purchase means rental, off means "spy on you mode", ...?
  - franga2000 6y ago
    Except more and more options are being taken away by Google, so there's no menu (not even developer setting?!?) that could give you any sense of freedom back. For examples (not all privacy-related), see clipboard permissions, background usage rules, Firebase notifications, WiFi scanning... The only way to get freedom back on Android is to either run a very old version (bad!) or undo all the bad changes in an AOSP fork (difficult).

ohmyblock 6y ago

But to 95% of users turning off Bluetooth means using the toggle, doesn't it?

kerng 6y ago

Even if they state that somewhere in a hidden menu, its inappropriate and disrespectful.

CalChris 6y ago

Does improving device experience mean phoning home to Google to you? When I do something to opt out, that should opt out. It is disingenuous to structure the preferences this way.

OrgNet 6y ago

I don't see this setting in Android 10... does it mean that it is now "impossible" to completely turn it off?

wartijn_ 6y ago
I second this. On my Android One phone (so pretty much stock Android) with Android 10, all it says is: "When Bluethooth is turned on, your device can communicate with other nearby Bluetooth devices."

sabujp 6y ago

It's not at all clickbaity since "apps and services can still scan for nearby devices at any time" doesn't clearly indicate what's happening with that information. It should be better said as "To improve USER experience, apps and services can still scan for nearby devices at any time and extrapolate/derive/get location data, even when Bluetooth is off." This clearly indicates to someone that turning off bluetooth from the pull down menu doesn't make you invisible via blueooth which is what I've always expected.

hcnews 6y ago

You can't ask every user to RTFM. I have been toggling off bluetooth and location for a while to save battery but haven't noticed it. So, I am guessing a lot of users don't end up noticing it as well. There are two issues with this implementation: 1. It's not privacy first. Toggling bluetooth should turn off everything. 2. It eats up battery/system-resources for a functionality that I don't want, causing me to have less control over my purchased device.

reaperducer 6y ago
Apple seems to have figured out a compromise. There is an icon for turning off data to a radio (wifi or Bluetooth, for example), and an entirely different icon for if the radio is completely off. If you have an iPhone, you can see this by turning off wifi and also your cellular connection. The wifi icon will change from color to black-on-white, while the cellular icon will change from color to white-on-black. This indicates that the wifi connection can still be used for things like AirDrop, but the cellular connection is off.
- samatman 6y ago
  That's better than nothing, but my response to your post was to try it on my phone and then mutter to myself "okay, I guess" I don't think most iPhone users browse HN to glean hints about the meaning of such opaque affordances, I had no idea that was what was happening when I turned off WiFi. I just figured it was actually off.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    I managed to figure it out. Maybe because I noticed the colors were different. I suspect other people have figured it out, too, since my ex-girlfriend describes me as, "the single most stupid person I've ever met."

diebeforei485 6y ago

Off should mean off. They could do what Apple does, perhaps.