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Why would they waste their time on Bluetooth tracking when your location pings cell towers and WiFi hotspots?
by nojito 5y ago
Why would they waste their time on Bluetooth tracking when your location pings cell towers and WiFi hotspots?
- solarkraft 5y agoPerhaps because the bluetooth tracking is a lot more accurate. But since not even Apple can access the data (or so they claim), this shouldn’t be useful for surveillance.
- judge2020 5y agoExactly. All mass surveillance request go straight to Google thanks to their unencrypted location tracking.
- TechBro8615 5y agoWhat unencrypted location tracking does this comment refer to?
- judge2020 5y agohttps://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28553778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28553778
- nojito 5y agoBluetooth tracking is noisy and a waste of time for external actors because you can't match it other data points.
- SwaraLink 5y agoNot sure I agree here. Most Bluetooth Low Energy devices (aside from Apple Devices and Android phones) don't make use the privacy feature and therefore their device address can be linked to a specific product. Many Bluetooth products have user accounts attached to them (think fitness trackers and AirTag-like products) meaning that the device address can be tied to a specific user. Now consider the vast number of “smart nodes” out there (eg street lights) that have multi-protocol connectivity built into them. Whoever controls these nodes can simply scan and log every BLE advertisement that is nearby. I’m not saying that this is the only way that a person can tracked or that this kind of tracking is definitely happening right now, but it’s a very real possibility.
- zylent 5y agoBluetooth tracking kinda sucks unless you’re literally apple or have beacons everywhere somehow. It really just gives proximity to a known location. UWB and Cell tower tracking are much more accurate for the majority of real-world applications