3 ms·
That doesn't seem like an accurate paraphrase at all. The article says nothing about polling constantly, nor does it make any kind of suggestion that polling c
by jsnell 3y ago
That doesn't seem like an accurate paraphrase at all.
The article says nothing about polling constantly, nor does it make any kind of suggestion that polling constantly is what makes it secure.
- JohnMakin 3y agoWhat do you think this means? > "The Find My Device network locates devices by harnessing the Bluetooth proximity of surrounding Android devices. Imagine you drop your keys at a cafe. The keys themselves have no location capabilities, but they may have a Bluetooth tag attached. Nearby Android devices participating in the Find My Device network report the location of the Bluetooth tag."
- jnwatson 3y agoIt means that Bluetooth is doing its normal thing.
- bootloop 3y agoThat has nothing to do with bluetooth. It's scans for tags, but the location is still reported constantly by the phone.
- mecsred 3y agoBluetooth is a wireless protocol. It's "normal thing" is to connect two devices. It CAN identify and locate devices by abusing beacons, but saying "that's what Bluetooth does" is crazy. That's like a falcon x rocket destroying my house and someone tells me "that's just what a rocket does". No, someone flew it there.
- shuckles 3y agoBluetooth is passively looking for devices to connect to all the time. The alternative would be to require users to actively initiate connections, which would be a horrible experience.
- recursive 3y agoI've been using Bluetooth for at least a decade and I really believed this active connection was actually needed.
- mecsred 3y agoYes, passively looking for devices is very different from noteing each device, tagging it with a location, and adding it to a central database.
- shuckles 3y agoWiFi has been used this way for 15 years to aid with approximate location queries. I don’t think concerns with the technology are unjustified, but referring to it as abuse is unnecessarily histrionic. This type of use for radios is not unprecedented, and eg the “central” database you refer to is only central in any meaningful sense if their implementation ends up being flawed. Otherwise is an encrypted repository of user data.
- gruez 3y agoThe location themselves are encrypted with a per-device key and google can't read it. I don't see what the issue is.
- JohnFen 3y agoI have a number of issues with these schemes generally. However, in this case my primary hesitation is that it's Google, and I lost trust in Google a good while back.
- M95D 3y agoExactly. That situation can change with an automatic update at any time.
- ryandvm 3y agoLol. If that's where your head is, Google illicitly tracking your location is the least of your problems. I hope you wear a ski mask everywhere, removed your license plates, and rolled your own mobile network...
- jsnell 3y agoIt seems to say that under some circumstances a phone will report its location (indirectly over an e2e encrypted network) to the owner of a bluetooth device that's in range of the phone. It doesn't say that the phone is constantly polling the location to do so. Now, your paraphrase is compatible with that text, so it's possible that it's indeed how it works. But there are other equally consistent options, e.g. that the phone only reports bt device locations in when it already has a fine-grained location available anyway for other reasons. The latter kind of seems more likely to me (to minimize the impact on battery usage for users participating int he network), but in reality we don't know which of these two schemes (or some other one) is used. And since we don't know, it seems like bad form to just make up an interpretation and claim that it's what the article says. And either way, the article also does not claim or imply that the security of the system relies on this "constant polling", which is how you paraphrased the article.