Yeah, at the end of the day, you're probably going to advertise with some sort of unique short name (so humans know what to pick in the a connect/pairing menu),

Yeah, at the end of the day, you're probably going to advertise with some sort of unique short name (so humans know what to pick in the a connect/pairing menu), and have at least one Service UUID (even if you only expose the juicy stuff after bonding.) But that still pushes it back up to a software policy concern, and it's up to the developers to make the appropriate privacy/security tradeoffs. The only real way around this is to do discovery out-of-band via NFC or QR codes or something. The other detail worth mentioning is that generic service advertisements and beacons will have different behaviors and payloads, since they have different goals. With the former, the device is advertising because it's disconnected and needs to be discovered. Service discovery necessarily means you're sending out some sort of information about what you are. If it only expects to be connected to one device (ie. the phone), it's going to turn off advertising when connected to said phone. You technically don't need to advertise the service UUID either once you're bonded, although I don't think would happen much in practice, as it makes recovering from an unbond event harder. Meanwhile, a beacon is data that is intentionally being broadcast out to the world by an application. The application will probably send out beacons regularly no matter what, since that's usually the point (Find My, COVID tracing, etc.) I would expect companies like Apple to ensure that these advertising packets aren't leaking any identifying information. This is easier to do than the above case, because the goal isn't service discovery, but to intentionally broadcast a piece of (anonymous) info. tl;dr Beacons are fine, especially in comparison to your headphones or smartwatch loudly announcing itself to the world because it's disconnected