> We’ve normalised the idea that Bluetooth is always on. Phones, laptops, smartwatches, headphones, cars, and even medical devices constantly broadcast their presence. The standard response to privacy concerns is usually “nothing to hide, nothing to fear.”
I guess anything you send out can be used to profile you.
Some of my friends live on a farm near a semi busy road, however far enough from other farms to not be able to receive their wifi. They showed me their router logging all the wifi accesspoints that appear/disappear. There where A LOT of access points named "Audi", "BMW", "Tesla" etc. similar to those devices leaking bluetooth data. We had a discussion that it would be easy to determine who was passing by at what times due to these especially when you can "de-anonymize" the data for example link it to a numberplate.
I believe shopping malls often use such signals (wifi, bluetooth) to track what your travel pattern through the mall is. They know what section of the store you spend most of your time in and what storefronts you stall at.
Don't worry about Tesla's being tracked. Via Bluetooth this has existed for at least 7 years [1] (was mentioned on HN as well). Tesla know (also for 7 years), Musk doesn't care 'since license plates can also be tracked'.
I used it in train stations, and get hits when passing highways via train or bus. Esp. fun if you stand still due to traffic lights or traffic jam, since you can try to get a visual.
The only lesson to be learned here is that it allowed one to learn in 2019 Musk is overrated. But you can also learn that lesson from the book The PayPal Wars which predates this by 15 years.
> I believe shopping malls often use such signals (wifi, bluetooth) to track what your travel pattern through the mall is. They know what section of the store you spend most of your time in and what storefronts you stall at.
Not allowed in EU.
> I believe shopping malls often use such signals (wifi, bluetooth) to track what your travel pattern through the mall is. They know what section of the store you spend most of your time in and what storefronts you stall at.
Yes, I remember Cisco had a product like this all the way back in 2011. They could pinpoint a customer to an exact position inside a store using triangulation, they would know which shelf you spent time in front of etc. In the 15 years since then, I expect the technology is much scarier and intrusive.
>There where A LOT of access points named "Audi", "BMW", "Tesla" etc.
That's one of the funniest things about wardriving with Wigle on your phone. I can often see the SSID of "Jennifer's Equinox", "Jacks Suburban" right after I get cut off by someone in said vehicle. The vast majority of car bluetooth/wifi I see tends to have varying amounts of identifying information. It's almost as bad as the fact that apple still defaults to Jacks iPhone/iPad etc with no option to rename the device until you've finished setting it up.
Companies are not out to protect us with default settings and the majority of users need to wake up to this fact.
This might just be me being uninformed as someone who doesn't drive but how are you seeing what wifi networks are available so quickly right after being cut off? My very naive instinct is that looking at your phone or opening up a menu with the available wifi networks on your car's display seems like it would require a noticeable decrease in attention to the road, so I'd almost expect an uptick in being cut off from other people who are annoyed with your driving.
> I believe shopping malls often use such signals (wifi, bluetooth) to track what your travel pattern through the mall is.
Many places do this. The department stores in the mall, target, even grocery stores do it.
I disable bluetooth on my phone, though periodically I find that it's back on.
Edit: iOS
I have the opposite experience: GrapheneOS has an option to automatically turn your bluetooth off after a configurable period of not being used. So when I need to use bluetooth, I turn it on like normal. Then, without thinking about it, it automatically turns off. The end result is my bluetooth is only ever on for a couple hours each month when I'm making phone calls.
Android now has an option to enable it every day.. (I have it disabled).
There's an Android app that can find devices, make profiles, and you can track location for as long as they're connected. So you can profile passerbys and even get notified when the profile passes through again. I forgot what is was called
> even medical devices constantly broadcast their presence
I mean yes, said medical devices are a whole lot less useful to me if they are not transmitting data. For some of this stuff you can't have your cake and eat it too.
I was wardriving my neighborhood and realized my elderly neighbor's CPAP machine is broadcasting some type of BT signal 24/7. I imagine it's transmitting some important stats, but it did make me have a 2nd thought about medical devices being IoT or BT enabled.
> being IoT or BT enabled
Please don’t conflate these two. I have lots of BLE wearables and other sensors. They only send data to my own computer which I control, unlike IoT devices which by definition send to a third party on the Internet.
What forces devices to constantly stream data? You can batch updates and probably save power thanks to it.
There’s a middle ground here. There is no technical reason a pacemaker constantly broadcasts itself - there is ways to allow communication to such devices without yelling your name all the time. And there is definitely no reason for such a name to be a unique identifier.
I mean if not a name, how would a mac id be any different?
Tangential, sort of: in the early days of mobile phones for the masses, when there was no WiFi/3G in the underground, I will often enable Bluetooth in my phone, look for nearby devices and try to match names and looks.
That was before everyone had their "John's IPhone" or "Samsung A55" boring names everywhere and some of us cared to personalise our device's name.
Anyone else played this game?
hmmmmm...
2006, sat in a job interview. Interviewer says he'll Bluetooth over a file to me - what's by phone's name?
2006, the year that Tool's 10,000 Days had been released, which I was enjoying and, being a bit of an Edge Lord, I'd named my device after a lyric from Vicarious - which, IIRC fit perfectly into the name space and made me very happy:
> ILikeToWatchThingsDie
Excellent. Still got the job though!
Hah, I change my device name and wifi hotspot all the time...
"[Agency-acronym] Surveillance Van #43/44/etc.."
Did you ever try to communicate with them?
Yeah, but it stopped pretty soon stores figured out that they could flood you with advertisements over Bluetooth. In some places it was bad enough that I had to turn off Bluetooth.
How did this play out? Were the ads from an app from the store that you had installed? Or did they spam you over SMS because they associated your bluetooth info with an account you have with the store, or contact info they bought from a third party?
Yep 100% did the same.
It was interesting to see what people named stuff as even back then I figured you could use that metadata for tracking devices...but even more interesting was looking at the Mac address to see the manufacturer and try and find some rare or cool device.
I do the reverse. I set my wifi hotspot or bluetooth to "MetPoliceUnit355" and I look for people making faces or looking around.
This is not very different from collecting visual cues. You can notice a delivery van arriving. You can see the driver's face, same with passers-by. The biggest difference is that a camera needs to be more conspicuous, while a BT receiver can be invisible and undetectable. Much cheaper, too.
Wonder what the difference is between this and: https://github.com/ArgeliusLabs/Chasing-Your-Tail-NG
About 10 years ago i had HomeAssistant running and thacking my bluetooth devices. It does so per default by jus memorizing a mac adress an recording when it's visible and when not. No need for pairing or anythung. It also stores the custom name if available.
Anyway, the default dashboard also automatically generated a view when my neighbours "Katie's iPhone' was at home and when not, until I actively deleted it and the data it stored.
Similar story - "Home assistant picked up my neighbours Bluetooth toothbrush and now I can see when they brush their teeth"
https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1306pcw/home...
Bluetooth desperately needs mac randomization. Wifi mac randomization is welcome, but it doesn't do much when many (most?) people have bluetooth accessories broadcasting a persistent identifier whenever they're on.
Random Bluetooth MACs are already possible. iOS devices have been doing it for years alongside the random Wi-Fi MACs.
"We agreed on a 150-day disclosure window". Isn't that longer than Google Project Zero gives to release fixes?
ran something similar on a home network once and was surprised how many of my neighbors' devices showed up with full manufacturer names and model numbers. you don't even need to try hard.
I suspect the e-scooters left around town (Lime, Bird, etc) are massive Bluetooth / LoRa dragnets. You pay them to increase coverage or visibility to social hot spots.
Wow e-scooter wardriving is something I hadn’t thought of. Could be happening somewhere
All 00:25:DF:* Are Bastards
At least until the MetaRadar (BLERadar) dev panicked and removed regex from the address alerts.
Doesn't HackRF with Cha0s do something similar?
And kismet
I read an article in 2012 about the feds (DHS?) placing Bluetooth enabled devices along I5 in Seattle. They were able to make profiles of people based on what Bluetooth devices they had in their cars. Is anyone familiar with this? I've periodically tried to Google it and can't find anything about it
I remember an art exhibit by an online privacy activist made where it’d ping people’s phones to get a list of “known WiFi networks” and then display them on a screen in a room.
Each person would get a unique fingerprint of named network locations
I believe Houston used bluetooth to measure congestion on 45.