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Just a thought.
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Apple? Maybe it's the big stores and advertisers want to know everything about everybody that are to blame?
Yes Apple. They rolled out iBeacons and created a whole toolkit on ios that enabled tracking - at least a lot easier than it would have been.
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I've used systems that leverage passive detection of Bluetooth, Wifi, and other radio signals as an indicator. No Apps required. Tying beacons into points of authentication (login from workspace) or transactional data at a register. A large portion of it was actually focused around security and not product marketing, but the tech is the same.
Tying beacons into points of authentication Reminds me of an old Mac application from PowerPC days that would sense your phone's Bluetooth coming into the room and automatically unlock your computer. I thought it was pretty cool. Current Macs have that possibility built-in, but it only works with the Watch.
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But didn't Apple change IOS so that the button to turn off bluetooth does not actually turn off bluetooth's ability to work with beacons?
No, turning that off blocks beacons and disallows new connections via bt. It still allows existing active connections which may be where it’s confusing.
This is a bit off topic, but how could I do this at home? Seems like it could be a great addition to home security systems. Criminals know to cover their faces with all the cameras and they use stolen vehicles that can’t be traced back to them. I bet they still have their phones with them. I’m not sure the police would take action on a device’s MAC address- but it’s still another data point. Perhaps there are hardwar…
As others have mentioned many of the top wifi brands, Cisco, Aruba, and Meraki (now owned by Cisco) provide this kind of information to clients at their enterprise level.
The reason this doesn't exist for consumers for security at least is that in the use case you described it is hard to tell what MAC address belongs to each device. Even in a neighborhood, you will detect hundreds of macs a day due to mac spoofing that modern phones do.
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Yes that's exactly how this gets implemented in practice. I did quite a bit of client work here too, specifically around using already existing surveillance camera networks to build user profiles. At the end of the day the goal is to optimize for the intersection of "what the user wants" and "what we want to sell." So, a low collection system will give bad recommendations and a really good recommendation system will…
> "It's kind of creepy, but if it gives me good suggestions, I don't really care." This is an Unpopular Opinion, but IMHO thats kind of a reasonable stance to take.
I disagree. The recommendation is immediate and apparent to the end-user. The negative potential uses/consequences of all the other data collection are not.
It's funny, but when an unsuspecting person gets a home loan they can't possibly afford pushed on them by a shifty mortgage broker, people here cry bloody murder. But when people ignorantly consent to having their data harvested for the pleasure of better targeted advertising, the tech community happily says "but they asked for it!"
This is rage inducing. I went into this article thinking "ok as long as I don't have the Target or Ikea or whatever app installed on my phone, I'm fine." While that is a primary way, this needs to be outlawed: > These companies take their beacon tracking code and bundle it into a toolkit developers can use. The makers of many popular apps, such as those for news or weather updates, insert these toolkits into their ap…
What annoys me is that weather is built into both popular phone OSes, so I am not sure why people install ad/tracking apps to get weather information. (What makes me sad is that I really like Weather Underground and subscribed for years... but now their website is super slow and bug-ridden, and I believe it's officially been canceled by their new corporate overlords. So I have no real good way to get "advanced" radar products except via GRLevel3.)
To me, this isn't big news -- It's at the point where I turn wifi and Bluetooth off when I'm shopping. Look at some of the filings by Kroger: https://fccid.io/PBR-SZG3APWC/Users-Manual/Manual-3994818 They are tracking down at the bay level for some items.
> I turn wifi and Bluetooth off You believe that makes a difference?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ios-11s-control-center-may-say...
Having done some proof of concept work for a couple of very large retailers using BLE/beacons I believe most of the scumminess isn’t on the retailer side but the 3rd party API/framework. The requests we were fielding was for better ability to find things in the store, floor maps for every store with wayfinding, and the ability to use the app to get more contextual info on demand. For those not completely in the know…
Specifically, if I have an app installed, but it's not open in any way (e.g. in iOS I double tap home and swipe up on the app's window to close it) can the app still run any code? Am I safe from these "background" vulnerabilities as long as I aggressively kill apps that I'm not actively using, or is simply having the app installed enough to let it run a certain amount of code on my device?