191–200 of 257 posts
So... turn off Bluetooth and Wifi when you go into a store? Put subtle lines on your face with makeup to confuse their facial recognition systems? What else do we need to do now to go out in public?
Physically dismantle every data broker's office and data center? Not sure what else would be effective.
What I don't get is: 1. Pretend it's the 1900s. Walk into a general store, shopkeeper sees you looking at ammo for 20 minutes and then leave without buying anything. Next time you walk in, he recognizes you and says he'll give you a discount on ammo if you buy in bulk. This is totally cool, not a violation of privacy, and both parties benefit. win/win 2. Use a computer to do the same exact thing automatically Rage, p…
Apple's iBeacon location-aware shopping goes live today (2013) https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/6/5181302/apple-store-ibeac... Beacon Technology Arrives in 50 Target Stores (2015) https://corporate.target.com/article/2015/08/beacon-technolo...
It began simply because Apple said "...iBEACON.." and everyone corporate wanted the new buzzword in their portfolio to let people know how hot/hip/tech they were (toys -r- us considered it for awhile) so they could pull the kids away from the internet and back into brick-and-mortar. How can we use these? What are they good for? No one really cared, they just wanted them in the store and we were there to sell them that (at a premium).
In 2015 - indoor location was bogus. Everyone in this forum seems confident that there are multiple ways you can determine location with Wifi (round trip packet time) or bluetooth (RSSI). A cacophony of radio in a catastrophically noisy environment does not work to provide reliable location information.
In fact - it was so bad, that there were a handful of other equally unrealistic solutions being pedaled by everyone from universities to light-bulb manufacturers. One such solution was to profile the accessible space of a building using a phone's compass, and then use the observations from a client device compass to identify how generated patterns correlated to the profile for the building.
The torrent of data you see pouring from your phone to the service via wireshark is real-time sensor data that is being used to feed a service side bayesian / markov-chain / monte carlo / kalman-particle filter / keyword soup monstrosity trying to generate some possible marginal confidence in a probable location. We found that this system was most effective in turning your phone into a pocket warmer, but sold like hot-cakes in a B2B setting wherein the intended end user had absolutely no voice.
Corporate wanted to buy it so they could sell advert-space (pop-up coupons) to affiliates. So we sold them something that worked barely well enough to provide a one-popup demo to potential interested parties. The affiliates bought the magic, corporate paid our company an arbitrarily large quantity of dollars for the service.
A deployment of thousands of coin-cell driven beacons per store, placed within reach of bored youths, maintained by an underpaid associate staff is of only questionable utility.
On a scale of things to worry about, ranging from nuclear holocaust to e. coli in your produce - this ranks a solid -3. In fact, in the 4 years since I've worked in this field I think the only advancement that has been made is that it's harder for third parties to sell because no one can do it well, so why not just do it in-house? It's cheaper and has the same garbage result.
If you think I'm wrong - go do it yourself. All these signals are easily grep-ed within any store (there's no way to make it proprietary), and you can create your own model and out-sell the proprietor. Surprise me. With an actual, viable client-oriented product (and assuming users actually want reliable indoor location) you'll make bundles selling it to the valley. Everyone is trying to do it (even cisco tried for awhile) - no one has.
Michael Kwet has read all the marketing copy, and rewritten it for popular consumption as a product. The insight/value provided by these systems is far more sparse than implied.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
iOS 13 actually has BT permissions per-app, and blocking that has no bearing on bt audio as that’s handled on the system level. It’s quite eye opening. Netflix for example wants access to BT even though there is absolutely no Netflix accessory that would warrant such access. I’m pretty thrilled about the change and it only cements my choice of iOS for me.
That still won't change much, though, because, inevitably, there will be some app that requires Bluetooth for some fundamental aspect of its use that will also use one of these SDK's. Granting that app access to this will give it all the info it needs. What really needs to happen is that Apple needs to make some of these beacon-able permissions more granular. How to do that in a way that a tech-naive population under…
Not if I keep Bluetooth turned off, which I usually do. Admittedly this is easy for me since my phone still has a headphone jack.
You may have been misinformed about the effectiveness of keeping Bluetooth "turned off".
I setup Home Assistant with the Raspberry Pi Bluetooth module to detect when my fiance and I were home or away (to turn on/off lights, turn off WeMo switches to the curling iron that my fiance always forgets). After a few weeks of forgetting I had it running, I logged back into the Home Assistant dashboard to notice that it was tracking nearly all of my neighbors Android phones, iPhones, headphones, TVs - when they w…
Apple's iBeacon location-aware shopping goes live today (2013) https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/6/5181302/apple-store-ibeac... Beacon Technology Arrives in 50 Target Stores (2015) https://corporate.target.com/article/2015/08/beacon-technolo...
I was working with Target when they did this roll-out. As sinister as everyone here seems to make it sound, I can assure you at that time it was not . If you're familiar with the inception of corporate projects, this project was no exception to any of the stereotypical fumbles and foibles of any effort of this scale. It began simply because Apple said "...iBEACON.." and everyone corporate wanted the new buzzword in t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That still won't change much, though, because, inevitably, there will be some app that requires Bluetooth for some fundamental aspect of its use that will also use one of these SDK's. Granting that app access to this will give it all the info it needs. What really needs to happen is that Apple needs to make some of these beacon-able permissions more granular. How to do that in a way that a tech-naive population under…
I really doubt there is any such application that most consumers would install. Maybe there are some industrial applications but most people have no use for Bluetooth apart from audio.
Apple's iBeacon location-aware shopping goes live today (2013) https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/6/5181302/apple-store-ibeac... Beacon Technology Arrives in 50 Target Stores (2015) https://corporate.target.com/article/2015/08/beacon-technolo...
I was working with Target when they did this roll-out. As sinister as everyone here seems to make it sound, I can assure you at that time it was not . If you're familiar with the inception of corporate projects, this project was no exception to any of the stereotypical fumbles and foibles of any effort of this scale. It began simply because Apple said "...iBEACON.." and everyone corporate wanted the new buzzword in t…
The more complex a method is at tracking someone, the less reliable it is.
People fear too much of what can be done with the fancy ways of tracking while overlooking simpler ways that are much more effective.