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> “As far as we know, the only thing that definitely stops Bluetooth beacons is turning off your phone,” Bhaskar said. At least for recent Apple devices, that's not true anymore (intentionally, as it is used to support "Find my iPhone" even with a dead battery or on a phone that's been switched off): https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06114
Faraday bags
This is generally old news. Philz Coffee in Palo Alto, CA and major department stores in the US have been doing this for years to track foot traffic. If you don't want to be tracked, turn off BT and Wifi and demand the protocol stds body and mfgrs support even stronger randomized hw addresses.
Also of interest, your iOS BLE "Random" MAC transmits every few seconds and can take up to 48 hours to change. I wrote some software for the Pi that would allow me to enroll a phone when someone was nearby (By RSSI) and then with a directional antenna later in the day, you could confirm presence in a house / building.
You can also infer presence of anyone in a house because of this. Oh hey, 2 iPhones in the ex girlfriends apartment, Wonder what's going on in there...
Yeah creepy.
Apple has added recently at least for the BTLE implementation an address randomization much like they did for wifi, details of which can be found here: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/bluetooth-security-...
Address randomization helps but it's not enough. The phone still transmits at a regular cadence so it's pretty easy to figure out which old address has changed into which new address and keep tracking the same device.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Address randomization helps but it's not enough. The phone still transmits at a regular cadence so it's pretty easy to figure out which old address has changed into which new address and keep tracking the same device.
possible != "pretty easy". How do you do this with multiple devices in the same location?
Maybe not easy, but also not hard. The only thing that screws you up is someone playing with the airplane mode toggle of their phone while moving within your detection radius.
So far the trend is towards the latter...
In another hundred years are people going to look back at this time as a barbaric age of surveillance or are they going to be even more surveilled and controlled than ever before? So far the trend is towards the latter...