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Bluetooth signals can be used to identify and track smartphones

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Re: Bluetooth signals can be used to identify and track smartphones

#61

Post by kalleboo »

sieabah wrote: post #12

Was this not apparent when every manufacturer was working on Covid tracking in the open? Were people really not aware of the technologies being employed? That technology now exists on every phone that has had any semblance of an update in the past two years. There is no privacy, you have always been and will always be completely trackable. You can even use ultrasonic sound signatures so your phone doesn't even need t…

You're being downvoted because this is a completely different technology from the covid tracking. For one thing, the covid tracking had to be explicitly installed and enabled, whereas this works passively.

Re: Bluetooth signals can be used to identify and track smartphones

#62

Post by yata69420 »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #55
blkhawk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, a private company that has bought the information can just chose to share it for a fee with anybody it likes. Why would a judge be involved in that?

Because it's not theirs to sell, data about a person should belong to that person. They should control who it's being shared with.

I'd be shocked if my cell phone contract said they couldn't sell my data. Why would they do that?

I have plenty of options besides cell phones. I could have a landline, or get my ham license, or pen a letter!

I'm just a subscriber to a private service, after all.

Re: Bluetooth signals can be used to identify and track smartphones

#63

Post by closedloop129 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #27

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...

You don't need to control people if you can control machines. Once AI is there, society will fundamentally change.

I would assume that in hundred years, people will spend most of their time in virtual worlds. Would it be important what people do and think if all they do is moving some bits around?

Re: Bluetooth signals can be used to identify and track smartphones

#64

Post by jillesvangurp »

pmoriarty wrote: post #27

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...

It's a nice thought experiment. I call it ubiquitous surveillance. Anything you say, do, etc. is picked up by cameras, microphones, sensors, etc. and analyzed and archived for the duration of your life. We're a few decades away from that becoming practical to do for the entire population of earth. A few exa bytes of data per person sounds like a lot right now but there are already companies operating at that scale today. A few decades would allow scaling that by few billion times.

That's scary if you think in terms of a scary state surveilling its citizens. But as soon as you have multiple parties doing ubiquitous surveillance on each other it gets interesting: counter surveillance becomes a thing. Counter surveillance could be a crucial tool to enforce rules related to e.g. privacy.

For example, the act of violating somebody's privacy would be observed by potentially many third parties, some of which might not be friendly. Doing so covertly would get a lot harder and now would have a risk of legal escalation. In fact doing anything covertly would become extremely hard. People will get to watch each other, but not covertly and probably under some very strict and extremely hard to dodge rules.

Re: Bluetooth signals can be used to identify and track smartphones

#66

Post by eternityforest »

blkhawk wrote: post #54
froh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the USA this stored by telcos for 2-5 years and is often sold to both private and government purchasers. To private purchasers? For 2-5 years? No need for a judge issued warrant? Just sold?

yes, a private company that has bought the information can just chose to share it for a fee with anybody it likes. Why would a judge be involved in that?

The GDPR type laws seem to imply that information can't ever really be sold, since consent is always revokable, and can't be required as a condition of using the service.

I have a bit of an issue with that, since one generally expects that they can license any data they own, and it makes things like model releases confusing.

And the laws seem to define new private spaces that formerly didn't have expectation of privacy for most people.

But perhaps it's necessary anyway to prevent even bigger issues.

I can definitely see the problem with a cell company being able to sell data to someone's abusive stalker, even though in general I don't like censorship of observation, for the same reason I don't like ag-gag.

Re: Bluetooth signals can be used to identify and track smartphones

#67

Post by GekkePrutser »

yata69420 wrote: post #62
GekkePrutser wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not theirs to sell, data about a person should belong to that person. They should control who it's being shared with.

I'd be shocked if my cell phone contract said they couldn't sell my data. Why would they do that? I have plenty of options besides cell phones. I could have a landline, or get my ham license, or pen a letter! I'm just a subscriber to a private service, after all.

Yeah I think this is the difference in view between EU and US in general :)

Re: Bluetooth signals can be used to identify and track smartphones

#68

Post by mleonhard »

femto wrote: post #32
DINKDINK wrote: post #15

comments are focusing on the protocol's message content which is not the source of the ability to track broadcasters. The ability comes from detecting nuances in the RF signal: >BLE [snip] imperfections are introduced by the shared I/Q frontend of the chipset (Figure 1). They result in two measurable metrics in BLE and WiFi transmissions: Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) and I/Q imperfections, specifically: I/Q offset…

Section IV of the paper, "Challenges", is interesting reading. As expected CFO displays a strong temperature dependence, causing wrong identifications. Further, I/Q characteristics tend to be close for a given chipset, so I/Q imperfections are more or less identifying the chipset. It's easy to detect different models of phone, but harder to detect individual phones. It doesn't strike me as a serious threat (yet). A f…

Does this mean that a listener can know whether the phone is indoors, outdoors, in a warm pocket, or held in the hand?

Re: Bluetooth signals can be used to identify and track smartphones

#69

Post by feet »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #67
yata69420 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be shocked if my cell phone contract said they couldn't sell my data. Why would they do that? I have plenty of options besides cell phones. I could have a landline, or get my ham license, or pen a letter! I'm just a subscriber to a private service, after all.

Yeah I think this is the difference in view between EU and US in general :)

As an american, I personally find it disgusting

Re: Bluetooth signals can be used to identify and track smartphones

#70

Post by froh »

yata69420 wrote: post #62
GekkePrutser wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not theirs to sell, data about a person should belong to that person. They should control who it's being shared with.

I'd be shocked if my cell phone contract said they couldn't sell my data. Why would they do that? I have plenty of options besides cell phones. I could have a landline, or get my ham license, or pen a letter! I'm just a subscriber to a private service, after all.

The potential for abuse of personal private data like location, movement profile, corelation with other movement profiles, etc, is so ginormous it blows my mind it's legal to keep the data for years, let alone to sell it to private companies.

If that is true then that means there is no data privacy protection in the US?

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