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What your Bluetooth devices reveal

blog.dmcc.io

131–140 of 204 posts

Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal

#131
post #16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

That middle ground has been eroded by cost-cutting.

Example: my mother had a cardic resynchronization device, and it had some kind of NFC type thing to enable the full wireless comms mode: wave a wand over her shoulder and the device's radio wakes up for a set time to send data or receive adjustments. So it wasn't always transmitting, but it did require the doctor's office or hospital to have that NFC wand to initiate any kind of data aquisition or reconfiguration. If it has an always-on BLE radio, the provider would just needs the phone/tablet/laptop with appropriate software that is already required.

Since any device like is already going to have a radio equivalent to a BLE radio, then removing the NFC parts from the device (and especially from the provider side) is some amount of cost savings. I think most patients would disagree that this privacy trade-off is NOT worth it, but you have remember that the patients aren't usually the actual customers in the US health care system. (And most manufacturers are going to have the US market as a target at least somewhat.) The most common actual customer is actually the insurance companies, and they'll take every single fraction of a penny, along with "an arm and a leg".

Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s actually even easier, your car has a plate on the front with a unique ID that a camera scans, often to automatically track your park time for ticketing. I can’t really care about obscure Bluetooth tracking when every business has CCTV doing facial recognition.

Wait they use this for parking meters?! Which cities?

[deleted]

Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal

#133
post #9

> 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 ab…

> I believe shopping malls often use such signals (wifi, bluetooth) to track what your travel pattern through the mall is.

I worked for a company about 18 years ago where we did just this. We also sold the technology to car dealerships who were very interested in our silent salesman stuff where you could tie interactions with your web campaign directly to the person walking past the dealership and preload the salesman with all their details.

Grubby stuff nearly two decades ago.

Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal

#134
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah exactly, with a car I would no longer be expecting any type of privacy, sadly. Here in Holland we must even have a mobile phone module in every car so it can call the emergencies in case of a crash.

It’s all of the EU. It’s literally illegal to sell new cars without a radio transceiver in them.

But is it illegal to personally disable it?

Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal

#135
post #55

Has anyone ever studied what happens with Bluetooth contention where thousands of people are gathered in a small space? Like a marathon mass-start with 10,000 sometimes 20,000 or more people How does bluetooth handle that? Or it doesn't?

In my experience, just fine. I recently ran a large (~30k) marathon and my AirPods and watch never glitched once, streaming the whole time including in the packed start corrals. I had the same thought about RF contention, but Bluetooth didn't seem to care.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spect..., combined with the inverse square law, is pretty amazing.

The amount of data needed to send audio to your ear-buds is quite small compared to the spectrum available, so only needs tiny slices of spectrum and for relatively tiny slices of time. And also relatively tiny amounts of power since it's only going max 100 feet, hence a pretty small chunk of space.

If all those 10K-30K devices are constantly jumping around the frequency band to transmit tiny payloads a tiny distance, then a whole metric fuck-ton of them can interoperate in what seems to us to be very tight quarters. But to those specialzied radios it probably seems like a fairly wide open field.

Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal

#136
Heard a talk in Paris about a guy who "war drove" around town using a higher layer Mobile IP ap which could sweep up open SSID, connect, and (ab)use the bandwidth to maintain a link "above" it (I guess like an agile VPN)

he was getting 100mbit class speeds routinely. Also patches of nothing, but it was interesting. That was over 5 years ago.

Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only see an option to turn back on tomorrow. How do you find this option?

It's under Settings > Security and Privacy > Exploit Protection > Turn off bluetooth automatically Definitely not the most obvious location. I would have expected to find this under the bluetooth settings.

Awesome, thank you.

I don't recall that being there when I first installed GrapheneOS. I need to go through the settings more often I guess.

It might be a cool feature if settings were highlighted or had a red dot or something until it was viewed (like an unread notification).

Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal

#138
Years ago I was interested to discover that my local road authority uses Bluetooth tracking of drivers to monitor traffic speed on certain major roads. Detect a particular Bluetooth ID at one point, pick it up again 2km down the road, you know how fast the traffic is going. Pretty useful for getting an immediate alert if traffic speed suddenly plummets.

Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal

#139
post #72
post #9

> 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 ab…

> 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 In the EU this is forbidden unless they explicitly ask your permission. They can still gather aggregate stats but they cannot build a profile on you .

I find it curious that the EU, despite it having such a complex parliamentary structure, is able to consistently enact such laws that are good for ordinary people. Are the two connected, I wonder...

Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iBeacon. They know what shelf you're standing in front of. What products you touch and read. Ever been in an Apple store? Look up. In the dark voids between the edge-to-edge backlit ceiling. There are secrets there. Watching you.

Not what iBeacon does but an entertainingly dramatic description nonetheless.

The only step missing from their description is having the app- or company- specific app installed. For Apple, that is the Apple Store app which everyone has. If you have BT enabled, it can detect the iBeacon and Apple Store can send that back for tracking.
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