51–60 of 257 posts
The cynical part of me thinks this is the real reason to get rid of the headphone jack -- to make it inconvenient to turn off bluetooth.
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…
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...
Now that the privacy pendulum is swinging the other way I'm curious if Apple will ultimately be the undoing of this thing they helped create. If devices using iOS 13 start broadcasting a constantly changing bluetooth ID as a part of the new "Find My" feature these systems won't be able to track users from beacon to beacon or know how long you were in range of a single beacon. This will probably wreak havoc on traffic…
They've always done this. I think you have your threat model inverted. Beacons aren't tracking phones around stores.
3rd party SDKs installed in apps are tracking user's indoor location via beacon triangulation and uploading that data. A subtle, but important difference.
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…
Android has a feature called "nearby device scanning" so even if you turn off bluetooth, apps can still do BLE. I suspect stuff like this, where many many apps can spy on you on behalf of others, is why Google made BT access a Location category. But it means your weather app that uses location to tell you where you are? It is selling your location via BT beacons to 3rd parties.
The cynical part of me thinks this is the real reason to get rid of the headphone jack -- to make it inconvenient to turn off bluetooth.
On the iPhone turning off Bluetooth using the control center doesn’t even turn it of fully, precisely so that these location services (and other features) are still available. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evpz7a/turn-off-wi-fi-and...
Sidenote, it behaves differently if you've enabled airplane mode (or at least so the UI would indicate). In airplane mode, it gives no message and the wifi/bt icon goes transparent. If you're not in airplane mode, the wifi/bt icon goes light gray and it says 'disconnecting devices until tomorrow' but the radio is still on as your article mentions.
Personally I miss the old behavior where it just turns it off, but I'm often in airplane mode so I get the old behavior anyway and great battery life :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...
Now that the privacy pendulum is swinging the other way I'm curious if Apple will ultimately be the undoing of this thing they helped create. If devices using iOS 13 start broadcasting a constantly changing bluetooth ID as a part of the new "Find My" feature these systems won't be able to track users from beacon to beacon or know how long you were in range of a single beacon. This will probably wreak havoc on traffic…
I actually implemented a nearly identical system for my senior design project, except we targeted the smart home ecosystem. Basic use cases would be automatically turning on/off lights or having a music stream/temperature preference/... follow you as you move throughout your house and enter/leave rooms. All implemented by an app on your phone detecting strategically placed beacons.
I don't see anything wrong with passively tracking people in a store, mall, shopping center, etc., as long as it is used to inform the owners of movement patterns in the area. To use the information to push notifications and determine purchasing habits of people is over the line.
1) Some random third-party app has to be running on your phone to detect beacons and send the data back... how viable/likely is this actually? It seems like this would only ever effectively detect a tiny percentage of users at best who just happen to have one of the apps open while walking around a store?
2) For an app to detect beacons, don't you have to give permission for the app to use Location Services? I've tried Googling it but can't seem to find a definite answer... I'd be surprised (and saddened) if Apple or Google are allowing apps to detect beacons without explicit location or Bluetooth permissions.
3) If the goal is to track as many users as possible... wouldn't it be far more efficient to look for Wi-Fi devices that are scanning, and identify them by their MAC address? I don't understand what Bluetooth beacons enable that Wi-Fi scanning doesn't.
4) The article lists companies that provide these third-party toolkits... but not a single name of an app that uses them, or what percentage of phones contain an app with them. Since this is the main accusation of the article... I don't understand why they wouldn't provide even a single instance of proof.
I've just seen a lot of very questionable reporting from the NYT in the past on tech/security/privacy, so I'd like to understand better how real this is or not.