What your Bluetooth devices reveal
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What your Bluetooth devices reveal
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Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#2Tangential, sort of: in the early days of mobile phones for the masses, when there was no WiFi/3G in the underground, I will often enable Bluetooth in my phone, look for nearby devices and try to match names and looks.
That was before everyone had their "John's IPhone" or "Samsung A55" boring names everywhere and some of us cared to personalise our device's name.
Anyone else played this game?
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#3Tangential, sort of: in the early days of mobile phones for the masses, when there was no WiFi/3G in the underground, I will often enable Bluetooth in my phone, look for nearby devices and try to match names and looks. That was before everyone had their "John's IPhone" or "Samsung A55" boring names everywhere and some of us cared to personalise our device's name. Anyone else played this game?
Yep 100% did the same.
It was interesting to see what people named stuff as even back then I figured you could use that metadata for tracking devices...but even more interesting was looking at the Mac address to see the manufacturer and try and find some rare or cool device.
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#4Tangential, sort of: in the early days of mobile phones for the masses, when there was no WiFi/3G in the underground, I will often enable Bluetooth in my phone, look for nearby devices and try to match names and looks. That was before everyone had their "John's IPhone" or "Samsung A55" boring names everywhere and some of us cared to personalise our device's name. Anyone else played this game?
I do the reverse. I set my wifi hotspot or bluetooth to "MetPoliceUnit355" and I look for people making faces or looking around.
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#5I read an article in 2012 about the feds (DHS?) placing Bluetooth enabled devices along I5 in Seattle. They were able to make profiles of people based on what Bluetooth devices they had in their cars. Is anyone familiar with this? I've periodically tried to Google it and can't find anything about it
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#6I suspect the e-scooters left around town (Lime, Bird, etc) are massive Bluetooth / LoRa dragnets. You pay them to increase coverage or visibility to social hot spots.
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#7I read an article in 2012 about the feds (DHS?) placing Bluetooth enabled devices along I5 in Seattle. They were able to make profiles of people based on what Bluetooth devices they had in their cars. Is anyone familiar with this? I've periodically tried to Google it and can't find anything about it
I remember an art exhibit by an online privacy activist made where it’d ping people’s phones to get a list of “known WiFi networks” and then display them on a screen in a room.
Each person would get a unique fingerprint of named network locations
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#8About 10 years ago i had HomeAssistant running and thacking my bluetooth devices. It does so per default by jus memorizing a mac adress an recording when it's visible and when not. No need for pairing or anythung. It also stores the custom name if available.
Anyway, the default dashboard also automatically generated a view when my neighbours "Katie's iPhone' was at home and when not, until I actively deleted it and the data it stored.
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#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 able to receive their wifi. They showed me their router logging all the wifi accesspoints that appear/disappear. There where A LOT of access points named "Audi", "BMW", "Tesla" etc. similar to those devices leaking bluetooth data. We had a discussion that it would be easy to determine who was passing by at what times due to these especially when you can "de-anonymize" the data for example link it to a numberplate.
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.
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#10I read an article in 2012 about the feds (DHS?) placing Bluetooth enabled devices along I5 in Seattle. They were able to make profiles of people based on what Bluetooth devices they had in their cars. Is anyone familiar with this? I've periodically tried to Google it and can't find anything about it
I believe Houston used bluetooth to measure congestion on 45.