The Next Major Version of Bluetooth Might Help Advertisers Track Your Smartphone Faster
FIFY
Let’s not pretend this feature didn’t trickle down the data harvesting dog-hydrant to us peons solely for our benefit.
I have to admit that I didn’t see this angle and greatly appreciate your comment.
Oh get a grip. I very much doubt phones will be giving out their exact location to devices they’re not connected to.
Uhhh that exact technology has been in use for years. Your phone broadcasts/receivers a beacon at regular intervals while Bluetooth is on. Anyone can pick it up if they are looking.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluetooth-wireless-tracking-privacy.html
The process is so streamlined companies bragged your advertising profile is updated before you check out.
This kind of monitoring and association technology is so advanced that Target famously had to turn it down because it was creeping out customers.
In order to track you or trigger an action like a coupon or message to your phone, companies need you to install an app on your phone that will recognize the beacon in the store. Retailers (like Target and Walmart) that use Bluetooth beacons typically build tracking into their own apps.
So, if you download apps like a Boomer downloads free tool bars, you’ve got something to worry about.
Also, doesn’t Android only give location data to apps you’re actively using?
The user may not be aware they have this tracking technology on their phone. The toolkit may be some app developer integrating a 3rd party library for analytics. Banking apps, loyalty apps, phone companies, games, utilities… they all can rely on 3rd parties for proximity services.
In fact, I was going to mention an app, Exodus, that can reveal these trackers and in scanning my phone, I found 2!. The first is home assistant, which is understandable, but the second is a Health app my doctor office uses! Man, that irks me!
How about a version that successfully connects to my car’s sound system right away, every time?
Anything car related with BT is almost always the car’s fault. They use shit hardware and don’t care about the software because no one can do anything about it. No one is picking their car based on the BT support.
I don’t know why but zero cars that I’ve been in seem to have its Bluetooth functionality made by sane people
For example: Hondas having multi-second delays
for some goddamn reasonapparently because they forgot the audio part of “bluetooth audio”???
Might be your cars fault. I’ve been in some cars that are cooperative (current is like a 99.5% success rate) and some that are… Not. Used a VW Bora, aftermarket head unit worked like 1 in 10 attempts. Newer Toyota corrola straight up steals my Bluetooth connection so I’d give that about 140% because it will always connect even if I don’t want to, am in another car and currently connected to a different device.
I think you are correct that it’s the car’s fault. I have an MPOW brand Bluetooth adapter that almost always works properly with my phone. I use it in my Mazda 3 that doesn’t have Bluetooth built in. My 2017 VW Golf (one year older than the MPOW adapter) does have Bluetooth and it frequently gives me trouble. However, I’m typically able to get the connection to work by disabling then reenabling Bluetooth on my smartphone. Resetting the VW head unit typically doesn’t help, which is the opposite of what I’d expect if the problem was with the car. The VW has Android Auto over USB, which I thought would be the end of my Bluetooth woes, but that has enough of its own problems that I just keep putting up with the Bluetooth.
I feel like this is the first technology news in a looooonnng time that’s actually cool instead of horrible
Bluetooth 6.0 boasts that adding Channel Sounding will improve keyless entry between the phone and the cars enabled. The feature will allow developers to “enhance the security” of the digital key with an extra layer that only unlocks a vehicle when connected with an authorized device at a particular distance.
kagis
https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/Files/developer/RDF_Technical_Overview.pdf
4.1 Two Direction Finding Methods
Bluetooth direction finding offers two distinct architectures or methods, each of which exploits the same underlying basis. The first of the two methods is called Angle of Arrival (AoA) and the second is called Angle of Departure (AoD).
In each case, special direction finding signals are transmitted by one device and the signal is then used by another device to calculate the direction of the received signal.
Using AoA, the receiver contains a multi-antenna array as shown in Figure 3. Using AoD, it is the transmitting device that contains the antenna array, as shown in Figure 4.
I guess that that’s going to require an antenna array and independent processing of each antenna then.
