Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Bluetooth turned off (2018)

Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by rvz on Monday April 13, 2020 @11:06AM (#22856456)

Another point to make is that iOS also made it a bit harder for the user to completely turn off bluetooth and wifi from the control center since iOS 11, possibly allowing scanners and beacons to pick up these devices from passers by. Unless you directly get into the setting screen and switch it off.

Sure Apple keeps Bluetooth/Wifi on for 'Find My' services but I'm pretty sure it will also be used for the contact tracing technology use case since many users will falsely believe that it is completely off when pressing the switches on the control center.

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by tinus_hn on Monday April 13, 2020 @02:08PM (#22858299)

Also airplane mode by default no longer turns off everything. Really annoying.

By the way this is not for ‘Find My’ services because these only work if the device has internet connectivity. The newly announced mesh functionality is not active yet.

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by Tagbert on Monday April 13, 2020 @02:56PM (#22858821)

I think that they realized that many/most of us are using Bluetooth headphones on the plane even in airplane mode. Airlines do allow Bluetooth so no reason to shut it off in airplane mode.

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by tinus_hn on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @07:14AM (#22864636)

This is true but airplane mode used to be ‘all antennas off’. It would be really nice if there were an ‘all antennas off’ mode now that airplane mode means ‘cellular off’.

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by sneakymichael on Monday April 13, 2020 @12:19PM (#22857143)

I remember reading from an authoritative source (Probably the Apple Support website, but I don’t remember alas) that this is done to retain functionality of wireless-based system services — which require Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled; like AirDrop, Handoff, Universal Clipboard, Instant Hotspot, etc.

(Not for nefarious/tracking reasons.)

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by deevnullx on Monday April 13, 2020 @01:22PM (#22857796)

That is the "Continuity Protocol". For a paper with a write-up on reverse engineering/tracking here is some stuff from last year. [1]

tldr, yes, it can be used to track individual users, but doing it at scale (like just about everything else) would be significantly more difficult. MACs randomize every 15 minutes, so that is not effective for long term tracking. Continuity Protocol allows a fairly effective way of tracking a device in a limited ecosystem, but with the expectation of large numbers of people spread over large areas, it would likely wind up being significantly less effective.

1. https://www.cmand.org/furiousmac/popets-2019-0057.pdf

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by memco on Monday April 13, 2020 @02:15PM (#22858376)

That is nice if it's doing that. I setup a shortcut so that I can fully turn off bluetooth when I leave the house, but it's a bit flaky: sometimes it works, sometimes it fails for unknown reasons and I end up having to go into settings. If this mitigation is sufficient I'll switch back to the control center toggle.

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by AlphaSite on Monday April 13, 2020 @01:06PM (#22857636)

They also randomise the BLE beacon MAC as well right?

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by floatingatoll on Monday April 13, 2020 @11:33AM (#22856715)

It seems a bit overblown to suggest that iOS is hiding this, when it openly warns you what it's doing when you use those Control Center buttons (messages shown quoted below) and leaves the buttons highlighted in a non-disabled state (in contrast to the disabled state that Airplane Mode usually displays one centimeter above):

> Disconnecting Nearby Wi-Fi Until Tomorrow

> Disconnecting Bluetooth Devices Until Tomorrow

Apple made a point about how these new toggles meet their users' needs more effectively than the pure on/off toggles available in Settings > Wi-Fi / Bluetooth, and they've been right for all of my use cases since then.

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by pottertheotter on Monday April 13, 2020 @01:27PM (#22857879)

I bet if you stopped 100 people and asked them to turn off Bluetooth or WiFi using the control center, and to pay attention to the messages you quoted, 100 of them would read those messages and see the colors of the buttons go from blue to white and tell you it means those services are completely deactivated.

It absolutely does not warn you that it is keeping some of those services going in the background.

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by lonelappde on Monday April 13, 2020 @01:36PM (#22857959)

The average person will never have any idea how anything works, but will have opinions and contradictory requirements like "give me a richly personalized and streamlined experience without knowing anything about me". That's one of the big challenges of privacy in tech.

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by floatingatoll on Monday April 13, 2020 @03:35PM (#22859208)

They would say so in the same breath as expecting their Apple Watch and Apple Pencil to continue working on their iPhone and iPad respectively, and objecting when they break. Telling them they shouldn't expect Bluetooth devices to continue working when they turn off Bluetooth will make them confused and eventually angry with you; "these devices don't require pairing, or pin codes, or manual connection crap, or any of that nonsense, so they're obviously not Bluetooth, they just work". We know that's not true, but they don't care about that technical distinction.

If you're a normal user, you don't care about whether the radio is active or not. You care about whether you can easily disconnect from crappy Bluetooth devices, or whether you can easily disconnect from broken cafe wi-fi to switch to cellular. The control center buttons provided by Apple do both of those things, without breaking Apple's ecosystem of devices.

Is this resulting control center behavior optimal? Sure is for Apple users. Everything that's broken disconnects and everything magic continues working. Is this optimal for tech nerds? Sure, if they're Apple users, because they quickly come to realize how useful "disconnect from this specific SSID today only, but continue using wi-fi when I go home" is. Is this optimal for people who want to aggressively control their radios at all times? Nope, sure isn't, you'll have to go to the Settings dialog and realize to do so the first time, presumably having missed out on endless Device Paranoia 101 courses that explain this.

Turning off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi is something that most users do not require of their device, and do not want of their device. Those that do want this for some sort of specific reason are the extremely rare exception, and just happen to be in slightly higher proportion here at HN relative to the rest of the world.

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by reaperducer on Monday April 13, 2020 @05:40PM (#22860393)

Telling them they shouldn't expect Bluetooth devices to continue working when they turn off Bluetooth will make them confused and eventually angry with you

Yep. Many greybeards around here have fought the battle of "Why do I need a modem to access AOL? I got a disk in the mail, that should be good enough!"

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by floatingatoll on Monday April 13, 2020 @10:18PM (#22862159)

Too bad their takeaway seems to have been “people are stupid” rather than “people had a point”. If AOL couldn’t make a useful program that worked in offline mode, with a content cache loaded on-disc and updated with content regularly, they were totally missing out on the “mail magazines to houses annually” strategy of using those discs for more than just trash waste. But people don’t understand modems and it was easier to mock them than to build a better product.

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by machello13 on Monday April 13, 2020 @02:31PM (#22858531)

I don't agree with that. Some people will never understand anything about their phones, and that's fine, but I don't think the message "Disconnecting Bluetooth Devices Until Tomorrow" is at all misleading about the fact that it's only disconnecting devices, and not shutting down Bluetooth.

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by Lio on Monday April 13, 2020 @02:36PM (#22858573)

If it’s to meet user needs why can’t I opt to have real on/off in the control centre again?

Personally I think this is more “Maybe later” passive aggressive crap from Apple. You know, where they take the option to say no out of the UI.

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Re:Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Blueto... by floatingatoll on Monday April 13, 2020 @03:44PM (#22859264)

I made up an idea and tested it for this reply. It turns out you can use airplane mode for this already!

When you turn them off in airplane mode, they go completely off, and airplane mode remembers their on/off state distinctly from non-airplane mode. You get the cellular disable for free, since obviously if you're disabling wifi/bluetooth radios, you're disabling cellular radios too. (Otherwise what would be the point? Radio paranoia can't afford to be selective if it's truly justified paranoia, and cellular radios are infinitely louder than bluetooth/wifi ones.)

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