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Comment by ganoushoreilly | Hacker News Reader

I've used systems that leverage passive detection of Bluetooth, Wifi, and other radio signals as an indicator. No Apps required. Tying beacons into points of authentication (login from workspace) or transactional data at a register.

A large portion of it was actually focused around security and not product marketing, but the tech is the same.

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Tying beacons into points of authentication

Reminds me of an old Mac application from PowerPC days that would sense your phone's Bluetooth coming into the room and automatically unlock your computer.

I thought it was pretty cool.

Current Macs have that possibility built-in, but it only works with the Watch.

There are still some open source solutions for this out there to do it with general Bluetooth.

>Current Macs have that possibility built-in, but it only works with the Watch.

Maybe built-in to the OS. You can definitely do this with any Bluetooth device and any Mac with both free and paid software.

I use MacID app on my iOS device to quickly wake my OSx machine via Bluetooth and authenticate w touchID. I think it's pretty slick. Not for the security crucial installation but fine for home.

Does the BT detection work the same way that WiFi access point scanning works? I know that app developers use this WiFi tech from a client (device) side to determine location, but I am a bit disturbed about the aspect of this being so accurate with BT devices.

Yes passive signal detection behaves like this. Apple uses passive and active Bluetooth in their stores to determine what products you are looking at.

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