Google can use Bluetooth to track phones even with Bluetooth turned off (2018) | Hacker News Reader

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

qz.com

247 pointsohmyblock122 comments

In the bluetooth settings it literally states: "To improve device experience, apps and services can still scan for nearby devices at any time, even when Bluetooth is off." This can be completely turned off in scanning settings. The article title is kind of clickbaity.

I wonder, what apps and services it helps improve? Why would you want to turn bluetooth off but not really turn it off?

Perhaps one loves Google and would like to help them increase their understanding of the world.

on edit: changed you to one and your to the.

I don't think anyone should "love" Google. Sure I enjoy using some of their services, but at the end of the day they will sell every single detail they can gather about you to make money. That's not something to "love" even if they are using it for other interesting things.

neither do I, but the question was why anyone would want to track bluetooth devices available even when bluetooth turned off and that extremely unlikely reason was the only one I could think of.

Okay, well I completely misread your comment haha.

Probably apps like Tile, that don't need to have full Bluetooth connectivity, but still want to scan for Tiles every once in a while.

Some uses I know about:

1.) Indoor location (uses beacons to improve accuracy). This is transparent to app developers which used fused location provider and just results in very accurate locations.

2.) Bluetooth fast pair - https://developers.google.com/nearby/fast-pair/spec This is for feature parity with Apple "magical" AirPod pairing. You open the headphone case and immediately the popup appears asking you to connect them.

3.) Nearby APIs for device-to-device comms without internet https://developers.google.com/nearby

4.) Instant tethering for feature parity with Apple macos + iPhone tethering - https://support.google.com/pixelbook/answer/7504779?hl=en

So you disable bluetooth...and then you are expected to pair with bluetooth headphones/airpods or connect to other devices(i.e mac) ?

If I disable Bluetooth I don't expect these features to be working...

Any unboxing experience. I mean, naively this means that the doodad you just bought (like the IoT Sous-vide heater I got for Christmas) requires you to fumble with your settings to turn BT back on before you can pair it.

Now, sure, I'm sure the response of the people here is "But I turned it off because I want to have to use settings to turn it back on." And that's fine. But that's not the use case for most users, I strongly suspect. Having a phone that just works with crazy kitchen gadgets is something of real value.

I’m suspicious of your reasoning.

Do you have any support that users who turn off a feature — such as Bluetooth — want it to continue to “just work”?

That seems opposite of their expressed intent in turning the feature off.

I think you are right. I don't like it, but as a user, I appear to be in a minority. My wife is not concerned about tracking nearly as much as I am. She was ok with ads disappearing from her Kindle, but she does not want to fiddle with anything. And to be perfectly honest, the older I get, the harder it is for me to devote time to do that as well. I even accepted BT pairing in car. That said, I already placed a line in the sand on BT for oven/fridge/toaster/younameit.

> Why would you want to turn bluetooth off but not really turn it off?

A typical case I used to see is "let me switch off bluetooth so that my car doesn't keep connecting while I connect it to your phone" combined with "hey, how come my watch isn't connected to my phone?"

Now it works as the user expected.

This isn't how you or I might expect it to work but I suspect it satisfies most users' mental models.

This isn't intended to praise or condemn the behaviour, I'm simply responding to your question.

my Bluetooth headphones don't support pairing with multiple devices. The easiest way to stop them from pairing with my phone when I want them to pair with my PC is to turn Bluetooth off on my phone. functionally, I don't care whether Bluetooth is off or not, I just want my headphones to pair with my PC. this has the added bonus of being easy to undo (turning on Bluetooth pairs with my headphones again)

>> this has the added bonus of being easy to undo (turning on Bluetooth pairs with my headphones again)

I still seem to miss the "added bonus" compared with disabling the bluetooth completely.

sorry, I meant that it was an added bonus compared to keeping Bluetooth turned on and unpairing my device through the settings menu in my phone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

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.

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.

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.)

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.)

They also randomise the BLE beacon MAC as well right?

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

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.

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.

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.

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’.

Except this is a lie. It’s not being done to ‘improve device experience’.

Using devices with GPS + WiFi to identify and catalog the relative geographic location of SSIDs is beneficial to other devices with WiFi capability that can benefit from Geographic location but lack GPS. The same is true of Bluetooth beacons.

Such as? My watch, for example, uses the gps from my phone (if I would let it, that is).

And are you implying that Google is cataloging my SSID even though I have it "hidden?"

You're fixated on it being about you specifically and your devices and direct benefits. If your phone's WiFi detects an SSID at a location and 10 other devices confirm your findings, then when I come along and connect to that SSID, with my non GPS enabled Tablet,my experience can be enriched with coarse location contextualized information. The same is true of IP addresses.

> SSID even though I have it "hidden?"

A hidden SSID is only hidden when it's not being used. That is to say if you setup your AP to not broadcast it's SSID then it's only invisible so long as you have no clients connected to it. As soon as a client connects to your "hidden" AP then it's SSID is broadcast to everyone and their mother.

As soon as a client connects to your "hidden" AP then it's SSID is broadcast to everyone and their mother.

Interesting. I've never seen it show up before. EDIT: I probably just wasn't looking for it.

Hiding an SSID only removes the name from Beacon frames that are broadcast. The SSID is still broadcasting beacon frames so it is discoverable and the name is still in Probe/Response frames. So a device passively listening can catch a Hidden SSID when it talks to a client.

So basically hiding your SSID is just giving you a false sense of security because it hides it from people who don't know any better but anyone who knows anything about WiFi security can find it.

I have to say, I did not know that, you have to go to an extra menu. I really hate all todays OS, how they fool all user. On the other side, Apps like Wiggle.net do not work since Android 9 because they limited WiFi scanning.

I just setup a Pixel and it asked about this during the initial setup.

It's easy to miss stuff on initial setup. Here you got a shiny new device, you're eager to get it up and running so you can start enjoying your purchase. It's extremely easy in that setting to miss the small print. Even if it ain't that small.

It's easy to hide these things behind It Just Works (tm). Give me a device that doesn't "just work". I want actual freedom in what my peripherals are doing.

If you want actual freedom, you have to take time to look at all the menus.

.. and construe terms in the worst possible double-speak way: purchase means rental, off means "spy on you mode", ...?

Except more and more options are being taken away by Google, so there's no menu (not even developer setting?!?) that could give you any sense of freedom back. For examples (not all privacy-related), see clipboard permissions, background usage rules, Firebase notifications, WiFi scanning...

The only way to get freedom back on Android is to either run a very old version (bad!) or undo all the bad changes in an AOSP fork (difficult).

You should consider Librem 5 phone.

I too did not know this, or even that there was a separate scanning setting. I'm also not sure where this message even pops up. I don't remember ever reading any time about apps being able to use Bluetooth while turned off and enabling and disabling Bluetooth did not seem to produce the message. I can't seem to find any mention of it in the Bluetooth help menu either. This is on Android 9.

I've found the scanning menu by searching for it. This is the only place that seems to mention allowing apps to scan Bluetooth while Bluetooth is off. It seems to be defaulted to disabled though.

I'm on Android 8.1. When turning off Bluetooth the entire Bluetooth menu showing previously paired devices changes to just show the string "When Bluetooth is turned on, your device can communicate with other nearby Bluetooth devices. To improve location accuracy, system apps and services can still detect Bluetooth devices. You can change this setting in _scanning settings_[link to the associated settings page]".

I don't see how this is fooling the user. Its pretty direct in stating what's happening and provides a link directly to the additional settings.

Maybe the "when this is turned off" bit not actually turning it off? That's not exactly up front. It could easily have not been called "turned off", like "OS use only" mode or "bluetooth not function except as a spy tool for Google" mode, something snappy ...

I suppose you have no problem with people calling things purchase when they mean short-term rental, either.

Do you really think it's called "off" when it's not off for any other reason than to fool users? They could make "off" actually mean off very easily.

Don't falsely quote, it's a disservice. The settings page never says "when this is turned off". It says what's happening in incredibly plain language and provides a link to the other settings which could confuse a user really attempting to fully disable the whole Bluetooth stack including OS level access. As others have stated, wanting to disable the ability of pairing is sometimes wanted while still allowing something like high precision location through Bluetooth scanning or other forms of 2.4GHz radio sampling. It's not entirely unreasonable for such a feature to exist, so to me it's not an unreasonable settings structure. Had they hidden the setting which could be conflicting with the user's request to disable all Bluetooth I would understand your point, but it's pretty clear what's happening when looking at the settings page.

Misquoting and falsely assuming things of others does a great disservice to your argument.

On Android 10 here, no such message on my Xiaomi Mi 8

I noticed that string about the additional settings disappears when those high precision location settings are disabled. Maybe you already have the precision location via WiFi/BT disabled?

But to 95% of users turning off Bluetooth means using the toggle, doesn't it?

Even if they state that somewhere in a hidden menu, its inappropriate and disrespectful.

Does improving device experience mean phoning home to Google to you?

When I do something to opt out, that should opt out. It is disingenuous to structure the preferences this way.

I don't see this setting in Android 10... does it mean that it is now "impossible" to completely turn it off?

I second this. On my Android One phone (so pretty much stock Android) with Android 10, all it says is: "When Bluethooth is turned on, your device can communicate with other nearby Bluetooth devices."

It's not at all clickbaity since "apps and services can still scan for nearby devices at any time" doesn't clearly indicate what's happening with that information. It should be better said as "To improve USER experience, apps and services can still scan for nearby devices at any time and extrapolate/derive/get location data, even when Bluetooth is off." This clearly indicates to someone that turning off bluetooth from the pull down menu doesn't make you invisible via blueooth which is what I've always expected.

You can't ask every user to RTFM. I have been toggling off bluetooth and location for a while to save battery but haven't noticed it. So, I am guessing a lot of users don't end up noticing it as well.

There are two issues with this implementation: 1. It's not privacy first. Toggling bluetooth should turn off everything. 2. It eats up battery/system-resources for a functionality that I don't want, causing me to have less control over my purchased device.

Apple seems to have figured out a compromise.

There is an icon for turning off data to a radio (wifi or Bluetooth, for example), and an entirely different icon for if the radio is completely off.

If you have an iPhone, you can see this by turning off wifi and also your cellular connection. The wifi icon will change from color to black-on-white, while the cellular icon will change from color to white-on-black. This indicates that the wifi connection can still be used for things like AirDrop, but the cellular connection is off.

That's better than nothing, but my response to your post was to try it on my phone and then mutter to myself "okay, I guess"

I don't think most iPhone users browse HN to glean hints about the meaning of such opaque affordances, I had no idea that was what was happening when I turned off WiFi. I just figured it was actually off.

I managed to figure it out. Maybe because I noticed the colors were different. I suspect other people have figured it out, too, since my ex-girlfriend describes me as, "the single most stupid person I've ever met."

Off should mean off.

They could do what Apple does, perhaps.

The article says turning off Location History "cripples" certain features of Android and Google.

That's a stretch. I have had Location History disabled for years and have yet to notice what crippled experience I suffered from, but I did learn today that my location is not being sent to Google when Bluetooth is turned off.

Disabling Location History seems like it has significant upside to me.

Think about it this way. If Location History had defaulted to "off" instead and "on", would you have opted in? For what feature or benefit? With what risks?

There was a time when Google Maps would simply refuse to work without having Location History turned on; not sure if that has changed by now.

That was never true. It was annoyingly aggresive, had some annoying UI limitations (e.g. it wouldn't remember past trips) but it was never fully unable to function.

I remember it not working.

It still only shows "home" and "work" addresses in one obscure part of the UI with history off, while the rest of the UI won't let you change or add saved addresses without turning history back on.

This is a false requirement. Google doesn't need to track my real-time location to allow me to tell it the location of my home or work.

It's due to a technical detail. Because of how the software was built, turning on Home/Work would have led to the data being slurped into the servers as a side effect of the overall architecture, so they had to block the Home/Work in no-History feature until they fix the data flow. Up to you to judge why they didn't prioritize fixing that bug earlier.

You couldn't even save locations (such as a "home" or "work" location) without allowing google to track your location history.

Yes, that sucked, which is why I mentioned it.

I have a screenshot that actually shows the locations you have saved before are still saved, it just does not let you access them, which proves this was just to annoy users.

I would say only giving the first voice direction when using maps to find a location is not working. I was using maps to find a place the GPS-map in my car didn't find, maps told which direction to start, but after starting to drive it did pop up a message that location history had to be turned on to get more directions

I recall it being true on my 2014-era phones (can't recall if it was a Moto G or a Pixel). I wrestled with turning Location Services on and off every time I wanted to navigate until I eventually gave up and left it on permanently. Opening the app with Location Services off would produce an (as far as I knew) undissmissable prompt demanding that Location Services be turned back on. Perhaps there was some way to work around this, but it's clear what message they were trying to send.

Don't mix Location Services and Location History (confusing but similarly named things - Google at it's best :P).

Location Services provide... location. Without it, Maps obviously won't work. Location History sends your location to Google servers and you should probably turn it off.

The thing the posters likely are noting is that maps (lowercase 'm', just a regular map) work totally fine without knowing where you are, and Google Maps should too.

On the LG phones I've used Google Maps is insanely slow when Location History is disabled. Same on the Samsung S7 my fiance uses.

Do you also have the Google service disabled? Because that will then fallback to pure GPS lock which needs of order of minutes to get a lock in cities and closed spaces. Since LH doesn't retrieve GPS data in background, the GPS location isn't warmed up and you need to wait for it.

No, I mean the search bar and some features of the app are slow.

Having location history means that Maps knows places I visit often, so they're highlighted on the map and in the search box, saving time if I want to navigate there or find out opening times. It speeds up time-to-fix with GPS. It allows Google Pay to have the supermarket loyalty card ready when I get to the checkout. Little things like that.

> It speeds up time-to-fix with GPS

There has been something seriously fucked with Google Maps in this particular regard. On my phone with my location/privacy settings, it takes Google Maps 5-10x times as long to get a location fix as it takes OSMAnd. It works eventually, but it's dog slow.

Last time I checked, Google Pay stores your credit card number in the cloud, which is not necessary. Both Apple Pay and Garmin Pay only store the card in an encrypted form locally.

So giving Google my location history so I can also give them my credit card numbers when they don't need those either is not considered a feature.

I use Google Maps frequently and have been bothered by any behavior changes there. My home address auto-completes easily enough and in some contexts Google clearly does seem to know my "Home" address (which I'd tell them if they just asked if they didn't want my lifetime location history along with it).

Google pay works on many different devices, something apple and garmin don't need at the same scale. I have google pay on a couple different laptops, phones, and tablets and wouldn't want to re-enter details 10 times.

I have google pay on a couple different laptops, phones, and tablets and wouldn't want to re-enter details 10 times.

If I save a credit card on my iPhone it saves that information to all of my iOS devices, and all of my Macs automatically. Even devices going back to 2012.

Google pay is also more of a competitor with Paypal than Apple pay. Not very many websites allow Apple pay on a desktop, for example.

>would you have opted in?

Yes.

>For what feature or benefit?

By the time I pull into my driveway my garage door has opened and the lights in my hallway have turned on.

If I'm working from home, my thermostat stays at its "comfy" setting. If I leave the geofence between certain hours during the week it goes into "ultra cheap-ass energy miser" mode.

When I am at a meeting, and I have another meeting in a different location, my Maps application checks the traffic to the route and tells me if I have to leave early due to congestion. This is especially useful for dentist appointments made six months ago that have slipped my mind.

When I turn on my car and my phone connects, it knows if I am likely to be heading to work or if I am heading home and will suggest the best of three routes to take depending on traffic.

If I am somewhere and have an idea, I hold my smartwatch up to my face and ask it to "remind me when I get to X to do Y" and then when I get to X a notification pops up to tell me to do Y.

I get hyper-local weather notifications. Just 5 minutes ago on my smartwatch a notification popped up saying that rain was starting. It then started raining. There have been times when I have been outside not expecting rain, had my watch say "oh man rain's a-comin!" and then I looked around at the clear skies and said "nuhuh... I looked at the forecast today and there's no rain" but then I went inside to check on the computer again and it started raining.

While driving I can just ask: hey give me directions to the nearest gas station, and it will. No looking at screens required.

>With what risks?

None. There are literally zero risks. Evil Ruskie hackers could haxxor all of my data and know that I go to work every (non-quarantined) day and go to Safeway every Sunday afternoon, and it would not change or endanger my life in any way whatsoever. Anything they could do with the data, they can do without.

This kind of hyper-connected lifestyle seems..... kind of exhausting. Constant barrage of information that you may or may not need; being reliant on many bits and pieces of services that change all the time (when they drop out of support or starts asking for money) in which you have to adapt or find alternatives to.

I see things in this list which require your current location, but it's not clear that any of them require storing your permanent location history.

Why is Google storing your location history if they don't need it to offer these services you care about?

Is this similar to Apple’s “off but not really off” modes for Bluetooth and WiFi where the toggle in Control Center keeps them active for certain purposes on iOS (and making it “really off” requires going to Settings)? Or is it different from that? I couldn’t really distinguish even after reading this article fully. The way to turn it off, described in the article, did seem very messy, and as with Android, the steps depend on the device and what (customized) Android it’s running.

I was so sick of this from iOS (because I don’t want WiFi to connect automatically in a different location or at 5 a.m.) that I have shortcuts readily accessible as widgets that turn these off, really off, when I want to.

My Pixel 3a XL does this with WiFi, I'm convinced it's never actually off. It will auto connect to remembered WiFi networks even when I "turn WiFi off".

Turn off location services with turning off wifi

Mine don't. Maybe Settings->Location->Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning is the setting that does it.

There you can disable whether apps and services are allowed to scan wifi and/or bluetooth even if they are turned off.

Maybe it's PNO

https://source.android.com/devices/tech/connect/wifi-scan

> On devices running Android 9 or lower, when the device is disconnected from Wi-Fi and the screen is off, PNO scans occur at 20 second intervals for the first three scans, then slow down to one scan every 60 seconds for all subsequent scans. PNO scanning stops when a saved network is found or the screen is turned on.

It's similar and it is used for "Find My" and other Apple services. There's enough reason why Apple won't change this and will plan to keep it on for other purposes though unless you completely turn it off in the settings "cough" "contact tracing" "cough".

That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a cough double entendre.

I have crappy wi-fi in my bedroom, but I'd still prefer that apps update themselves while I'm asleep.

The 5 am thing is actually perfect for me. I get to use LTE when browsing around at night, but it still downloads app updates over (slow) Wi-Fi in the early morning. By the time I'm awake around 8 am, it's all updated.

If you don't want to auto-join your wi-fi network you can change that in Settings for your network.

> If you don't want to auto-join your wi-fi network you can change that in Settings for your network.

That just makes joining a network cumbersome since I’d have to choose which network to join every time. Replacing one pain with another doesn’t sound great. As I said above, I have my shortcuts to deal with this annoyance.

Another solution to this, suggested by many when iOS 11 came with this design, is a three way toggle. But Apple plays to its tune, and rarely listens to users (or even to power users and popular people who write about it).

I’m so fed up of going to settings for exactly this reason, can you explain how you created these widgets please?

This is the exact same behaviour iOS shows - the BT stays on to allow for fast bluetooth pairing, indoor precise location, nearby communications and a few other things.

Last I checked the details, the data didn't leave the device but it was awhile ago.

Except that it does leave the device with android

Can you link to some source? Last time I checked it didn't if Location History was off.

> A third option on Android called “Device only” location allows a user to utilize only GPS to determine location, rather than “High accuracy,” which uses GPS, wifi, Bluetooth, and cellular signals. But even when a phone is in Device-only mode, beacon information is sent to Google when Bluetooth is off (though not when scanning is also disabled). If Location is turned off entirely, and then re-enabled, the phone resets to the High accuracy mode, making the setting hard to rely on.

This was removed in Android P, unfortunately.

When you consider this fact together with news such as this one is when it starts getting scary: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/13/nhs-coronaviru...

If you are tired of constant lies from Google Android, consider Librem 5 phone by Purism. It has hardware kill switches and is based on GNU/Linux, not Android.

https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

To paraphrase Arthur Dent: "This must be a meaning of the word off with which I was previously unaware"

Both the title and Google are misleading: Bluetooth is not off; it is not participating in Bluetooth transactions but it is still listening.

This is precisely why you shouldn't buy phones with an OS developed by a company who's main business is tracking people.

> The Pixel 4 and 4 XL received generally positive reviews from critics [...] but were criticized for their poor battery life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_4#Reception

I really got to get around to compiling one of those Android forks with telemetry turned off. As much as people like to criticize G, at least they released the code. The world would be a much worse place if both members of the phone duopoly hid their source code.

I'm starting to think...so what? The ads I see are either comically irrelevant or easily explained by the search terms or video I selected. This targeted claim is just to dupe their customers.

Given the big security threat Bluetooth provides, this seems pretty bad. If someone wants it off, there is a reason they want it off.

It amazes me there are not more scandals yet with Google senior staff abusing the incredible data access they have. When it happens at the NSA, they can cover it up. But Google must be working very hard to keep it hush hush.

They do the same thing with wifi.

Shocked! I wouldn't really care if they were upfront about it, but when they try to hide it, it makes it adversarial and since I consider myself technical, I must do as my cat does and make it stop.

They are upfront about it, it’s right there in the settings. When you first set up a Google phone, it will Warm you that WiFi does scanning for location services, and the Bluetooth setting is in the same page.

And does it tell you how to totally disable them?

It asks you during setup if you'd like to disable it.

What's all this data about me worth to Google? It can't be that much. I've never bought something from an internet ad in my life. With the whole world going SaaS I'm amazed there's no "Google Private" subscription where I can pay them five dollars a month to give me what they already do without collecting data about me.

Frankly I think personal data is every bit as much of an addiction as heroin.

> What's all this data about me worth to Google? It can't be that much. I've never bought something from an internet ad in my life.

Just spitballing here, but it seems conceivable that information about you could help them improve their behavior modelling and consequently help them advertise more effectively to other people.

Well if this comes as a surprise to you if you're a regular here, perhaps you need to read this article in its entirety, because it's clear that a sentence like "Privacy by Google" is a valid oxymoron.

Luckily I have a throwaway dual SIM dumbphone to use, so I should be covered...

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