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).
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 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.
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.
Misquoting and falsely assuming things of others does a great disservice to your argument.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It absolutely does not warn you that it is keeping some of those services going in the background.
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.
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!"
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.
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.)
(Not for nefarious/tracking reasons.)
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.
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.
on edit: changed you to one and your to the.
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
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.
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.
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.
I still seem to miss the "added bonus" compared with disabling the bluetooth completely.
When I do something to opt out, that should opt out. It is disingenuous to structure the preferences this way.
They could do what Apple does, perhaps.
And are you implying that Google is cataloging my SSID even though I have it "hidden?"
> 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.
Interesting. I've never seen it show up before. EDIT: I probably just wasn't looking for it.
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.