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Comment by seanalltogether | Hacker News Reader

This is the reason I've been so frustrated with working with bluetooth devices on Android. Android places all bluetooth usage under Location permissions, and if you need talk to bluetooth devices in the background, users have to manually consent to background location tracking, even though that's not what we want to actually do.

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Is this because it automatically becomes possible to obtain location when accessing Bluetooth?

It's because it's easy to estimate someone's location from nearby Bluetooth beacons or wifi access points.

This is in fact what most iOS apps that ask for Bluetooth permission use it for. https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/19/20867286/ios-13-bluetooth...

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, none of this is true for the Android devices I've owned. Vendor specific perhaps? Devious way to do it. Doesn't Apple suffer with the same problem (location+bluetooth tied?)

It depends on the targetSdkVersion. https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/05/19/android-12-apps-won...

That article says that from Android 6-12 if an app wanted to scan for bluetooth it ALSO had to require the location permission. Not that BT had hidden location information. As of Android 12 apps could bluetooth scan without requesting/enabling location.

That's what the person you're replying to said as well. In order to use Bluetooth, their app had to request a location permission from the user. If they wrote an app targeting a version of Android before that range, the permission would be requested for them even if their code didn't explicitly request it. If they targeted a version in that range, they would have to request the permission at build time.

IIANM, this is only when _scanning_: as soon as you pair/bond with a device, the app can communicate with it even with the location permission switched off.

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