Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Beacons are Bluetooth devices that emit simple signals that smartphones can pick up.

A beacon in a New York City phone booth ad would need to recognize a corresponding app to push beacon-linked content to that phone.

From what I can see from reading the article this isn't the scary "things that watch you without your knowledge" but more like "things you can connect to if you're nearby" - and given that there's WiFi hotspots and other things in this category too, it doesn't seem all that frightening. In other words you'd have to have allow your phone to connect to them for them to gather any info, and in that case it's not much worse than connecting to a WiFi hotspot setup for marketing purposes (e.g. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/19... ).

(The fact that the majority of people leave their phones in a "promiscuous" mode with all the radios enabled and constantly looking for things to connect to, and submissively install apps without reading their privacy policies/terms of use carefully, is a different although related issue - but this is something you can educate yourself and protect against.)

It does seem a bit exaggerated:

"In its current iteration, a Gimbal beacon requires a third-party app to trigger advertisements, and requires those apps to receive 'opt-in' permission from users in order to collect data and send notifications. (Users, of course, also need to have Bluetooth enabled.) ... Gimbal-powered apps may collect your current location, the time of day you passed the beacon, and details about your device."

If the beacons are doing anything more, it is not reported in this article.

It is however a rather small step to such a 3. party app being bundled with your branded phone, which you've opt-ed into by buying the phone.

Then let's wait for that step to happen before jumping to conclusion.

Are there any rules or precedent preventing this? Or is it a chicken-and-egg not-enough-beacons-out-there-to-make-it-worth-it type situation?

One smells like conclusions are a bit premature, the other smells more like inevitability.

If you turn on wifi tether mode, you are broadcasting your unique Mac address. Not sure if you have just BT headset running, can they sniff an unique address from the air way.

> (The fact that the majority of people leave their phones in a "promiscuous" mode ... )

Not everyone really understands what's going on with their phones or real intent of others (i.e the stores who provide wifi) so I think it unfair to lay blame on consumers for being 'uneducated'. There is a lot more overlap between 'things that watch you' and 'things you can connect to' than people realise. I'm reminded of the London bin tracking of last summer [1].

[1] http://qz.com/112873/this-recycling-bin-is-following-you/

Personally, I disable both WiFi and Bluetooth unless I'm actively using it in a trusted location for this very reason.

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