Facebook Bluetooth Beacons | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Bluetooth Beacons

facebook.com

118 pointsjondot84 comments

"Designed for privacy"

Let me guess, instead of broadcasting a textual description of the location and a Facebook URL that's visited if you click the interaction button, the beacon contains a URL that's automatically downloaded from Facebook every time you enter the location (presumably to download "up to date and accurate information").

Couldn't find any details on the page though, anyone know?

The page has enough details to deduce it, I think. My understanding is that the Facebook app will download all of the local ads in the area your phone reports you as being in tied to the beacon ids. Your phone will then display the ads of the beacons it sees nearby.

It's actually a bit laudable that they didn't seem to go the route of "report to Facebook all the nearby beacons", although perhaps that's simply not necessary since wifi networks are everywhere and mobile OS'es already do the "heavy lifting" w.r.t. using those for device localization.

1. "The beacons don't [...] change the kind of location information Facebook receives."

I thought the beacons would transfer content to the device.

Beacons never do that. They're basically a BLE pinger connected to a battery; their only purpose is to keep broadcasting "HEY THERE MY NAME IS 1234-5678-90AB-CDEF" over 2.4GHz.

This will work in a very similar way to iBeacons. Basically BLE beacons can transmit 31 (or 32? I can't remember exactly) bytes of data in their advertisements.

Apple uses that to send GUIDs which they look up in their online database. Google uses it in their URIBeacon proof-of-concept to send URIs (but only really really short ones) that then don't depend on an online database of IDs (or rather, it uses the DNS database).

Facebook's will use Apple's approach. The beacon transmit's your facebook business ID. The facebook app then looks that up.

It is very unlikely that the business will receive any direct information about physical visitors - though facebook probably give them aggregate statistics ("150 people looked at facebook while in your shop this month"). I think facebook's main motivation (other than making Facebook more useful) will be to get this information for themselves so they can improve their advertising targeting (i.e. if you've been to clothes shops, show you clothes adverts).

It's probably not that great from a privacy point of view, but I doubt they're doing anything really sinister.

From a privacy point of view it's pretty much taking active "checking in" and making it automated. If you don't mind that then enable the feature in your Facebook app. If you do mind that, then don't (though I guess there's a good chance you're someone who doesn't have a Facebook app installed? "you" the hypothetical reader, not specifically IshKebab)

Facebook just fix the biggest issue with (i)beacons today : You need to have an app that read them install on your device to get notify. This was a show stopper for most small business application as you will have needed the small business app installed on your phone. Now you will just need you costumer to have Facebook installed and they certainly do. This could revive the (i)Beacon industry.

One more reason not to install the app and use the smartphone browser for Facebook, and not Chrome if on Android, but Firefox of course. But then again, I rarely have Bluetooth on, only at home for streaming music.

I don't quite understand; what's the reason, exactly?

The app uploads your contacts, and probably monitors many other things that you don't want. Firefox won't let Facebook do this. And I prefer Firefox as Chrome will do similar things for Google - not the contacts, but keeping history of websites you visit etc.

But in this particular case, this is something that I want it to monitor automatically in most cases, and it provides a lot of useful information based on this monitoring.

I actually find both of these features to be really useful.

It's an invasion of privacy for either you or (if you don't care) your contacts' privacy. You're probably on the wrong forum if you don't consider these "features" to be overreaching.

Yes I don't recommend installing the Facebook app, the application is doing shady things with contacts, messages and tries to gather as much data as it can. For the Bluetooth, there is not a lot of usages today anyway and it's consuming battery (which is the main problem on smartphones) so switching it off is the best option in my opinion.

I certainly dont have the facebook app on my phone. Mostly because it hoovers up the phones contact list, and some of that information isn't mine to share with them, and I wouldn't share it even if it was.

That's nice, but your friends probably already did it and Facebook have graphed you anyway. Whatsapp also uploads all your contacts btw.

I've never used whatsapp, and just because some of my friends are on facebook, doesn't mean all of them are, and I especially don't want autoinvites going to my professional contacts.

Is that on Android? The iOS version doesn't appear to request access to the contacts database.

There is little mention of the technology used, but if Facebook is really interested in the kind of openness they claim when talking about Internet.org etc., they should adopt an open standard.

The Physical Web project (http://google.github.io/physical-web/) aims to set up such a standard based on existing technologies (Bluetooth, mDNS etc.), but it's being held back by lack of browser support. If Facebook were to adopt this, it would be a huge boost.

They're very likely using the same tech as iBeacons (which is part of Bluetooth LE)

But that's the thing: the iBeacon protocol does very little to specify the data payload, whereas Physical Web Beacons always broadcast URLs, for example.

"Designed for privacy" part made me laugh. A lot.

Why? It is privacy minded in a way. The business does not get to know any data about who was near the button or who was near the button. I mean if this wasn't designed with privacy in mind you would probably expect the business owner to get a list of all the Facebook users who were in the business.

FB knows the list of visitors from their query logs and in principle may later sell it to the business either directly or as a more targeted ad.

Still this beacon network may be also alternatively mapped (or ripped from FB servers) by the community, released as an offline db and then used as a fully private navigation aid or something like this.

There already are Facebook pages with locations on them so I don't see the need for beacons to already be able to do this. And Facebook also already likely uses users locations to pinpoint where they are. As it stands right now you already can get notifications if you have location services on that you're near a business and will ask if you want to "check in".

So I don't see how this changes anything. They already have this data, the beacon doesn't change that.

The fact that they want beacons suggests that the location information is not as accuracte or reliable as they would like to; quantitative changes also matter.

Well this method can be faster and can encourage more businesses to take up a web presence as a device like this is free. Not only this but the physical device like this and notifications on the users phone can push more users to interact with the businesses. This seems to be being pushed forward in order to encourage a greater presence of businesses with more interaction through Facebook. The more interaction that Facebook can bring between the customer and the business the better for Facebook, but also the better for the business.

There's a pretty big difference between "private for the businesses, but Facebook continues to know All, as is usual for them" which is what you basically describe, and "actually private, including from Facebook" which is probably what a reasonable person would understand from "designed for privacy."

Well I mean Facebook kinda has to know based on how this works. It seems like the beacon essentially instructs the app to grab data for a specific page and display it. Based on this Facebook will know that a page was requested. Page data changes, it wouldn't make much sense for the button to store that data. The unique id however for a page wouldn't be changing, so that is what the button uses.

If you're that concerned about such a feature it is easy enough to not use the app, or simply not use this feature of the app.

You're probably right, but it doesn't suddenly become OK to lie just because the truth is evident if you think about it. Especially when the average person does not have the knowledge needed to reach that conclusion.

I think you're thinking about it more from the technical persons view of privacy. Most non tech people do not think about these kinds of privacy concerns or worry about what Facebook knows about them. They already have likely shared a ton of data with Facebook and don't care and likely don't care to share more. However they may be concerned if they found out every business they go to was getting a bunch of personal information about them.

So I think the general consumer would be more concerned about all these random places they go knowing who they are and details about them. This is what I believe Facebook is trying to state, that no business gets any of your information. Not that Facebook doesn't get anything. So yes they poorly worded what exactly is private and what isn't.

Do you think the average non-technical person interprets "designed for privacy" as "Facebook gets information about all your movements"? I wouldn't think so personally.

Has anyone else been keeping an eye on estimote? Any idea how this will measure up against their offering? In many ways this looks similar too. Just wondering if this is going to make business hard for estimote. Although, estimote just seems to be a lot more developer friendly, and open to more applications.

I really like Estimote, but it seems like they're selling premium hardware in a space that's racing to the bottom. Most beacons really don't need the temperature sensors or accelerometers. I finally got my nearables order last month, over six months after the first promised delivery date, and as great as those are ten dollars each is still a bit much IMO. Their solid SDK and developer relationships aren't going to matter too much if stuff like Facebook's beacons take off, making it so that businesses don't even need people to download an extra app.

Just got one of these:

http://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Near-field-Positioning-Wirel...

and it works great.

"Designed for privacy" -> misleading people who don't understand they are being traced and manipulated. Disgusting...

Yes facebook, please track me more. Bluetooth -> Off.

This looks incredible. They've taken the fact that people will scroll through their Facebook feeds when sitting at a cafe or shopping at a retail store and monetized it! Also, if they were to integrate push notifications for every time you walked into a store to inform people of your specials that could work great.

I don't really get why you need to have a beacon for this though? The Facebook app is already installed and knows your location anyway. Provide businesses with a page to enter the details to be pushed to the phone and then just let the app pop up a notification once the user enters the associated geofence.

If the location is not accurate enough, you can tie it to a Wifi point of the business (the Wifi doesn't even need to be open). And it doesn't need to use Bluetooth at all (which I always leave off on all my phones until I really need it as it consumes a lot of battery).

Given the fact that the Facebook app is already installed anyway on literally any phone, they could pull this off right away. This is what Foursquare should have done years ago to survive.

I think you might underestimate how big is the error in the normal (wifi) location sensing (e.g. see here[1]). Bluetooth beacons add a much more localized spot, so much less likely to pop up the wrong place on your device, which is very important for this to be any real use.

[1]: https://gigaom.com/2012/08/17/how-much-better-is-gps-over-wi...

Yup, that might be... though theoretically it might be possible to calibrate this in a more fine tuned manner if you know/have access to the WiFi hot spot/box beforehand.

Exactly. GPS could probably work well enough in suburbs and other areas with fairly wide spaced buildings, but in a urban environment there could easily be ten or more businesses within the margin of error for GPS location detection.

Not all businesses have Wifi. Does an out of the box equivalent of iBeacon for Wifi exist? I'd be interested if you know of one.

Sure, buy an AP and just let it sit there unconnected. As soon as a few smartphones with their Wifi and GPS turned on pass by it, its position will make part of location databases and be used by smartphones to locate themselves.

I meant one that's as accessible to use out of the box like an iBeacon or this new fangled FB beacon, but with Wifi instead of BLE.

I'm not saying one doesn't exist. I'm genuinely curious whether one does.

That's what I'm saying: any Wifi AP is usable out of the box. Just plug it to a power socket, and it'll start broadcasting beacon packets that smartphones can use to geolocate, just like with iBeacon. You don't need to do anything.

Understood. I meant one geared at non-technical people. More of a plug it in and data starts being collected and pushed.

But iBeacon doesn't collect any data. It does exactly the same as an WiFi AP - continually sends beacons to local listeners.

In both cases, it's the client device (smartphone, tablet, etc) that's doing the collecting.

Ah ok, got it. Thanks!

> Also, if they were to integrate push notifications for every time you walked into a store to inform people of your specials that could work great.

That, I guess, would kill it, were it enabled by default or not easily turned off. Some people may like being shoved ads in their faces, but others hate it. I personally would happily switch to another store if they were to start push-spamming me.

How is it monetized? The beacon is free to the business, the customer doesn't pay Facebook to view the business's page.

This could be huge for small bands and artists. Yesterday at a show in Berlin the drummer kept talking about the bands Facebook page and handing out paper with the link. If a band could just have a becon that sent out push notifications to the fb app it could increase engagement significantly.

There's no way to implement that on iOS, afaik. While the app is running, it can scan for nearby beacons and send that info to Facebook to pull down notifications. Push notifications would have to originate on Facebook's end, though.

Beacons can't send push notifications. Beacons are equivalent of light houses in 2.4GHz spectrum. They just keep broadcasting their presence and send their UUID. Everything else is done via the apps installed on your device.

(That's, coincidentally, is also why a lot of dream scenarios for beacons can't take off - they literally require you to have an Internet connection and a vendor-specific app on your phone to do anything interesting, which is not something you can expect of people outdoors. Facebook has a really good chance of making some of the beacon ideas work, because a/ almost everyone has their app, and b/ it's an app that people actually want to use outdoors, and they power up their mobile connection for that.)

I've read some papers that claims that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signal does interfere each other. And in my group project, we tried out transferring files from phone to phone via Bluetooth while there is another file transfer going on from laptop to laptop via Wi-Fi; and the result is that the time taken for the Bluetooth transfer to complete is longer than that when there is no Wi-Fi file transfer going on. Well, it may depend on the version of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi frequency used though. (but in my scenario, we're using 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0)

Of course they interfere, Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE use the 2.4-2.48 ISM band, and so does WiFi. WiFi has up to 14 overlapping 20MHz channels, and Bluetooth 4.0 has 40 2MHz channels. Though I guess Bluetooth could be clever enough to avoid the channels with interference.

BLE has 3 advertising channels, spaced to try to avoid the WiFi channels. Once a connection is made (probably not relevant for beacons anyway), it uses frequency hopping over the other 37 channels to avoid interference as much as possible.

Yes, they can sometimes use overlapping bands. However Bluetooth tries to minimize that by using FHSS [0].

I've witnessed it first-hand with my last ultrabok (lenovo yoga 13, 2013), which uses a cheap radio (WiFi + Bluetooth) that shares several components, including a narrow USB bus. End-result: I couldn't use a BL mouse because my WiFi would go dial-up slow [1].

Macbooks had that problem too, FWIW [2]. The ONLY solution? Using a 5 GHz Wifi.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spect... [1] https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-Edge-Yoga-Lavie-Z-Flex/Y... [2] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6601731

Bluetooth beacons work by advertising only. The BLE advertising bands are at the start of the WiFi band, after the end, and in the middle (between two common WiFi channels). This minimises the likelihood of interference.

They can interfere, but there's so little data transferred that it's not a practical concern.

It seems to me like this is the realisation of the personalised advertising billboards they had in "Minority Report", except instead of billboards it's your phone (for now...).

Well I'd doubt it will ever be billboards. They're so clunky and impersonal. In my opinion, they'll get pushed to your most distracting or annoying device (watch, glasses, surgically implanted HUD, etc).

This seems to be a "standard" iBeacon with Facebook branding? Or is there anything different here?

There's nothing interesting in any iBeacon sold, they're just (mostly) Nordic 2.4GHz chips in cool package. What matters is the software and related services; in this case Facebook has a chance to make iBeacons actually useful for retailers because they want to make Facebook app itself be able to use beacons to deliver you localized information. With a typical beacons you'd have to install a special app for every store or service that wants to use them.

Looks like a cool idea and I'm excited for Facebook, but I'm also quite happy I never have Bluetooth enabled except when I'm at home. Do other HNers tend to have it on? Bluetooth headsets seem to be on the decline but with cars getting smarter I'm not really sure.

I use BT only at home for streaming music to the stereo, and I guess I'm not the only one.

I always have it on. I'm already being tracked using Wi-fi and GPS; BT beacons are unlikely to pose much more of a threat.

If you don't want to be tracked, you're better off not installing Facebook or any other closed-source app with BT or location permissions.

I use it to stay connected to my Pebble

I have it on all the time to connect to my car - I do sometimes turn it off when I'm trying to preserve the battery.

Anyone with an Apple Watch will have BT on, and presumably those people have some disposable cash to spend at your business.

The problem with beacons to date is the lack of a happy medium between controlled network and openness for 3rd party developers.

Most developers are not Facebook and won't be able to ship thousands and thousands of beacons to businesses for their apps.

Also, this is a super haphazard deployment by FB. Their installation instructions are "take it out of the box, set it up somewhere in a central area and you're good to go." Well not really - these beacons are going to end up in weird places, giving people "Place Tips" when they're walking down an alley, or live upstairs from a restaurant with a FB beacon.

Quick a dirty beacon: set the SSID of your wifi network to a URL.

Ha, I made something very similar 9 years ago as a POC, but the tech and battery life didn't really work back then, J2ME was a bitch.

Give a shop a "beacon". Track customers in a mall. Find general walking patterns. Give time limited offers. Give awards if you stay in a shop for x minutes. Main one I liked Find a friend feature.

Also looked at installing them in Theme Parks and at Concerts mainly for the Find a friend.

Probably a privacy nightmare, bluetooth battery nightmare.

I know someone working on this right now and a bunch of cities are already on board to get the data.

The first thing that came to mind was "wow Life Invader isn't so far off as a parody". Life Invader was a parody on Facebook in Grand Theft Auto V.

Am I missing something, or can you just leave Bluetooth off for this to be a non-issue from a privacy standpoint?

I usually never have it on anyway due to battery drain.

Practical question: I participate in promoting events that take places in different venues every time. Will these beacons work for business like this?

I bet you can buy ads to promote your events. FB will know the location of the beacons, and can serve your ads to people walking there.

I actually saw this in full effects near alexandra steakhouse Cupertino. It is a really impressive experience. and also surprisingly, it works for even when I was quite far away, at least like 20 meters. I wonder how the technology works. Dose it has something to do with the one way transmission?

I doubt this does anything unless you have location services enabled for Facebook.

Most people do, of course.

I'm impressed with their focus on privacy, but for me as a business owner I am probably not as interested in my customers privacy as my customers are in their own, so the privacy issue should probably be communicated more to fb users than to businesses.

Secondly, this page is very vague about what benefit I as a business owner will gain from service. Seriously, what will I gain?

I remember Facebook announced a free WiFi service for businesses, where I as a business owner could give my customers free WiFi if they checked-in at my location on Facebook. Now there's a benefit for the business!

If as a business owner you're not interested in your customers' privacy, remind me not to do business with you.

You misinterpreted what he wrote. It's entirely possible to care about customer privacy a great deal yet the customer will generally still care more. It's an exceedingly rare business that would actually care more about your privacy than you would yourself.

And it's entirely possible a business could care too much for your privacy by taking cash only ("Sorry, credit and debit cards will track you. Checks leave a paper trail."), have a faraday cage around the entire building to block any RF signals ("You don't want big brother tracking you!"), etc. while you just want to buy that item with your credit card and be able to get messages while shopping.

The main selling point of this is that it is private. Not that it gives my customers or me some sort of benefit.

If your product has a benefit, I am interested. If it cannot supply this benefit with reasonable privacy, I will have to decline.

I'm so sick of FB. FB pages are really a joke at this point.

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