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Comment by pierre | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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.

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.

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