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Comment by dantiberian | Hacker News Reader

One privacy issue I'm seeing is that it seems like the users device still needs to make a request to get the metadata? So the retailer could use fingerprinting of requests to track people around. I wasn't entirely clear on where the metadata comes from so I could have this wrong.

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> information about users won’t be saved until they click a link, so the beacon owner will not know anyone was nearby until they visit the website

It sounds like the metadata is sourced from the bluetooth-broadcast, not via a separate request.

However, the specification itself[0] only has room for the URL and the telemetry data, so how they achieve this in practice is questionable.

[0] https://github.com/google/eddystone/blob/master/protocol-spe...

The beacons them selves have proximity sensing built in, that at least how the "ibeacons" works...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy#Proximity...

Proximity detection is done by the receiver. An iBeacon is just a dumb broadcaster.

It's not the device to fetch metadata. There is an additional service from Google to prevent that - see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9940474

Probably easier just to sniff their various MAC addresses.

iOS devices randomise the MAC when scanning to avoid this.

It actually doesn't in most cases, last I heard:

http://blog.airtightnetworks.com/ios8-mac-randomization-anal...

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