What your Bluetooth devices reveal

> We’ve normalised the idea that Bluetooth is always on. Phones, laptops, smartwatches, headphones, cars, and even medical devices constantly broadcast their presence. The standard response to privacy concerns is usually “nothing to hide, nothing to fear.”

I guess anything you send out can be used to profile you.

Some of my friends live on a farm near a semi busy road, however far enough from other farms to not be able to receive their wifi. They showed me their router logging all the wifi accesspoints that appear/disappear. There where A LOT of access points named "Audi", "BMW", "Tesla" etc. similar to those devices leaking bluetooth data. We had a discussion that it would be easy to determine who was passing by at what times due to these especially when you can "de-anonymize" the data for example link it to a numberplate.

I believe shopping malls often use such signals (wifi, bluetooth) to track what your travel pattern through the mall is. They know what section of the store you spend most of your time in and what storefronts you stall at.

Tangential, sort of: in the early days of mobile phones for the masses, when there was no WiFi/3G in the underground, I will often enable Bluetooth in my phone, look for nearby devices and try to match names and looks.

That was before everyone had their "John's IPhone" or "Samsung A55" boring names everywhere and some of us cared to personalise our device's name.

Anyone else played this game?

This is not very different from collecting visual cues. You can notice a delivery van arriving. You can see the driver's face, same with passers-by. The biggest difference is that a camera needs to be more conspicuous, while a BT receiver can be invisible and undetectable. Much cheaper, too.

The part about passively detecting delivery driver patterns from a home office is wild. I knew BLE was chatty but being able to correlate device pairs (phone + watch) to build movement profiles with just a Pi is genuinely unsettling. Makes me want to audit which of my devices are broadcasting when they don't need to be.

Bluetooth desperately needs mac randomization. Wifi mac randomization is welcome, but it doesn't do much when many (most?) people have bluetooth accessories broadcasting a persistent identifier whenever they're on.

Ring: thank you for the idea, "Introducing Ring Face-Off, face masks covering faces during a break-in is no an issue for Ring, we will track the thieves until they reveal their face to our Ring network."

I can assure you this has been talked about and is known and it's why you still find a headset port on devices handed out to government officials, though most of them ignore the advice to not use bluetooth.

"We agreed on a 150-day disclosure window". Isn't that longer than Google Project Zero gives to release fixes?

About 10 years ago i had HomeAssistant running and thacking my bluetooth devices. It does so per default by jus memorizing a mac adress an recording when it's visible and when not. No need for pairing or anythung. It also stores the custom name if available.

Anyway, the default dashboard also automatically generated a view when my neighbours "Katie's iPhone' was at home and when not, until I actively deleted it and the data it stored.

This could be used for a truly eye-opening art installation: a screen that as you walk by it, tells you when you were last there..

Even wilder would be to buy data on you in real time and display that.

Wonder what the difference is between this and: https://github.com/ArgeliusLabs/Chasing-Your-Tail-NG

you said " blocking ads network-wide with AdGuard". It's better to block it with a Pihole.

Emit at your own peril

The project describes - and shows - a web interface.

Is there a simple CLI interface that can be redirected or pipelined into other tools ?

I suspect the e-scooters left around town (Lime, Bird, etc) are massive Bluetooth / LoRa dragnets. You pay them to increase coverage or visibility to social hot spots.

Doesn't HackRF with Cha0s do something similar?

ran something similar on a home network once and was surprised how many of my neighbors' devices showed up with full manufacturer names and model numbers. you don't even need to try hard.

> This isn’t about paranoia. It’s about understanding the trade-offs

> Bluetooth mesh networks—no internet required, no servers, no phone numbers

LLM slop. Both the article and the Python script

Wait doesn't BLE randomize the UUIDs?

Has anyone ever studied what happens with Bluetooth contention where thousands of people are gathered in a small space?

Like a marathon mass-start with 10,000 sometimes 20,000 or more people

How does bluetooth handle that? Or it doesn't?

I read an article in 2012 about the feds (DHS?) placing Bluetooth enabled devices along I5 in Seattle. They were able to make profiles of people based on what Bluetooth devices they had in their cars. Is anyone familiar with this? I've periodically tried to Google it and can't find anything about it