Tracking People Using Bluetooth 65
damdam writes "A Dutch guy seems to have set up a small network of bluetooth scanners. He has all the information logged to a central database and you can search it over the web. On his website it says "Some of these matches were only minutes apart. Therefore I could even calculate the approximate speed of someone moving from one location to another.". There are also some interesting statistics on his site showing traffic volume in his hometown (based on bluetooth signals) and he even lists popularity of certain Nokia phones. It's interesting to see how much information an individual can gather using old equipment."
Re:Bluetooth Attacks (Score:5, Interesting)
Specifically, people would use bluetooth to discover other people with active devices (on trains or what have you), and send the message "toothing?" as an invitation to have sex in a nearby bathroom or similar. The media of course lapped it up, and for a while there was quite a bit of talking about what exactly you could and couldn't do over bluetooth on a standard phone.
Of course, it eventually turned out the whole "toothing" thing was a hoax. But it wouldn't surprise me if there were a lot of very confused people on trains around the UK for a while.
Go for the Macs (Score:5, Interesting)
I won't comment on Apple's policy in doing so, and I'll leave you to figure out what kinds of social engineering and hacking exploits this opens the door to. I'm just sayin', that's all.
Cool (Score:5, Interesting)
The next step would be to scale the network up to cover an entire city or country. Perhaps he might like to consider using an RFID scanner in addition to the Bluetooth one, so that RFID chips being carried by people could also be used to identify them. Just in case the people decide they want some privacy. When RFID chips are widely used for stock control, it will be difficult to avoid buying things that contain them, and they can't be turned off. Robust identification could be provided by the "cloud" of RFID chips carried by each person.
It's amazing when you think of what is now technically possible, given a sufficiently large budget.
Re:Bluetooth Attacks (Score:3, Interesting)
Or in other words, it's orgy time!
Also good for tracking on smaller scales (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bluetooth Attacks (Score:5, Interesting)
Males and Females are by law not allowed to mix in the same room (of a restaurant) so they use their Bluetooth for contact through the separations.
like a horror story (Score:4, Interesting)
With the kind of electronic surveillance we have going on now, the technology available, it would be so easy to fuck with people. Nevermind the Orwell angle, which we're already well familiar with. Consider the "stalker cop" scenario, someone who is placed in a position of authority which he then abuses. A nut could stalk and terrorize someone without ever leaving the computer. There was a story about Perverted Justice that seemed too outlandish to be true but has not yet been debunked -- the PJ founder had a detractor that he wanted to get revenge against. He posed as a hot chick in chat and carried on an affair with the guy for months, up to and including the guy divorcing his wife and flying out to another state to meet his new lover. Then bang, the PJ guy lowers the boom. Ok, so one part of me says that the guy must have been a credulous boob but the other part of me says even so, the PJ guy sank hundreds of hours into this psycho revenge. That's a scary level of commitment.
I guess what I'm getting at is that all this technology is giving people ways to fuck with other people that haven't even yet been conceptualized. Planting kiddie porn on the soon-to-be-ex's computer and calling the cops is barely scratching the surface.
Roommate tracker (Score:5, Interesting)
I also played around with gathering some information and playing it via Festival on arrival, "welcome back so-and-so, you were away for 10 hours and 23 minutes. You have 143 new emails, 132 marked as spam." Could be expanded a lot with other functions; music presets, wake my computers, etc. Anyway, the system fell into disuse after the computer was moved and the cat ate the speaker wire. But it was pretty interesting to see how easy it was to use Bluetooth as a presence detector, with a few lines of shell script. The phones didn't even need to be set in Discoverable mode, once the mac addresses were gathered.
This kind of thing is a piece of cake for the various secretive agencies to do to you on a global level, and they don't even need Bluetooth...every cell phone is a little tracking device. Too bad that power is several orders of magnitude more difficult for the public to obtain, as it is a centralized service much like the government itself. Sure, you can track your kids' phones if you pay Sprint some extra cash...but the head of the NSA can see where everyone with your last name had lunch today, while you can't log in and make sure he didn't skip work and go to the golf course instead. This is just a small example of the ways we're gradually being tagged and tracked, and it's a good think to have people aware and thinking of it. The power may be in the right hands for the most part, but it can be misused so easily.
Same thing but betterish? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://whereabouts.eecs.umich.edu/ [umich.edu]
Having played with the system April of 06, all I can say is their website should be updated. They have this great mapping system that will pinpoint where in the building any registered people are standing (and let you do queries). This is variably accurate depending on how close you are to different wifi access points, so with small rooms like a photocopy room on the 4th floor, it will occasionally project your location reflected across the hallway. The system was totally the "people-mapping-radar" as shown in movies except for a robust privacy architecture. Each registrant device tied to a person can have settings based on location and more general rules. You have to explicitly add general groups of users, or specific people to your allow list before they can query the system for your location.
Anyways I figured it was an appropriate link in this topic.