Bluetooth Spam In Public Spaces

mrwireless writes with a bellwether from The Netherlands of a problem that is bound to spread. Judging by the CAN SPAM Act, the US would be even less likely than the EU to classify Bluetooth-borne commercial spam as spam. "The Dutch OPTA, a national telecommunications watchdog, has decided not to label commercial Bluetooth messages as spam (in Dutch, but Babelfish works). These messages seem to fall through a loophole in European laws against spam since they do not travel through an 'intermediary network.' The issue was raised last week when a Dutch broadcasting agency outfitted a number of bus stops so they would send a promotional video of an upcoming show to passersby. Although the messages first asked if people wanted to watch the video, the article quotes a lawyer who believes that this does not qualify as 'opt-in' advertising. As more and more people leave Bluetooth turned on to make use of their Bluetooth headsets, Bluetooth close-range messaging, such as through bluejacking, is increasingly being exploited for commercial purposes."

Comments

Re:I don't understand advertisers

[Mike89]

Yep, cause people handing out leaflets in the streets, that's *never* been effective.

I don't know about in the past, but at least now (in Melbourne, Australia), it's extremely ineffective. People handing out pamphlets are completely shunned, all they do is block up the sidewalks.

For further proof, you should watch this video from 'The Chaser's War On Everything' (comedy show over here) - they go to busy areas with $20 notes, calling "Free money? Free money?" waving it in people's faces - everyone ignores them, says no, or tries extremely hard to avoid them.

Also, here's another video related to advertising from them which may give you all a laugh ;-).

Re:Please start doing it.

[quasinfinity]

I find the discussion for this article a little out of touch with reality... except the post before this which made mention to disabling settings.

All devices (cell phones, PDAs, computers, etc) with bluetooth have two sets of options when you turn the bluetooth in them on. You can choose to make your device discoverable or not, and connectable or not. For any two devices to continually connect to each other they both have to have connectivity enabled (well duh), and they both have to be paired(one exception to the pairing rule, below). To pair devices, at least one must be discoverable, then the other searches for "discoverable devices." When the discovering device finds the discoverable one you exchange a passkey (so you know it's not Joe Blow's phone across the room), and they're paired. Paired devices will always connect to each other so long as connectivity is enabled on both devices. Discoverability never needs to be turned on unless a new device is being paired or you want to receive a business card or something else that uses the object push profile (which is the exception to the pairing rule).

So the way bluetooth transmits information is different depending on the information being sent. Music for instance needs to be continually streamed, while connecting to the net over bluetooth is more sporadic transmission. To acknowledge this, the bluetooth standard has several different profiles that transmit the data in different ways depending on what is being sent. Devices will only have access to the profiles that the manufacturer decides that device needs. As earlier stated, the object push profile is special, it can transmit data to any discoverable (or already paired) device. This is because the object push profile is only used to send short text-based messages, such as that business card I mentioned.

Thus, I'm going to make the safe assumption that these ads are being sent using bluetooth's object push profile as well.

So let's say you want your bluetooth phone to always be connected to its headset but you don't ever want to receive these ads, the solution is simple. Leave your bluetooth turned on, just don't make it discoverable. It's that easy.