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Tracking People Using Bluetooth

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the turn-your-bluetooth-off dept.

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."

4 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. He also tracks a lot more stuff at his house by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    http://icepick.com/

    From toilet flushes to how often the cat eats!!

  2. Cityware by aj50 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Sounds quite similar to the facebook application made by the Cityware project. It tells you whose been near their hotspots at the same time as you.

    As one of our projects on my course, we're looking at extending this to do without hotspots and be able to show you a list of who's around you right now, pulling their name and picture from facebook and alerting you if one of your friends is near by. We're also looking to be able to store where you've met people and display this using google maps.

    --
    I wish to remain anomalous
  3. Re:Did we slashdot it already? by pla · · Score: 2, Informative

    Check the books; that's got to be some kind of record.

    Nah - Sometimes servers get Slashdotted before a single post makes it in.

    And now that we have the Firehose, it wouldn't surprise me to start seeing the occasional story Slashdotted before even making it to the FP.

  4. RFID powder... welcome big brother by Lord+Satri · · Score: 2, Informative

    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. Did you know about RFID "powder"? (it was discussed on /. earlier this year) In short, RFID so small it will stick to people's hair if sprayed on a crowd. In forensics, you can thus know who was in the crowd with simple RFID scanners. There's much more applications, of course. (shameless plug; selected RFID stories here)
    --
    Animoog.org