Tracking People Using Bluetooth

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."

Comments

Re:Bluetooth Attacks

[ZombieWomble]

Interestingly, this issue actually came up in the technology sections of the UK media a while back, but under a rather different guise - that of "toothing".

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

[DingerX]

I confess that I do from time to time look to see who has their bluetooth in discoverable mode. Some cellphones do it, and these have generic names (such as the Verizon WonderPrice Z302). My GPS transceiver doesn't have a non-discoverable mode (If you see a device called "In my pants, not my car", come over and say hi, sugar). But Macintoshes seem to be discoverable by default, and even better, advertise that they are Macintoshes and give the name of the user.

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

[Cheesey]

He should link this up to a network of CCTV cameras. The appropriate database software would give him the ability to not only track a person's movements, but also watch what they were doing at any specific time. A powerful search engine could be used to find meetings between people, digging up CCTV and audio recordings of those meetings. No need to solve the problem of automatically recognising people using CCTV images: the Bluetooth devices that they carry provide that capability.

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

[arashi no garou]

There's an app called "Bluejacker" for Palm based devices with bluetooth that will spam a message to any bluetooth-enabled devices within range.

Or in other words, it's orgy time!

Also good for tracking on smaller scales

[mikeselectricstuff]

We used Bluetooth for tracking people across London Bridge & displaying the results on Tower Bridge as part of a 1-week lighting festival earlier this year - info at http://www.whitewing.co.uk/switchedon.html I was also recently involved in installng a permanent Bluetooth-responsive light artwork in a bench outside ASDA in Poole, Dorset - this generates colour waves moving along the bench in response to people walking past, using relative signal strengths from 2 sensors to determine direction. (pic at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mannmade/1432286282/)

Re:Bluetooth Attacks

[Teun]

In countries (Saudi Arabia, Iran) with a more advanced religion than the US Bluetooth is used as an aid in dating.
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

[jollyreaper]

In stories past, we've gotten used to the cliche of the endlessly capable killer. If he is not explicitly supernatural and haunting your dreams, he still is capable of performing many feats that would defy logic and credulity. He can always find the victim when she is alone, either terrorizing her and letting her escape or doing away with her then and there. He is able to avoid detection, knows how and where to find her, etc etc. V in the comic operates in a similar fashion. At least the writers came up with a decent enough explanation: the government was so paranoid they wanted to have everything in tight, centralized control with a complicated computer, a computer that V had backdoor access to. That explains how it seems like he has eyes and ears everywhere, how he can slip through security measures as if they weren't even there, etc.

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

[Solder Fumes]

Reminds me of an experiment I did a while ago. On a whim, I stuck an old USB Bluetooth dongle into a 400MHz Linux box I had set up as a random-task server in the apartment closet. It was recognized and running immediately (wait, what?) so I played around with some of the HCI commands. Long story short, we soon had a tracking system tied to our cell phones. Whenever either of us approached the apartment, the server would log the event on a web page, play a few tones and announce "so-and-so has entered the perimeter" to the apartment. Similar if either of us left. The web page had a status indicator showing whether we were IN or OUT. This was handy in a few ways; you could tell if your roommate was already home from work and give them a call to see if a parcel was delivered, etc.

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?

[fbartho]

Primarily wifi, but with rfid location aware people tracking to a resolution of a couple feet (with variable accuracy) within a university building, based on existing wifi antennas.
http://whereabouts.eecs.umich.edu/

Whereabouts is a project at the University of Michigan to build a location sensing network using widely available off-the-shelf components, such as RFID sensors and 802.11 stations.

Our goal is to build a network of sensors that will allow users and computers to detect and share their location information, and provide an interface to query and monitor that information. This network and query interface will serve as infrastructure for research in areas such as ubiquitous computing, privacy, large and rapidly changing databases, and whatever else we come up with.

Note that this project will in no way involve the tracking of anybody who does not wish to be tracked. Anybody who prefers not to participate can simply not wear a tag. We further plan on providing privacy options which will allow users who do decide to wear tags to control what information is disclosed.

Currently, we have created a building-wide location infrastructure in our CSE building, location middleware to allow location data to be handled in a uniform and privacy-sensitive way, and a tour guide application to demonstrate the system and acquaint new visitors with our building. We also have a variety of student projects which have built on the location system.

This work has resulted in several publications, and in some software available from our Web site. We are in the process of making more of our software available.

Many people are involved in and have participated in this project.

Quite a bit of other information is available on the Whereabouts project Wiki.

This work is funded in part by the National Science Foundation under grant EIA-0303587 as "An Infrastructure for Wide Area Pervasive Computing" and by a grant from Intel.

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.