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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."
He could just sit and watch people go by and see what they do.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
An excellent example of how the general public has no idea what technology is capable of. Imagine this chap was in the mood to cause a bit of disruption; I wonder how many of these phones would automatically accept a data transmission?
Case in point - a local pub automatically sends a simple java-based football game to your phone (or attempts to) via bluetooth when you enter. Some people have set their bluetooth to accept automatically and wonder what has happened when they discover the application sitting there a few days later.
Mildly amusing at times, but it does highlight the security risks associated with a system that can rely on users thinking about security to work properly.
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.
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.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
1. Follow them home from the grocery
2. Tail them from a car/taxi/bicycle
3. Hide out in the donut shop across from their work
4. Pretend to be a jogger/homeless bum in the park
5. Break into the house across the street and set up a stakeout
6. Hide in their backseat under a blanket
7. Put on camouflage and pretend you are a bird
8. Dress up in a gorilla suit
9. Paint yourself 'brick' colored
10. Mini submarines!?!?!?!?
This technology stuff is crap I tell you.
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.