Open-source contact tracing, part 1

Posted Jul 21, 2020 0:54 UTC (Tue) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446)
In reply to: Open-source contact tracing, part 1 by logang
Parent article: Open-source contact tracing, part 1

"the bluetooth distance finding problem was solved"

I don't believe this. I have played around with iBeacons etc and the margin of error I found was at least five metres, probably more. Is the phone in your front or back pocket? Is it face to you or away? Left or right side? What sort of reflections/sinks are there near you? Are you wearing jeans or ... whatever.

BTLE was designed for advertising. As you shimmy into sight with your hipster phone into a shopping centre, the shops who paid enough would be allowed to dump shed loads of ads at you. Lovely.

Your phone with all of it's incredible technology is absolutely useless for this use case.

Open-source contact tracing, part 1

Posted Jul 21, 2020 1:06 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

> BTLE was designed for advertising. As you shimmy into sight with your hipster phone into a shopping centre, the shops who paid enough would be allowed to dump shed loads of ads at you. Lovely.
Uhh... Whut? There's no way BTLE can be used to push ads.

Open-source contact tracing, part 1

Posted Jul 28, 2020 15:25 UTC (Tue) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link] (1 responses)

> > BTLE was designed for advertising. As you shimmy into sight with your hipster phone into a shopping centre, the shops who paid enough would be allowed to dump shed loads of ads at you. Lovely.
>
> Uhh... Whut? There's no way BTLE can be used to push ads.

iBeacon, that is a class of BLE devices, is born exactly to 1) track phones and 2) push notifications to them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBeacon https://medium.com/@the_manifest/a-beginners-guide-to-bea... At the beginning you needed to install a specific listener app to receive these push notifications, but that feature is now integrated in iOS and Android https://blog.beaconstac.com/2018/01/how-to-run-a-proximit....

It is technically incorrect to say that you can push ads (or any kind of notification) over BLE. But it is correct to say that BLE is a fundamental part of iBeacon, whose whole purpose is to send unsolicited notifications to your mobile phone and that most BLE implementations in post-2018 mobile phones are iBeacon-enabled. Ergo, one can argue that BLE can be used to push ads.

Open-source contact tracing, part 1

Posted Jul 28, 2020 18:54 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

You can use any protocol to push notifications. The phones are not at all obliged to act on them, and none of the current phones (even with the tracker apps) do that.

Of course, you can install a specific listener app to get notifications. But why would anyone do that?