Facebook tosses creepy Place Tips beacons at stateside retailers Facebook has begun dishing out "free" beacons to retail outfits in the US, just in time for an update to its eerie Place Tips technology, which is now being deployed across the country. The Yelp-like service kicks into life when a Facebook user's location-tracking is set to the default 'on' mode and their mobe has Bluetooth …
The user is already "nailed" since it requires they have "tracking" switched on. Facebook already know where those users are. The only thing new I'm seeing here is that this beacon thing will send stuff to those users phones who have facebook/tracking/bluetooth all on.
"The Yelp-like service kicks into life when a Facebook user's location-tracking is set to the default 'on' mode and their mobe has Bluetooth enabled."
"Only people who have enabled location services on their phone and have Bluetooth turned on will receive Place Tips from the beacon at your business."
Yo Zuckerfuck. OPT-OUT of my 'on by default kick your wife up the cunt service here' /dev/null
I have to ask...
"Only people who have enabled location services on their phone and have Bluetooth turned on will receive Place Tips from the beacon at your business."
It that only for FB users, or are they snarfing everyone's phone data?
And is that only for those with 'active' FB accounts? Meaning if someone created an account years ago and 'deleted it' (like they can delete it...) does FB still collect information?
"Location services... and Bluetooth on." Does this mean Bluetooth simply needs to be on, or does it need to be discoverable? Are there really enough people stupid enough to have location services and Bluetooth set to "Broadcast Widely and Accept Anything" to make this worthwhile??
We haven't even got replies-to-comments yet on the facebook app for Blackberry, so you can bet it's going to be many years before my location is stalked like a tagged sheep around a shopping centre.
Beacon sounds like it's all about the people who pay facebook money, and not the actual users. Sorry, I mean the products.
And I received a notification in my Facebook app yesterday that my business was eligible for a free Beacon. I filled in the request, because I'm curious to see how it works.
The people who would want to use this are the ones who leave their location information on Facebook enabled, check in at a business, etc. So long as it isn't grabbing information on people who have that stuff disabled, I don't see the harm. If we can get more customers to better engage with our page then it is a win as far as the business is concerned. If it is overstepping its bounds in any way that more privacy sensitive customers might not like, it'll go in the trash post-haste as driving customers away is not a goal!
At first I was wondering about the short range of Bluetooth, but upon thinking about it you'd locate this near the main entrance, so it would trigger when customers walk in, and it doesn't matter if they leave its range later (though it may re-trigger when they leave and count that as a second visit) Since my business doesn't have walk by traffic it won't affect anyone who doesn't intend to visit. In those cases I could see it being a real annoyance - one wouldn't want to have it triggering for every business you walk by on the way to your destination in an urban area!
(No idea why you were downvoted for a well written comment)
If you get the beacon and play with it, please tell us about it in the next relevant artice.
(No idea why you were downvoted for a well written comment)
If you get the beacon and play with it, please tell us what / where your business is located so i can actively avoid it.
TFTFY
These beacons use BT Low Energy, also called BT 4, BT Smart and a bunch of other names. THis has a range larger than classic BT.
Although low energy, these devices can communicate up to 100m or so depending on how good the antennas are. The devices I've experimented with were able to communicate over 10m even with poor antennas and low signal strength.
So, one of these near the front of a shop in a mall can easily see a large area. One of these every 5 or so shops and you have the mall 100% covered. You can throw away your FitBits, Facebook will know how fast you're walking, whether you stop, will sell back that info to shop owners ("Well your window display is working this week. We found that men aged 20-35 stopped outside your shop window.") and maybe to you.
"So long as it isn't grabbing information on people who have that stuff disabled, I don't see the harm".
That logic has been with us a long time now, but it has been incremental. Ten years ago people "didn't see the harm" in having a cell phone, but would have been really upset that someone like FB runs a dossier on them, knows their likes and dislikes, their friends,... and knew exactly where they were all the time.
I wonder what the threshold of "don't see the harm" will be in another 5 years?
People who have have location and places enabled on Facebook are already automatically checking in wherever they go that Facebook knows about based on GPS and/or SSID. It is up to those end users whether they want to enable/disable this stuff, adding the beacons just gives Facebook another way to get the location fix they're already providing (whether knowingly or not) I personally keep that all disabled in Facebook and don't even leave Bluetooth enabled on my phone.
Since iOS anonymizes the MAC used when looking for wireless access points (only giving out the real one when you actually associate and get an IP) the only way you can be tracked is at larger places like malls where they can afford to have their own base station that grabs your IMEI information. Individual businesses don't have the ability to do that. One thing I'm curious to see if whether the beacons change that (i.e. if there's a way it can recognize my phone via Bluetooth info even if I have all that stuff disabled in Facebook)
The idea is to sniff the traffic coming off the Facebook beacon when I enter. I imagine that traffic will be encrypted, but if it is sending back data when I come in with Bluetooth enabled but not when I come in with it disabled, I'll know the beacon is tracking my phone even though it doesn't know who I am (presumably saving the info in case it could later match that info up with my Facebook ID should I ever enable location tracking in Facebook) If it does that, it won't be permanently installed as it would be going beyond what Facebook has claimed it would. Someone else will almost certainly beat me to this since deciding what to do with that free beacon won't be high on my priority list. In that case hopefully their findings will be the subject of a Reg article and save me some time :)
Anyone who wanders around with WiFi, bluetooth and GPS all switched on is, IMHO, an idiot and will be getting what they ask for - tons of annoying adverts, risk of malware infection, and very low battery life.
As for me, I only switch those things one when I actually need them for a specific purpose, then they're turned off immediately afterwards. When it comes to advertising, there's enough of it around anyway and I do already have eyes and ears that are assaulted by it all so I'm not inviting any more of it to crowd my already overloaded brain cell.
@Novex
Yes, 'best practice' may well be to disable anything you are not using, thus reducing the attack surface and resource usage.
But these devices are ubiquitous - they're not just tools for IT professionals. Everyone I know has an iPhone or Android phone and I guarantee that most of them have the phone set pretty much as default. That's what ordinary people do.
As an IT worker, I get it - I really do - and I am amazed at how open most peoples' computers and devices are. But then I remind myself that this is the way non-IT people are - they trust their devices and the providers of their software. Naive perhaps but that's the way it is.
And then I ask myself if it really is too much to ask to be able to use the features of the device you have purchased without having to be constantly switching things on and off through the day. Yes, it's wishful thinking at its best/worst but not unreasonable when you think about it.
And, as I detailed in another post (in a different story,) it can be a real pain to keep turning things off and on through the day - on at home, off for the trip to work (unless your train/bus has free wifi, in which case it's off for the walk to the station, then on for the trip and back off for the walk to work), back on at work, back off for the trip home, back on again when you get home - wash, rinse, repeat.
The simple truth is that most people just won't bother and will leave it on the whole time. After all, the battery issue is generally not a deciding factor as they will have it charging at home and again at work, seeing as some of them struggle to last 24 hours even with everything disabled.
So yes, it is a good idea to turn off everything and then only enable what you use, when you use it, but people just don't do that.
"When it comes to advertising, there's enough of it around anyway and I do already have eyes and ears that are assaulted by it all"
Agreed. Why would anyone want an advert for a special offer in a shop they are walking past and have no intention of going in? If that offer was for something they wanted they would already be actively looking for it and probably have gone in the shop rather than walking past it.
This will work for weak willed impulse buyers, the sort who buy special offers because spending £50 instead of £60 on something they didn't know they wanted saved them £10 so they "saved" money, yes?
Likewise, the sort of people who never shop around for the best price and just buy from the first seller who has it in stock. I'm thinking here of the woman in the supermarket yesterday who bought a 1Kg tub of Lurpak "butter" for £6 despite the special offer right under her nose for two 500g tubs at "two for £5" or £3.20 each. D'oh!
This post has been deleted by its author
you forgot to add:-
Is this a reason to sign up to Facebook: No, never in a million years.
The sooner FB comes clean and admits that is nothing more than an arm of the NSA/GCHQ/etc the better.
After all, aren't these orgs only interested in where you are and what you are doing all the time?
And you don't receive PlaceTips from the beacon.
A BLE beacon is a small box costing around £20. It is battery powered, typically with a life of 2 years between changes. As the name implies, it's a beacon - meaning all it does is periodically announce its existence using a unique ID. These announcements can be picked up any Bluetooth enabled device nearby. The beacon doesn't know anything about devices that have picked up their announcements and they are not Internet enabled so couldn't send any such information to Facebook anyway.
It is your phone that talks to Facebook's servers telling them it has detected a particular beacon ID. The server then checks this against a database of registered beacon IDs and hence knows where you are. Therefore for beacons to work with your phone they require (a) Bluetooth to be enabled and (b) the relevant app to be running (in foreground or background).
So if you don't want to be tracked, disable Bluetooth - but remember that every time you upgrade iOS, Apple sneakily turns it on again, or close down the Facebook app.
Indeed. It's no different to an app scanning WiFi for SSIDs, or getting the cell tower ID you are connected to, asking 'HQ' if the location of those are known and getting back a report that 'you are probably here'. Using a Beacon simply makes that a lot easier and more accurate.
and if I have any interest in the merch on offer (mmmmmm, donuts!), wouldn't I just stick my nose in and have a look-see without being prompted by fecebook? I can not imagine that getting a notice saying "three out of five visitors to the donut shop 100 feet ahead on the right gave it a favourable rating, most notably the honey glazed" would make a difference; if I were sitting so precariously on the fence that this WOULD have any impact, why wouldn't I just see for myself if I am close enough to it for the beacon to blip my phone? Sure, I can see value for fecebook (we know you like donuts, we saw you enter that shop, don't try to deny it, and guess what adverts you will see until the day you die?) and for the businesses involved ("free" advertising, unless the reviews are bad enough to scare potential customers away), but I am seeing little value for the end user/products.
My BT is on all the time because it is convenient to have it pair automatically when I get into my car. I don't have a Facebook app on my phone but it hardly matters as far as I am concerned. I am walking around with yet another personal license plate on display. As others have observed, the Wifi MAC and IMEI are also available for cross-reference. Given all the other data leakage, I have no doubt I could be identified by many entities given the resources. I don't lose sleep over it but I do find it annoying. It's sloppy and I'm a boiling frog. The technology needs to change.
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