Hundreds of Devices Hidden Inside New York City Phone Booths
Beacons are Bluetooth devices that emit simple signals that smartphones can pick up.
A beacon in a New York City phone booth ad would need to recognize a corresponding app to push beacon-linked content to that phone.
From what I can see from reading the article this isn't the scary "things that watch you without your knowledge" but more like "things you can connect to if you're nearby" - and given that there's WiFi hotspots and other things in this category too, it doesn't seem all that frightening. In other words you'd have to have allow your phone to connect to them for them to gather any info, and in that case it's not much worse than connecting to a WiFi hotspot setup for marketing purposes (e.g. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/19... ).
(The fact that the majority of people leave their phones in a "promiscuous" mode with all the radios enabled and constantly looking for things to connect to, and submissively install apps without reading their privacy policies/terms of use carefully, is a different although related issue - but this is something you can educate yourself and protect against.)
I hate all these FUD headlines that claim iBeacons can track you or send you adverts - everything to do with beacons is (at present) mediated by an app, and therefore subject to a user installing it and granting permissions. Sure, you can get people to install stuff that they don't understand and which will allow snooping etc. but that's by no means constrained to anything using the (Apple-owned) iBeacon standard.
I'll be more interested in keeping an eye on the URL-centric 'physical Web" experimental project recently revealed by Google (https://github.com/google/physical-web) as that potentially removes the need for app-based mediation of beacon (without the "i" prefix) interactions, uses the universality of http and URLs for content identification, and could make for a much lower-friction way of implementing beacon integration across different platforms.
Wifi beacons were deployed in London[1][2] as part of advertising systems on waste bins. These logged your MAC address as you passed by and allowed targeted advertising. I believe they were removed once the rollout was publicised and people rightly kicked up a stink about it. It was an opt-out system because if wifi on your smartphone was switched on (which most people probably do) then it would automatically log your phone's presence. Users would have had to switch off wifi to avoid being tracked.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23665490 [2] http://qz.com/112873/this-recycling-bin-is-following-you/
This article is cheap sensationalism to foster Luddite paranoia. The beacons will only track those that want to be tracked. And there a lot of valid situations where people would want to share geographical information in order to be guided, notified or rescued.
Sometimes I feel that valid concerns on privacy are doing to IT what pollution did to chemistry: people got so panicked that blindly reject any valid contribution that technology might give.
I thought Buzzfeed was on the list of domains you can't link to? If not, this post is a good example why it should be..
"In its current iteration, a Gimbal beacon requires a third-party app to trigger advertisements, and requires those apps to receive “opt-in” permission from users in order to collect data and send notifications. (Users, of course, also need to have Bluetooth enabled.)"
FFS, Buzzfeed. This is buried practically at the end, AFTER the giant infographic and 10+ grafs of scare text. It's like running the headline:
YOUR BREAKFAST MAY CONTAIN POISON
and then at the end of the article:
"Well, if you bought the cereal that said 'CONTAINS POISON' on the box and decided to eat it right now, that might be true."
Why is this exaggerated journalism even on here? These aren't tracking everyone in NYC within range, only those who have bluetooth enabled, downloaded a very specific application, and then allow the app to track you in the background. Now this is all for IOS, android on the other hand does have potential to be troublesome.
Several commenters here have stated that Bluetooth beacon interactions are mediated by apps and they are therefore not surveillance devices.
That's just not correct. Bluetooth beacons can log and report information about devices that come within range of those beacons with active Bluetooth radios. Only interactive-time applications of a beacon need the cooperation of an app on a wide-area connected device.
Beacons that don't have external power generally can't use WiFi or mobile networks to do it, but this information can be uploaded on demand. For example, this information could be collected when coins from pay phones are collected.
Moreover, these beacons are reportedly installed in pay phone kiosks that do have wired connectivity. It's possible, even likely, that they "phone home."
There are still phone booths in NYC? Without reading the article, just seeing the headline above, my first thought was that a reporter discovered strange, long-forgotten devices with handsets and number pads and coin slots, collecting dust in the booths.
People should not be tracked. Full stop. Even with their permission. We are headed for worse than Orwell ever imagined. I cannot believe some people consent to this.
There will come a time and soon whereby people will not be able to do a thing without someone tracking it.
And I just became aware of the NYC Halal carts run by the NYPD (in the talk by Steve Rambam at HopeX recently) [0].
I recommend watching Person of Interest. The TV show has started long before the NSA scandal, but it's like a Hollywood post interpretation of some major event. Except it was a premonition.
Ah Gimbal, the HaaS company... the beacons that require you to register them on-line to be able to reconfigure them. Also, iBeacon compatibility doesn't work well in Series 10, i.e. those you can order a dev-kit of for free.
I'm waiting for someone to figure out how to force all those various beacons to talk the same language. Right now, everyone is trying to lock users in to a particular brand. It's incredibly annoying (and the same thing goes for the entire IoT and home automation market).
UPDATE:
And they're being removed: http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/new-york-city-to-adv...
Out of interest does anyone have any statistic on how often phone booths are used? I'd have thought that with most people owning mobile phones the need to ever use a pay phone is very rare