I live in a big city in the center. When i activate “Show bluetooth devices without names” in the developer settings of my android 13 phone, there appear loads of this devices. I have no clue what they are. Does anyone know? Are that the bluetooth nanobots of the vaxxinated people? (/s to last question!)
Probably just because you live in a big city and there are a shitload of bluetooth devices around. If you’re worried, try moving out of bluetooth range and scanning again to see if any of them don’t change.
They may just be other people’s various devices. Maybe IoT devices or devices not fully set up. If you’re living near a store/above a store, those might be Bluetooth beacons that track people through the store.
TIL about Bluetooth beacons. I assumed people were tracked, but I didn’t consider it was via Bluetooth.
Bluetooth personal networks have been a thing for about a decade and are used for monitoring traffic density and flow by third party companies. It’s partly why Apple was removing their aux ports and pushing for Bluetooth so much, they are making money with tracking their statistically significant user base. Google does it too and it’s most readily evident with Maps traffic filter.
If you’ve wondered why enabling Bluetooth asked for iPhone location to be enabled, now you know.
What the fuck
Just wait until you hear about how AirTags work:
Apple AirTags emit a Bluetooth signal that anonymously connects to any nearby device active within Apple’s Find My network (any iPhone after iPhone 11 with “Find My” enabled). The AirTag’s location is triangulated based on the strength of the Bluetooth signal sent to those third-party devices.
Your AirTag’s location information is uploaded to the cloud and pinned on a map for easy reference.
That’s how it’s expected to work, yes. As does Samsung SmartTags, and Tiles. These tracking devices (that we purchase and opt-in for) are a net positive in most cases. How else would we expect them to work if not for Bluetooth beacons (and UWB)?
When you buy a new iPhone, is the location tracking “Find My” feature enabled by default, or do you need to turn it off if you don’t want your phone to upload other people’s location data to Apple while draining your battery?
Bluetooth personal networks have been a thing for about a decade
Bluetooth has been around a lot longer than that. Since 1989.
You’re right that Bluetooth has been around since 89 but the idea of a personal area network that tracks the movements of a user is a relatively fresh idea. In fact third party data resellers that track you didn’t really exist until after 2006. It’s unique to cell phone data being recognized as basically an analog for an individual, which shows all kinds of data. Did a display catch someone’s attention? We’ll know because of a longer than usual time in front of the display. That display now has an impact rating - not to see how durable it is to dropping but how much attention, how long, and how likely it is to attract attention.
Want to know something even crazier? That duration of stay can be paired to your phone’s metadata and compared to other interests that phone has seen on social media and web pages (via cookies). So now that display can have personality types and interests linked to it. They will know the types of person who will be attracted and it makes the data a gold mine for advertisers.
All those spiders that you’re never more than 10 feet from have started using fitness wearables, and with 8 arms each that’s a lot of bluetooth nearby.
Don’t forget the birds. They want us to think they’re eating the spiders. It’s actually more like Uber for spiders, they use Bluetooth for ride hailing.
Birds don’t use Bluetooth. They use 5g in order to connect to the government surveillance drone network
Haha, birds. Right,lol.
Bluetooth devices only broadcast their name when in pairing mode, at other times only the mac address is available. In other words, these are just people’s Bluetooth devices like headphones, cellphones, airtags, etc.
… tv’s, soundbars, remotes, keyboards, mouses, media players,… fucking toothbrushes, vibrators, mirrors, etcs.
Please don’t fuck toothbrushes :(
What if they vibrate though?
they map in Bluetooth as vibrators then
You’d think… Mine didn’t… Had to write a whole wrapper with kernel module and all…
Because you have lots of BT devices around you!
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Stasi listening devices. We never went away, comrade.
Nowadays, people buy them out of free will. They give them names and ask them to play Despacito.
Can confirm (posted from a Stasi listening device)
God dammit.
Our Aldi now has electronic price tags for each product in the centre aisles. I wonder if they’re Bluetooth.
It varies. Some of them use Bluetooth Low Energy, some of them use other wireless techniques for lower power and greater range.
I have an idea, there are some restaurants around, maybe its these restaurant pagers.
They’re usually e-ink displays that get their power from NFC, so they’re probably not Bluetooth
I think those are electric scooters if your city has those. When im around a lot of those things my device list looks just like this
I have replaced almost every light bulb in my house with smart bulbs which feature both bluetooth and zigbee connections. It’s around 40 devices. If your neighbour has smart bulbs or other devices, I guess that could be a large part of it.
Started with smart bulbs, but very quickly moved to actual smart switches+plugs instead.
Smart bulbs automatically turn on when power goes out and back on. (so you can still control them from the regular switch) This is anoying af with how frequently I get short power outages.
So many electronics now have a Bluetooth chip, wether they use it or not. If you have AirPods, that’s up to 3 BY devices (each ear plus case), each phone, each computer (+ mouse, keyboard), TV (+ remote controls), game pads, Bluetooth speakers (plus extra of stereo or 5.1). A lot of small devices too now have Bluetooth like some Arduino boards can Raspberry Pi,
Every single node in any form of “smart home” networks including color changing light bulbs
Most of those use other networks - Zwave, Zigbee, or WiFi.
Many of them use Bluetooth or BLE for setup purposes and im sure some don’t bother to stop advertising
That makes sense.
I use Philips hue and totally hated when they started adding Bluetooth to their products. Why anyone would need that is beyond.
My god the wifi lightbulbs make me want to cry, at least mine crypto or something with that heat source
Just how much power do you think those suckers are using in standby!?
Depends on how much you paid for them 😹 also I’m more worried about when they stop going into standby because they become the bastion of a botnet trying to get into my other machines
So I have to worry about my lamp pwning my clothes dryer?
What a future we live in!
If I had to guess you probably live in a big city in the center. This means when you activate “Show bluetooth devices without names” in the developer settings of your android 13 phone, there appear loads of devices. You probably have no clue what they are because none of them are your devices so why would you know what they are?
I guess im not smart enough to get what you want…
If you live in a city center you are probably in a highly populated area and your phone is receiving the signals from other people’s Bluetooth devices in proximity to you and your phone. Basically your seeing the devices of all your neighbors, because that’s how wireless Bluetooth transmission works.
or in other words, BT devices broadcast their names only in pairing mode, so you know only the names of devices you are paired with.
all other devices continue to be there, but normally not shown, because you don’t know them.
Until you pair, there’s no reason for showing them
Try using RamBLE or nRF Connect to see some more info about the devices
Thx for your suggestions, theyll help.
Just in case
There’s an app called AirGuard put out by a German university, it scans for air tags in your vicinity. Useful if you are worried about someone slipping an AirTag on your person/belongings to track you.
When i activate “Show bluetooth devices without names”
I think that option just shows MAC addresses (or whatever it is BT uses) instead of the devices’ names?
It shows all Bluetooth devices in range, whereas normally Android only shows ones which your phone knows the name of, either because they’re in pairing mode and thus broadcasting their name, or because you’ve paired before.
Ah, interesting
or whatever it is BT uses
Bluetooth Device Address.
