Thanks for the reference, I didn’t know about that [1]. Wouldn’t you achieve the same result by turning on airplane mode? I guess it should be straightforward to check whether there are any signals when it is activated.
Once you need to be online you must disable airplane mode, true, but you also must take your phone out of the silent pocket, no? At that point you “lost”.
My worry is more that there will be an exploit for Android that will collect all those Bluetooth IDs and geolocations and upload them somewhere that somebody could use nefariously.
Not saying that telcos have shown any moral high ground with location data, even Google has this level of location tracking enabled for a considerable amount of people. I'm most worried about an Elasticsearch instance cropping up where somebody's bluetooth ID can be used to see how they get to work, etc. Faraday cage bag for phone seems like a reasonable solution.
> And better not tell the author of this article but this data has been made available to authorities for decades.
Sometimes people can surprise us; the author is least somewhat familiar with GSM networks, and perhaps you'd both enjoy a learning experience if you're able to share any additional information you have with them.
