Because your location can be inferred by finding which Bluetooth devices are around you, as that article says...
> See, back in Android 6 Marshmallow, Google changed things so that apps needed location permissions to scan for Bluetooth devices. At the time, the rationale was that Bluetooth was going to be used for things like interior navigation or location tracking in a more abstract sense, and your location could indirectly be inferred via Bluetooth scanning alone if a given hardware identifier was tied to a specific location.
Before Android required that permission, there were marketing companies selling malls the ability to see who was around by the ID of their Bluetooth beacon.
But pairing work well without the app involved, we could just give a permission to a specific already-paired devices and keep location for apps that actually need to scan.
Again - That still sends out a beacon. Searching for already-paired bluetooth devices still sends a bluetooth frame with your bluetooth MAC address, (which has to be consistent, because that's how bluetooth devices identify each other).
> Searching for already-paired bluetooth devices still sends a bluetooth frame with your bluetooth MAC address, (which has to be consistent, because that's how bluetooth devices identify each other).
It doesn't have to be readable by third parties. Given that the devices are already paired, it's perfectly feasible for that frame to be encrypted gibberish that only the other device can understand.
I think that the math of battery life if you had to decrypt anything that looked like a handshake packet to see if it's for you is the opposite of feasible.
> See, back in Android 6 Marshmallow, Google changed things so that apps needed location permissions to scan for Bluetooth devices. At the time, the rationale was that Bluetooth was going to be used for things like interior navigation or location tracking in a more abstract sense, and your location could indirectly be inferred via Bluetooth scanning alone if a given hardware identifier was tied to a specific location.