The phone has Bluetooth on, so be careful, you are being monitored!

Highlights

• Disclosure of smartphone Bluetooth
• It is important to stop using it.
• Consumers can get in trouble if they don’t shut down.

New Delhi. Bluetooth has become one of the key connectivity options that can connect smartphones and computers. Knowing that Bluetooth is an important connectivity option, online hackers are slowly finding new ways to intercept Bluetooth connections and target systems. However, the scope of such attacks is very limited. This is because Bluetooth pairing is encrypted by default. But what if you turned on your phone’s Bluetooth but weren’t using it?

By the way, it is always advisable to turn off your phone when Bluetooth is not in use. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, have found that the practice of not turning on Blue Tooth without using it is important. This research suggests a new way in which Bluetooth transmission can be used to track the location of your phone. Not surprisingly, this is true.

This idea may seem unbelievable, but it is not. Wondering how to connect Blue Tooth to a device’s location? So let us know what scientists say. Scientists say that there is a way to do this and that this method can be very dangerous if used by hackers.

Location tracking via Bluetooth:

Scientists have focused on a special aspect of Bluetooth technology, how Bluetooth is used to track real devices. This is called Bluetooth Low Energy or BLE. BLE is a low-energy Bluetooth format that uses relatively little power. However, it does so by compromising bandwidth and range.

Due to the low power consumption, BLE can sometimes transmit up to 99% of the continuous signal while Bluetooth is on the device. So when scientists found out that there was a permanent source of signals that they could tap on, the only thing left was to identify these signals individually. The researchers then focused on identifying the different devices. The errors in the signal of each phone were found to be almost unique. Separating these differences, the researchers were able to identify each phone with extremely high accuracy.

According to the investigation, this is the first time that the Android Police has noticed. The technique resulted in a false positive rate and a false negative rate of less than 5%. The Pixel 5 gave a false negative rate of 0%, which means it was never misdiagnosed. This simply means that it is accurate.

What does this mean:

The implication of this research is that if Bluetooth is on, your phone’s Bluetooth can be used to track you. However, there are several limitations to this type of location tracking. First of all, the system has to work in a close and stable environment. Because many factors can be the result of recording errors or omissions. Furthermore, the flaws in these BLE signals are not always unique. This means that there are some devices that can generate identical signals and therefore cannot be individually identified.

Regardless, this research has exposed the hackers’ plan to find out the location of users in this way. But it would not be wrong to say that the encryption provided in Blue Tooth is not completely secure. Because hackers can’t try to decode it. To track the location, it must collect the BLE signal and identify it by phone. Information transmitted via Bluetooth does not need to be decrypted.

In any case, a straightforward and effective solution is to turn off Bluetooth when not needed.