hahaha…. You guys are royally fucked in terms of privacy….
because I worked on all the geolocation shit, some of which was donated to Google, and other sold to third party companies…

It’s not bluetooth, it’s not gps, it’s not wifi, it’s not your cellular data that will pinpoint your location. It’s ALL OF THE ABOVE working together. Bluetooth is crappy for trying to pinpoint someone location with accuracy unless there’s a lot of beacons deployed in given venue. It’s only good at short range and requires a lot of beacons. Otherwise you can’t tell if someone is entering a store or exiting a store or entering the store on the first floor or second floor or third floor.

A major computer company spelled with 4 letters, two being the same, pathetically tried to use Bluetooth as a way to turn on a monitor when you entered your room. Couldn’t figure out when someone entered the room or entered the room right downstairs….lol…

Trying to triangulate over wifi gives you a coarser grain location but lacks the granularity of a Bluetooth beacon mesh. But it’s less intrusive because you don’t need to deploy so many goddamn beacons. GPS works until you get inside a building, then either the signal drops or even if you could get signal it’s hard to resolve which floor you are on. Bouncing your phone off of cell phone towers is another option that is course grain. The problem is each of these paths all have their advantages and disadvantages and using just one thing all the time won’t really help you…..

That’s where all this software comes in that uses all of these techs and glue things together where you are. The course grain the data someone wants, the less expensive the software and service is. The finer grain, the more money it’s going to cost you.

There’s public attempts at doing this. These public apis on the phone called “nearby” apis are pathetic and crude attempts to do this. Some of us private companies can do much better, we just don’t like to discuss how so we can make more money selling to other people.

Ever wonder how after visiting a physical store, you suddenly start getting coupon deals for stores similar to the one you visited? Its because we are watching you at some of the malls, or shall I say, watching your phones…

We can nail you down not only to which store you entered, but with the help of nfc, even which items you picked up while in the store.

Google is already using a shitload of people’s cellphone in a car to augment the real time traffic info for Google Maps.

The one thing that will prevent companies from doing this? Not tech limitations….. Hippa…unless that gets torpeadoed.

Why do you think people at my company are being called back to work? Because while getting a mall to pay for this technology to serve targeted coupons is “cute”…There’s a much more compulsory use of this technology….mandated by the government …..