Bluetooth Ads Beamed from Billboards 231
dylanduck writes "Billboards in the UK have been using Bluetooth to beam media clips at passing cellular phones. The system has been dubbed Bluecasting and 17,000 people accepted the ads. When billboards know your name that's when to really worry."
Thank God my Phone Isn't Bluetooth (Score:1, Insightful)
Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
bluetooth spam to your phone.. (Score:4, Insightful)
now we will have bluetooth spam everywhere we go..
just what we need..
If they'd let me do the asking... (Score:5, Insightful)
Otherwise, it's like a pop-up on your phone, asking if you'd like to see a pop-up ad.
That's a lot of acceptance, but not for long! (Score:4, Insightful)
So this is good advertising.... for now... =)
Spam (Score:2, Insightful)
Thank God. (Score:2, Insightful)
Thank God, bluetooth can be disabled.
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Re:bluetooth spam to your phone.. (Score:1, Insightful)
That's correct. And using something like hcitool you can not only get the Bluetooth MAC address (what more-persistent cookie could advertisters want for tracking their recipients) but also the make and model of the phone for specific targetting of malware. NOTE: Only the "stock" version of hcitool needs your phone to be in discoverable mode for this to work.
Re:Idea for advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
Horrible advertising of the future.. (Score:4, Insightful)
(I pick up 75 wireless access points on my 12 mile commute through what I thought was the countryside - so I can't imagine what this "bluecasting" will be like once it takes off in cities).
I can almost see the next step being advertisers pressuring phone makers to require always-on phones with always-on bluetooth so that they can't be "denied" the chance to spam your phone. You won't be able to switch the phone off, will only ever be able to switch to "silent mode" for a couple of hours at a time (like for going to a movie theater), and it'll automatically accept absolutely anything sent to it (and it'll simply keep the last 128MB [or however much storage the device has] of messages received). Just walking through the mall your phone will pick up 40 different advertising messages before you get to the store you wanted to go to - and when out driving, billboards and other cars will all repeatedly spam you.
And worst of all, they'll advertise this as being a "feature" of the phone ("get always-on bluecast so you're not left out! all the cool kids have it.. and you want to be cool.. don't you?") - and people will still buy it.
Re:Cool (Score:3, Insightful)
17,000 or 17%? Willing? (Score:2, Insightful)
FTA - "The posters detected 87,000 Bluetooth phones over a two week period, of which about 17% were willing to download the clip, says Scott."
First 17% is more like 14,790. I couldn't find a reference to the 17,000 number. (Perhaps its somewhere on the corporate web site link.) But even ignoring this point I'd still question the "willing" statement. Does that mean people intentionlly enabled access to their cell phones. Or is it more like 17% of blue tooth cell phonesare left unsecured by their owners?
Sort of like claiming 40% of PCs [pcworld.com] are "willing" to be zombies for spam.
Re:crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, just curious. The first time they do this, 17,000 people will accept the "blue-vert". Of those 17,000, the next time, only 7,000 people will accept. The third time, 700.
Eventually the new technology will penetrate the common consciousness and people will just start ignoring it, since it is, after all, thoroughly useless and annoying. The only thing it has going for it is its novelty. Once that's dried up, "blue-vertising" will go away and die.
Over-marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it possible to go anywhere or do anything these days without being advertised at? Seems you just can't get away from it anymore.
In any case, if I'm standing on a train platform looking at a billboard, I can just read the damn billboard. What is the point of sending me a message to tell me about what's on the billboard?
Re:Horrible advertising of the future.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Dunno. Why would you want an internet connection on your pc? Looks like phones are going the way of the average windows box, pretty soon 60% of its processing time will be spent on the firewall, antivirus and anti-spyware. Which leaves about 40% to animate that silly wallpaper. Every form of technology that allows communication will at one point or another be used for advertising. As long as advertising actually works, and it doesn't look like that's about to change anywhere soon, this is just a reality we're going to have to live with.
That's how we can kill this (Score:5, Insightful)
Sit it next to a real coke bluecaster, and then half the time that people choose to "Accept connection from Coke?" they'll get the porn.
Bluetooth doesn't have a whole lot of authentication other than the name that the other node chooses.
It wont take many calls to a large companies complaint department about them dispatching porn before this whole dumb idea will go away.
Re:hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:stupid names on stupid names (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
That reminds me: we're at the beginning of this 'new frontier'. Right now, they're getting about a 1 in 6 acceptance ratio -- Today, it's a novel idea. A few months, or years, down the road, they'll be seeing those numbers drop preciptiously. Then they'll start resorting to all sorts of tricks to get people to 'accept' their garbage, and we'll have to start writing software to filter out thes ads, then they'll come up with work-arounds, and then....
Starting to sound like the spam wars??? There's a reason.
Re:Welcome Mr. Yakamoto (Score:3, Insightful)