...stuff I do and things I like...

Thursday, January 05 2006

Bluetooth Spam in Berlin

mh57 just pointed me to a Spiegel Online article about Bluetooth advertising or BlueSpam as I like to call it. Its about a German company which uses Bluetooth to beef up their billboards in Berlin. Apparently they just push images, videos, text ads and coupons to any Bluetooth device in range. This is annoying but you can of course just ignore/reject the transmission or turn of visibility. The actual security/privacy problem is that people maybe get used to accept connections from certain senders e.g. BlueSpam (of course you wouldn't name your system BlueSpam). So what keeps me from standing next to one of the billboards naming my laptop BlueSpam and instead of sending a coupon I send hello.jpg. And since some phones still don't show what the Bluetooth connection is for I just pull their phonebook etc., the user will just see Allow connection from BlueSpam? Sure I want that coupon.

This is not a good idea!

Btw. the company doing this stuff is: Wall AG

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