That's good. I wasn't even aware such a thing existed, but thankfully I know now.

Just that the cheap ones suck. I got a two-pack from Walmart and the first one I used started falling apart in weeks.

I'd get one handmade off Etsy. They're a little pricier, but the less expensive ones are garbage.

Yeah but it was a luxury, and most likely an RX-only unit that only had a GPS radio. Even if you had a 2g cell radio in the 90's in your car it'd be incredibly limited, and horrendously expensive for something you could carry in your pocket.

These days even the cheapest model of Honda Civic will have a modern internet connected network of microcontrollers and computers which all receive OTA updates, many of which handle telemetry.

This video, where Veritaseum hacks LinusTechTips' phone, gives a good overview of how it's possible to track cellphones or hack sms, even without asking a carrier or having physical access to the device: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wVyu7NB7W6Y

TLDW: cellphone networks rely on old, unsecure infrastructure

I work for a telecom. In my country there is well regulated legislation that specifies how and when the police can ask the telecoms for cell location data, usually used for missing people.

They also provide large scale, anonymised data for crowd movement analysis. For example it was used to demonstrate how 60,000 people moved into and out of a stadium located for historical reasons in an old-fashioned, dense residential area, in preparation for the arrival of English football fans.

I haven't done an extensive survey or anything, but every modern router I've interacted with supports setting up a secondary WiFi network with guest isolation (so anything on that SSID can't see any network device besides the router and itself). This is useful for apps or hardware that is untrusted and/or demands unjustified permissions.

It's not like Bluetooth started demanding location permissions, the conceptual model of the permission was revised: having access Bluetooth means an app could determine your location via a form of lateration.

In earlier versions of smartphone operating systems, this was not transparent to users lacking the technical background, so Bluetooth also requiring location access is actually an attempt at making users aware of that. I'm not an iOS developer, so I can't comment on iPhones, but on Android versions prior to 11, having access to Bluetooth meant an app would be able to determine your location.

Today, you can require the permission ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION, which expresses that your app might use Bluetooth to obtain location information on Android. Also, if you're just scanning for nearby devices to connect your app to, but don't want users to be confused why your smart fridge app needs to know your precise location, you can declare a permission flag (neverForLocation) and Android will strip beacon information from the scan results, better asserting your intentions.

So, overall: no, there is nothing nefarious going on, it was always possible to determine your location via Bluetooth, and the update to the permission model was an honest improvement that actually benefits you as user.

Now, there are still plenty of shady apps around, and apps that are poorly written - don't use those.

Whaaat? I definitely use Bluetooth without location services, and always have?