Privacy implication of always on Bluetooth

AccessDeniedBitch I'm not sure I follow. Is there a concern that turning Bluetooth off via the quick tile doesn't turn the radio off?

There is in my mind until I understand a good reason why the following scenario exists.

To be complete, but probably irrelevant, immediately after both of my gos installations, I found BT to be on. So I turn it off.

Seems like I'm done, no? I'll get into why I'm so fanatical about chucking BT below. But...since I am, o go through all the settings I know to reach, looking for my arch enemy, Bluetooth. Among the few is found in settings>apps>see all x apps> (with show system apps selected) Bluetooth.

There I find that this app has permissions to access a lot of things, like files, sensors, network, to name a few. Viewing the permissions reveals that they are all enabled and grayed out. Can't be disabled.

This begs the question: whats the point of disabling my ability to control access of a thing (that happens to be used to radio stuff in and out of what it can access) if I can actually turn it off? Without a sensible explanation, the situation is disturbing.

Now to why I'm overboard about this and use"disturbing".

My surface running updated win10 has, of course, BT capability. Left to its own devices, it will install some 15 drivers that allow BT to poke its nose into my system using various protocols. The drivers seem somewhat persistent. I found only one way to convince win10 that I goddamn fucking do not want Bluetooth in my surface: cut it off in uefi. This does the trick. No traffic per wireshark, no ability in any settings to enable BT.

If this same ability to kill BT in windows exists in gos/android, its not obvious to me that its effectively working.

Why do I want to control BT so badly?

Bluetooth was introduced before 9/11. Before McVeigh. Before Lockerbie. Before, I think, you could still install win95 on all your machines that would run it from the same CD.

Security then was such a joke that broward county required more care to keep someone from logging in to pay my water bill for me than boa required to keep others out of my business.

You couldn't joke about a bomb at the airport in 1979 but getting one on board and detonated seemed pretty trivial given the continuing incidents. We due don't have things like kiddie scripters. Hacking wasn't seen as a legit Method for your own little group of creeps to influence society.

Bluetooth was how you avoided wires in transport of mostly digital audio. I had some modules that did that. My bet is that I could have hacked into them to repurpose them, but I had two Harris prism radios leftover from a project, which did raw dsss with a mere setting of parameters. Cypress semiconductor started selling a 7 chip that did short range dsss soon after that and they still do.

None of these things had security in mind then. And I'm sure that workable drivers can be found.

In 1987, I was designing the camera head for a face recognition system. The hardware and firmware, including 16-bit is a card, were done but needed testing. The two guys doing the analysis software in I think winnt, were slow to get me something. A high school buddy happened to work there. What I needed was the old outp and inp (I think those are the names) that were no longer available in Borland c. Two days after I asked, this guy delivered to me a file that he wrote in Microsoft assembler. I had what I needed. It was that easy for him to poke through the security layers that nt had put in my way.

Security was just then starting to be taken seriously, long after Bluetooth should have been buried.

This mess gives me the concern that bluetooth, perhaps not by intent, offers more hacking possibilities than I care for. Having it remain in any of my systems whether I like it or not only sharpens that concern.

Threads of this type have been locked. Thank goodness, not before someone handed over how to shut down BT from adb.

I know that he was kind of saying "go ahead, but don't come crying to me when you brick your device".

I won't.

See, its my device to brick. My 349 to flush.

I was admonished for my aggressive style. I'll tone it down. But notice that it netted me a real answer just in the nick of time, for better or worse.

I'm retired from physical science in industry. Think abbott labs, raytheon, allied signal bendix. I know how to get answers. Once in a while its not pretty. Wish it were otherwise, and I apologize for ruffled feathers.

User2288 this is also a public forum and can be accessed by minors. It should be only appropriate that age walks hand in hand with wisdom and politeness.

User2288 I only looked at the first paragraph and didn't look at the rest. Are you looking to be the next?

I have made some mistakes in the past, but I have learned from them and now know that if I am not mentally fit for something, I would and should keep it to myself and stay away. Perhaps some do not acknowledge their mental state. I rest my case.

akc3n See, it's not just about [your] device, it's about what other people may or may not read on here, interrupt it wrongly, and could brick their device based on you're comments.

User2288 This notion of me being responsible for someone else's "false interpretation" of my words is outrageous and a very dangerous precedence in a free thinking society.

At the end of the day (or maybe the beginning), discuss.grapheneos.org is not Hyde Park or "the public square". It's a virtual server somewhere, rented by the GrapheneOS project, dedicated to helping people improve and better use GrapheneOS, staffed by volunteers, with content, generally of high quality, also provided by volunteers (thanks, everybody!). Both the technical detail and the tone reflect on the project.

Because the technical detail and the tone reflect on the project, the project can publish a community-standards guide, and the volunteer moderators can enforce it (sometimes making mistakes -- it happens!). Users who, in the (fallible human) judgment of the volunteer moderators, suggest things that might cause other users to suffer may well be requested to do things differently. This web site isn't a free society in the sense of being governed by one or another government's constitution; it's a free association in the sense of being a place where people who are more or less ok with the site's policies (as interpreted by fallible human volunteer moderators) choose to hang out to help each other.

Just my two cents! Please note that I do not speak for the GrapheneOS project.

Back with the original topic… what implications does having Bluetooth on with a smartwatch or wireless earbuds have?

I guess it increases attack surface and reduces privacy as @de0u said, because os the two MAC addresses of the two BT radios talking to each other constantly? Is that any different than having BT on? There’s only one MAC, but whoever wants to track BT devices, can still track that person, right? (That’s the reason why I like the auto off feature for BT and wifi).

What would be the mitigations if someone was still inclined in wearing a smartwatch? Using an LTE smartwatch and not use BT?

AccessDeniedBitch
Did the answer i gave you in the other thread that was closed answer your question?

On topic, I read the the Garmin link. It goes to can you trust what they say about not sharing your PII and other info with 3rd parties? The watch does look nice. A link was posted in another thread to an open source watch. Watch looked clunky IMO and screen was lame, but I'm used to sacrificing for security/privacy.

As for Bluetooth itself, I don't see it as being secure as WiFi with a VPN at all. If you have Bluetooth scanning (along with WiFi scanning) off that eliminates a lot of location and ad tracking. While the Bluetooth connection to a watch or a car infotainment may not be very secure from a hacking standpoint, it also has a very short range. I'm not very concerned about a hack as someone would need to be really targeting me personally and can't hack me by other "easier" (easier in a long distance remote attack without having to follow me) means that is not in my threat model. I'm not particularly concerned about a Bluetooth hack, unless I am missing something in that it can be done long range. The concern for me is the device you are connected to slurping up what it can and sending it off. For my car, it is an older model where the infotainment does not connect to the internet so I am not concerned with data loss using Organic Maps or Magic Earth with Bluetooth turn-by-turn. I am still grappling with a watch along those lines. The key would be only being able to transmit to my GOS phone.

Garmin is not as invasive regarding privacy concerns compared to others as far as I can tell. I'm experimenting with GOS and paired a Fenix to the Connect app on the main profile, with Gapps disabled. The notification push to watch is useful at home, while airplane mode is switched on when out to prevent the constant watch broadcasting. The offline map and GarminPay features are handy even in airplane mode. I'm unsure about the app's Bluetooth chattiness and have disabled app's BT scanning permissions via adb. The app's third party internet connection is limited to Google Firebase - DNS blocked.
Most of Garmin's newer watches can upload exercise activities via Wi-Fi and be viewed on the Connect website without phone involvement at all, perhaps that is the way to go.

MoonshineMidnight

As for Bluetooth itself, I don't see it as being secure as WiFi with a VPN at all. If you have Bluetooth scanning (along with WiFi scanning) off that eliminates a lot of location and ad tracking.

Having Wi-Fi/Bluetooth scanning enabled only allows apps with the Location / Nearby Devices permissions to do scans while Wi-Fi or Bluetooth are otherwise disabled. If you don't give out those permissions, it makes no difference. The scanning toggles are off by default on GrapheneOS, and standard permissions like these are never granted to user installed apps by default.

am missing something in that it can be done long range

Bluetooth can be quite long range. It depends on the radios at both ends. Most Bluetooth accessories have very weak radios, but the radio in the phone can work quite far away. If there was a strong radio on the other end, it should work from quite far away.

The concern for me is the device you are connected to slurping up what it can and sending it off.

It can't do any of that unless you explicitly give it access to data.

de0u No, there are different Bluetooth standards with different versions of privacy features. It depends on the Bluetooth version used by the accessory. Modern Bluetooth LE attempts to provide much more privacy than Wi-Fi with MAC randomization, since it rotates the MAC addresses while in use and randomizes them on both ends. It's far from perfect but it's a lot more private than carrying a Wi-Fi AP with you where the AP has a fixed MAC address. GrapheneOS uses per-connection MAC randomization but it remains the same while connected, which isn't as good as what the Bluetooth LE privacy features provide.

AccessDeniedBitch AccessDeniedBitch Simply disabling Bluetooth and leaving Bluetooth scanning disabled works fine. You should also remove the quick tile so you can't accidentally enable it. Bluetooth and Bluetooth scanning are disabled by default on GrapheneOS but it's very easy to enable by accident via the quick tile.

AccessDeniedBitch Those threads were locked due to getting derailed into arguments. Threads full of inaccurate information like this one get removed so that people can hopefully find higher quality threads. Those threads were not removed because they quickly got decent answers, unlike this one which has been a mess of inaccurate information and inappropriate arguments.