[freehunter]

Break-ins yes. But hibernating laptops being discovered via bluetooth? Cameras?

Thieves break into cars when they know there will be valuables inside the car. Now, are they running Bluetooth scanners to determine that, or is the fact that they're parking in an Apple parking lot enough?

From the article:

>San Francisco saw a 24 percent increase in vehicle break-ins between 2016 and 2017

Is that increase due to Bluetooth tracking? Or just all break-ins? This is exactly what I'm talking about... just because break-ins are happening more often and also unrelatedly Bluetooth can be discovered wireless, does not mean the two things are in any way connected.

Possible, yes. Actually happening in the real world? Well, we have an anecdote that the author promises us "isn’t just some crazy theory Joe and I have" and an anecdote from a police representative surrounded by statistics on all break-ins regardless of if Bluetooth was involved.

I mean... the story is about a thief who broke a window and stole a backpack that was in plain sight for anyone passing by the car. Absolutely nothing to do with Bluetooth at all.

[perl4ever]

It's simultaneously true that people believe or at least repeat any story that triggers their prejudices and that people discount anything that violates them, particularly when they haven't seen it firsthand.

So just because those impulses are opposed, doesn't mean that one is more right than the other in general.

[freehunter]

Yes, but when should you decide to take action on that belief? At what point should people go out of their way to prevent an attack that may never happen? It's possible to steal passwords by listening to someone typing on a keyboard and reconstructing the key presses based on the sound. Should everyone stop using keyboard? Stop using passwords and stop using every service that requires a password?

In the security world we develop a risk matrix. This compares the likelihood of a threat compared to the consequences of that in order to determine how concerned you should be. Someone breaking into your car to steal things based on tracking the Bluetooth signal seems a lot less likely than someone breaking into your car because they can see your backpack laying on the back seat, but the consequences are exactly the same. So since thieves seeing your bag and deciding to break into your car is more likely, the natural course of action is to stop leaving your bags in a place that's visible to thieves. If someone then tears open your trunk to steal your bag, then you can worry about Bluetooth.

This article provides absolutely zero proof that Bluetooth was involved in this break-in, so why should anyone rush to the conclusion that Bluetooth was responsible for it? It's not an impulse or a prejudice, one is objectively more right than the other.

Blaming Bluetooth is begging the question when the backpack was visible through the window.

[perl4ever]

A person could assign enough risk to a proof-of-concept existing that the difference between a true and a false report of it in the wild seems rather small and unimportant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness