[doomslice]

A ticketing company was experimenting with BLE beacons to trigger things like seat upgrades and coupons when people walked by certain things in a venue… or at least that’s what they said it would be used for.

Instead they covered LA Live and surrounding area with them and then just sold that data to… well I’m not sure who since I left shortly after they did that.

The justification was “but we put it in the TOS and Privacy Policy”.

[zinodaur]

How did the BLE beacons track people? A phone app?

[doomslice]

Yes the ticketing app that people were required to use to get into the events.

[rl3]

>Yes the ticketing app that people were required to use to get into the events.

Well, at least Android 12 has granular Bluetooth permissions.

While the majority of tickets at LA Live are sold by one company currently, there are others, so it's impossible to know which specific company you're talking about.

On a completely unrelated note, there was a big thing surrounding privacy concerns with AXS' app a couple years ago.[0][1]

Clearly those claims were overblown. Surely AXS would never blanket an area with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons and invade users' privacy like that. I refuse to believe AXS would make an app virtually mandatory and then violate users' privacy using physical Bluetooth beacons. Say it ain't so.

Oh, almost forgot: fuck AXS.

[0] https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/axs-spyware-claim-de...

[1] https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/axs-isnt-spywa...

[doomslice]

This was maybe 8 or so years ago so I'm not sure what else this unnamed ticketing company added since... but permissions were pretty lax at that point and had JUST started to tighten up.

Oh I forgot to mention that Apple rejected the iPhone version of the app at first because we didn't make it clear enough that we were tracking their locations like this. Our head of product at the time just called someone up at Apple and it got approved with no changes. It all stunk.

[zinodaur]

Nice. Hold on a sec while I uninstall all the random apps I have left over on my phone...

[BoorishBears]

We're at the point where the lights in a store can be used to track you: https://www.usa.lighting.philips.com/systems/lighting-system...

[scambier]

On Android, the apps won't track you through bluetooth if they don't ask for the location permission.