Why are there such idiotic smart TVs that can’t even turn off bluetooth?!
There are at least two such devices in my apartment block and my bluetooth audio transmitter always tries to connect to them instead of my headphones. I have already talked to the people owning those TVs and we tried to disable BT, but it just isn’t possible. This is driving me insane!
Tv companies use those features to collect advertising metrics. While the BT can’t connect with anything on it’s own, it can see things like what other bluetooth devices are near by and how often.
It’s a small inconvenience to the user but knowing device 001A3FD24AE3 was present during a viewing of all of Star Trek TNG in 4 weeks is critically important for the TV to know.
I don’t care what’s “important” for some random marketing executive to know about me and what’s happening inside my house.
I bought this device and I will use it how I want and not how these predatory bastards want.
Yuuup. Fuck their “features” with a rusty shovel.
Bluetooth gets a normal plain text device name, and many of then are default. Knowing “Steve’s S20 FE” is near by is more useful, especially when farming that information from tens of thousands of tv’s and cross referencing that with other factors like income demographics for a given area.
Removed by mod
You would think that with all that demographic data and spying on everything they’d have a clue, but it’s like they’ve not been using it to make products better at all. It’s like they’re finding out just exactly how awful something has to be until we complain.
Don’t the Bluetooth beacons only see the MAC address unless it’s in discovery mode?
I don’t know the actual spec, I just thought that’s how it worked.