Windows Phone Thoughts: Bluetooth-Powered Location-Based Advertising -- Courtesy of Land Rover

"Land Rover was able to start transferring data to my phone without my explicit permission because I'd left it on the "Discoverable" setting, meaning that other nearby Bluetooth devices were able to detect its presence. I guess I'd been lulled into not looking at this as a security issue because hookups of two Bluetooth devices normally require a pairing process that requires human intervention, even though I know of the hackish prank known as Bluejacking. But it hadn't dawned on me that a discoverable phone could be discovered by an advertising broadcast."



You may recall a post from about a month ago titled Location-based Advertisements Sent to Your Cellphone?. It referenced a French advertising company looking to push ads to your phone via Bluetooth. Personally, many of us were not amused by this concept, but I did took solace in the idea that I probably won't have to deal with this anytime in the immediate future. I guess that lasted all of about five weeks!

The good news is that you can avoid this headache by making your phone undiscoverable... and note, this article is proof-positive that your phone does not require human intervention to accept incoming transmissions from an unknown source (helps highlight the concerns raised last week regarding Bluetooth security flaws). Moral of the story? Make those phones of yours undiscoverable (and please remove any thoughts of providing "GTA" treatment to any Land Rover exec you may run into in the future)!!