Shopping centre uses mobile phone data to "monitor visitor levels"

[Adrian Hayter]

On 24 Aug 2011, at 17:14, Brian Morrison wrote:

> Some places were intending to use Bluetooth to detect visitors, if the
> phone is set to discoverable then the MAC address can be tracked and
> all restricted to about a 10m radius.

Even assuming the majority of people did keep their phone's Bluetooth turned on, it wouldn't be a very accurate tracker of Android devices. Unless Google have made radical changes in the last year, I'm pretty sure you can't keep the phone discoverable for longer than 300 seconds. It was a massive problem for me last summer when I was tasked with creating a sort of tracking system with the Android phones. We had to result to rooting the darn things and installing a special service just to keep Bluetooth running.

-Adrian Hayter