Another thing that's basically a real security hole/opportunity with BLE sniffing is to record the unique IDs of all the BLE devices you can see, along with geo-location data.
Do this enough places and over time, and you get a map of what devices are where and at what time, with the assumption that the devices are probably linked to people.
Expand that to a government placing little innocuous BLE sniffers all over the place collecting data has some pretty evil big brother vibes. Or on everyone's phone so we are all sniffers.
But it kind of goes both ways. You could sniff outside a police station and just skim all the BLE devices you can find, and assume with enough data over time the frequent ones are mostly owned by police officers. Then have an app that alerts you any time one of those LEO BLE devices is in range of you. Basically an undercover LEO's Fitbit could give them up.
The government does put Bluetooth trackers all over the place. Cities like to use them for monitoring traffic flows and patterns. But I would not be surprised to find out they do more than just that with the data. Or I would not be surprised if the vendor who makes the hardware also collects and sells that data on top of the tax money they get.
I'm pretty sure this has been done for years and is one of the reasons why the truly paranoid always keep bluetooth turned off.
Creating a BLE based cop detector would be a neat way to sign up for harassment and surprice traffic stops.
Unfortunately it would likely also work for identifying other groups.
Do this enough places and over time, and you get a map of what devices are where and at what time, with the assumption that the devices are probably linked to people.
Expand that to a government placing little innocuous BLE sniffers all over the place collecting data has some pretty evil big brother vibes. Or on everyone's phone so we are all sniffers.
But it kind of goes both ways. You could sniff outside a police station and just skim all the BLE devices you can find, and assume with enough data over time the frequent ones are mostly owned by police officers. Then have an app that alerts you any time one of those LEO BLE devices is in range of you. Basically an undercover LEO's Fitbit could give them up.