
New Chrome for iOS scans for beacons broadcasting URLs - jimiasty
http://blog.estimote.com/post/124778667895/beacons-chrome-ios
======
RexRollman
As a user of Chrome on iOS, I absolutely do not want this. Is there a way to
turn this "feature" totally off? I've been looking through the links and
didn't see a mention of it.

~~~
jimiasty
This is Jakub, founder of Estimote here.

@RexRollman: it seems Google is experimenting with that at the moment and the
feature is opt-in only, so no worry.

When you download the new Chrome for iOS you "have to" include Chrome into
"Today widgets" section and also Enable "Physical Web Scanning" that will show
you the list nearby URLs broadcasted by beacons.

As you can see there is still a lot of efforts there and you need to turn on
initially.

~~~
RexRollman
Thank you.

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rsuelzer
One thing I've wanted to do, but is total impractical.. I want to put beacons
on trees around the city that will provide information about the tree, for
example what type of tree it is, when it was planted, etc. Of course, I could
just put little signs on them and it would be available to more people. But it
sounds cool.

~~~
RossP
Every tree maintained by the City of Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) has "an
email address" (in the mainstream press it's been "one email per tree"; in
reality it's a single mailbox the CoM staffers respond to).

Click a tree marker on the map near the top of the Melbourne Urban Forest
website
([http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au/](http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au/))
and you can email your selected tree to find further information, etc. A bit
more info is in this Broadsheet article:
[http://www.broadsheet.com.au/melbourne/entertainment/article...](http://www.broadsheet.com.au/melbourne/entertainment/article/trees-
return-your-emails)

~~~
bigiain
Nice - Sydney Uni have a similar thing with an iOS app:
[https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/campus-
flora/id918408102](https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/campus-flora/id918408102)

I can't see anything there' but I _think_the app code is open source and
they're encouraging reuse.

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lvs
Well, this is precisely what no user wants or needs. Slow clap to everyone
involved.

~~~
callahad
Are you sure? I'd quite like to walk up to my bus stop and have my phone
provide me a link to a stop-specific schedule, among other uses.

~~~
lvs
But Nextbus already knows what stop you're at using AGPS. What's the point of
the beacon? Perhaps you can come up with a use for beacons, but you need to
deal with the fact that users don't need or want another intrusive advertising
channel.

~~~
tjohns
What if I don't have Nextbus installed, or have location services disabled?

Or even if I have location enabled, what if Nexbus could figure out which stop
you're at without having to spin up GPS, in turn saving battery?

~~~
lvs
Really reaching here. Nextbus is a web app. Location is in my experience
always good enough without a sat lock. You don't need "to spin up GPS" to get
your answer.

~~~
WojtekB
But Nextbus data is not available everywhere - and installing beacons on bus
stops to broadcast URL addresses is fairly easy and low cost.

~~~
lvs
The infrastructure you'd need for your beacons is the same as Nextbus (i.e.
trackers on public transport and a city data feed), but Nextbus requires no
distributed/deployed devices. Therefore, rolling out a beacon approach must
have more overhead than something like Nextbus. You really can't come up with
a reason why these beacons are better for that use case.

Hell, just put up a QR code at the bus stop. What could be cheaper than that?

------
tanujparikh
Tanuj from the Estimote team here. If you're curious about some of the under-
the-hood mechanics between BLE beacons, Eddystone, and the Physical Web check
out developer docs
[http://developer.estimote.com/eddystone/](http://developer.estimote.com/eddystone/)

~~~
michaelt
Does the indoor location feature work on time of flight, RSSI or something
else? If it's time of flight, how do you convince the OS to give you accurate
enough time measurements?

The website claims 3 year beacon battery life - but bluetooth has a reputation
for poor power performance. How often do the beacons broadcast, for how long,
and at what power output?

~~~
mx12
It works by RSSI [1], and I believe you can calibrate it with your
antenna/case design. Not to mention any attenuation by the phone's antenna or
your hand/body.

Quote:

"Phones or other smart devices can pick up the beacon’s signal and estimate
the distance by measuring received signal strength (RSSI). The closer you are
to the beacon, the stronger the signal. Remember that the beacon is not
broadcasting continuously—it’s blinking instead. The more frequent the blinks,
the more reliable the signal detection."

[1] [http://developer.estimote.com/](http://developer.estimote.com/)

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tashoecraft
Does chrome put in anything to protect against developers spamming
notification center? I can just imagine putting a couple hundred of these
throughout time square and making everyone really hate chrome for ios.

~~~
nevi-me
On Android it does, and assuming that it uses the Push Notification API via
WebServiceWorker, the user should be able to globally turn the notifications
off (as they wouldn't be device-specific).

~~~
heypiotr
We're yet to see how Google implements this on Android. Currently it's iOS
only, and the "Today" Chrome widget only, no push notifications at all.

Also, see the above comment from jimiasty about Google ranking/filtering the
URLs before it shows them in the widget.

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rdancer
Because the Bluetooth text spam and Bluetooth image spam was such a raging
success!

~~~
aflinik
It's like saying any information printed on paper is useless, because people
hate flyers.

------
dantiberian
One privacy issue I'm seeing is that it seems like the users device still
needs to make a request to get the metadata? So the retailer could use
fingerprinting of requests to track people around. I wasn't entirely clear on
where the metadata comes from so I could have this wrong.

~~~
chrisfosterelli
> information about users won’t be saved until they click a link, so the
> beacon owner will not know anyone was nearby until they visit the website

It sounds like the metadata is sourced from the bluetooth-broadcast, not via a
separate request.

However, the specification itself[0] only has room for the URL and the
telemetry data, so how they achieve this in practice is questionable.

[0] [https://github.com/google/eddystone/blob/master/protocol-
spe...](https://github.com/google/eddystone/blob/master/protocol-
specification.md)

~~~
dogma1138
The beacons them selves have proximity sensing built in, that at least how the
"ibeacons" works...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy#Proximity...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy#Proximity_sensing)

~~~
fyolnish
Proximity detection is done by the receiver. An iBeacon is just a dumb
broadcaster.

------
dogma1138
How many users actually have BT on? I never have it on, and i don't anyone
else who has it on unless they pair it with their car, and even then most of
them prefer the USB pairing since it charges the phone.

Also abusing an already insecure standard and pretty much stitching this onto
it doesn't seem like that much of a good idea to me, I wonder what effect all
that spam has on actual compliant devices....

The good thing is that it doesn't support URL's that are longer than 18 chars,
and only supports 14 top tier TLD's so pretty much USA only.

The odd part is that all their examples seem to use shorthand url's provided
by goo.gl, but the .gl TLD isn't supported by the standard, eh? who thought
this through?

~~~
tjohns
Honest question: How is Bluetooth insecure?

There are some specific insecure devices out there, and Bluetooth has some
optional anonymous pairing modes, but my understanding was that the default
pairing process provided a reasonable level of security for most applications.

Notwithstanding that, I thought Bluetooth LE beacons are broadcast-only, which
avoids the pairing issue anyway.

And to answer your first question: I leave bluetooth on, both to pair with my
car (USB connections don't give enough power to charge with GPS running, and
don't provide live audio) and because it's a much lower power way of tethering
my other devices to the Internet compared to WiFi tethering. Oh, and my
smartwatch uses it too. As does a few other devices at home (BBQ thermometer,
conference phone, headphones).

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tdicola
This is really nice, will it also be available for Android and if so what
Android versions? Right now you have to install Google's physical web app
thingy on Android to get beacons so it's kinda clunky and annoying. I know
Eddystone was supposed to change a lot of that but I didn't see any mention of
what Android versions it will work on. Is it only 5.1 and beyond or are they
going to update 4.4, 5.0, etc?

------
jimiasty
Estimote founder here. Few days ago Google released their new, open beacon
format - eddystone and today just updated Chrome for iOS that can scan for
beacons broadcasting Eddystone URLs. You can read more on our blog how to
start broadcasting URL using beacons and how to test it on Chrome for iOS.

~~~
scrollaway
I'll ask the uncomfortable question: How conscious are you of how this tech
will be abused as a pure advertising medium and how annoying and ugly this
potentially will be for users? And how concerned are you by that? Popups were
useful once upon a time.

OT: the scrolling hijack for the animation in the middle of your site is
really annoying.

~~~
WojtekB
Hey there,

Wojtek from Estimote team here: actually, Google is approaching this very
conciously when it comes to privacy and UX. You need to opt-in to see those
URLs in notification center, then metadata is fetched so you know what you
click, and still no tracking is possible until you actually click.

Also, they're iterating very fast with Physical Web, but it's still in
experimentation phase. Physical Web for Chrome is big news, but keep in mind
that Chrome on iOS has ~5% penetration.

