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phipples parent
In the bluetooth settings it literally states: "To improve device experience, apps and services can still scan for nearby devices at any time, even when Bluetooth is off." This can be completely turned off in scanning settings. The article title is kind of clickbaity.
_trampeltier
I have to say, I did not know that, you have to go to an extra menu. I really hate all todays OS, how they fool all user. On the other side, Apps like Wiggle.net do not work since Android 9 because they limited WiFi scanning.
vel0city
I'm on Android 8.1. When turning off Bluetooth the entire Bluetooth menu showing previously paired devices changes to just show the string "When Bluetooth is turned on, your device can communicate with other nearby Bluetooth devices. To improve location accuracy, system apps and services can still detect Bluetooth devices. You can change this setting in _scanning settings_[link to the associated settings page]".

I don't see how this is fooling the user. Its pretty direct in stating what's happening and provides a link directly to the additional settings.

pbhjpbhj
Maybe the "when this is turned off" bit not actually turning it off? That's not exactly up front. It could easily have not been called "turned off", like "OS use only" mode or "bluetooth not function except as a spy tool for Google" mode, something snappy ...

I suppose you have no problem with people calling things purchase when they mean short-term rental, either.

Do you really think it's called "off" when it's not off for any other reason than to fool users? They could make "off" actually mean off very easily.

vel0city
Don't falsely quote, it's a disservice. The settings page never says "when this is turned off". It says what's happening in incredibly plain language and provides a link to the other settings which could confuse a user really attempting to fully disable the whole Bluetooth stack including OS level access. As others have stated, wanting to disable the ability of pairing is sometimes wanted while still allowing something like high precision location through Bluetooth scanning or other forms of 2.4GHz radio sampling. It's not entirely unreasonable for such a feature to exist, so to me it's not an unreasonable settings structure. Had they hidden the setting which could be conflicting with the user's request to disable all Bluetooth I would understand your point, but it's pretty clear what's happening when looking at the settings page.

Misquoting and falsely assuming things of others does a great disservice to your argument.

ohmyblock
On Android 10 here, no such message on my Xiaomi Mi 8
vel0city
I noticed that string about the additional settings disappears when those high precision location settings are disabled. Maybe you already have the precision location via WiFi/BT disabled?
izacus
I just setup a Pixel and it asked about this during the initial setup.
hanche
It's easy to miss stuff on initial setup. Here you got a shiny new device, you're eager to get it up and running so you can start enjoying your purchase. It's extremely easy in that setting to miss the small print. Even if it ain't that small.
grawprog
I too did not know this, or even that there was a separate scanning setting. I'm also not sure where this message even pops up. I don't remember ever reading any time about apps being able to use Bluetooth while turned off and enabling and disabling Bluetooth did not seem to produce the message. I can't seem to find any mention of it in the Bluetooth help menu either. This is on Android 9.

I've found the scanning menu by searching for it. This is the only place that seems to mention allowing apps to scan Bluetooth while Bluetooth is off. It seems to be defaulted to disabled though.

dmos62
It's easy to hide these things behind It Just Works (tm). Give me a device that doesn't "just work". I want actual freedom in what my peripherals are doing.
Angostura
If you want actual freedom, you have to take time to look at all the menus.
pbhjpbhj
.. and construe terms in the worst possible double-speak way: purchase means rental, off means "spy on you mode", ...?
franga2000
Except more and more options are being taken away by Google, so there's no menu (not even developer setting?!?) that could give you any sense of freedom back. For examples (not all privacy-related), see clipboard permissions, background usage rules, Firebase notifications, WiFi scanning...

The only way to get freedom back on Android is to either run a very old version (bad!) or undo all the bad changes in an AOSP fork (difficult).

fsflover
You should consider Librem 5 phone.
hcnews
You can't ask every user to RTFM. I have been toggling off bluetooth and location for a while to save battery but haven't noticed it. So, I am guessing a lot of users don't end up noticing it as well.

There are two issues with this implementation: 1. It's not privacy first. Toggling bluetooth should turn off everything. 2. It eats up battery/system-resources for a functionality that I don't want, causing me to have less control over my purchased device.

reaperducer
Apple seems to have figured out a compromise.

There is an icon for turning off data to a radio (wifi or Bluetooth, for example), and an entirely different icon for if the radio is completely off.

If you have an iPhone, you can see this by turning off wifi and also your cellular connection. The wifi icon will change from color to black-on-white, while the cellular icon will change from color to white-on-black. This indicates that the wifi connection can still be used for things like AirDrop, but the cellular connection is off.

samatman
That's better than nothing, but my response to your post was to try it on my phone and then mutter to myself "okay, I guess"

I don't think most iPhone users browse HN to glean hints about the meaning of such opaque affordances, I had no idea that was what was happening when I turned off WiFi. I just figured it was actually off.

reaperducer
I managed to figure it out. Maybe because I noticed the colors were different. I suspect other people have figured it out, too, since my ex-girlfriend describes me as, "the single most stupid person I've ever met."
rvz
Another point to make is that iOS also made it a bit harder for the user to completely turn off bluetooth and wifi from the control center since iOS 11, possibly allowing scanners and beacons to pick up these devices from passers by. Unless you directly get into the setting screen and switch it off.

Sure Apple keeps Bluetooth/Wifi on for 'Find My' services but I'm pretty sure it will also be used for the contact tracing technology use case since many users will falsely believe that it is completely off when pressing the switches on the control center.

tinus_hn
Also airplane mode by default no longer turns off everything. Really annoying.

By the way this is not for ‘Find My’ services because these only work if the device has internet connectivity. The newly announced mesh functionality is not active yet.

Tagbert
I think that they realized that many/most of us are using Bluetooth headphones on the plane even in airplane mode. Airlines do allow Bluetooth so no reason to shut it off in airplane mode.
tinus_hn
This is true but airplane mode used to be ‘all antennas off’. It would be really nice if there were an ‘all antennas off’ mode now that airplane mode means ‘cellular off’.
sneakymichael
I remember reading from an authoritative source (Probably the Apple Support website, but I don’t remember alas) that this is done to retain functionality of wireless-based system services — which require Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled; like AirDrop, Handoff, Universal Clipboard, Instant Hotspot, etc.

(Not for nefarious/tracking reasons.)

deevnullx
That is the "Continuity Protocol". For a paper with a write-up on reverse engineering/tracking here is some stuff from last year. [1]

tldr, yes, it can be used to track individual users, but doing it at scale (like just about everything else) would be significantly more difficult. MACs randomize every 15 minutes, so that is not effective for long term tracking. Continuity Protocol allows a fairly effective way of tracking a device in a limited ecosystem, but with the expectation of large numbers of people spread over large areas, it would likely wind up being significantly less effective.

1. https://www.cmand.org/furiousmac/popets-2019-0057.pdf

memco
That is nice if it's doing that. I setup a shortcut so that I can fully turn off bluetooth when I leave the house, but it's a bit flaky: sometimes it works, sometimes it fails for unknown reasons and I end up having to go into settings. If this mitigation is sufficient I'll switch back to the control center toggle.
AlphaSite
They also randomise the BLE beacon MAC as well right?
floatingatoll
It seems a bit overblown to suggest that iOS is hiding this, when it openly warns you what it's doing when you use those Control Center buttons (messages shown quoted below) and leaves the buttons highlighted in a non-disabled state (in contrast to the disabled state that Airplane Mode usually displays one centimeter above):

> Disconnecting Nearby Wi-Fi Until Tomorrow

> Disconnecting Bluetooth Devices Until Tomorrow

Apple made a point about how these new toggles meet their users' needs more effectively than the pure on/off toggles available in Settings > Wi-Fi / Bluetooth, and they've been right for all of my use cases since then.

pottertheotter
I bet if you stopped 100 people and asked them to turn off Bluetooth or WiFi using the control center, and to pay attention to the messages you quoted, 100 of them would read those messages and see the colors of the buttons go from blue to white and tell you it means those services are completely deactivated.

It absolutely does not warn you that it is keeping some of those services going in the background.

lonelappde
The average person will never have any idea how anything works, but will have opinions and contradictory requirements like "give me a richly personalized and streamlined experience without knowing anything about me". That's one of the big challenges of privacy in tech.
floatingatoll
They would say so in the same breath as expecting their Apple Watch and Apple Pencil to continue working on their iPhone and iPad respectively, and objecting when they break. Telling them they shouldn't expect Bluetooth devices to continue working when they turn off Bluetooth will make them confused and eventually angry with you; "these devices don't require pairing, or pin codes, or manual connection crap, or any of that nonsense, so they're obviously not Bluetooth, they just work". We know that's not true, but they don't care about that technical distinction.

If you're a normal user, you don't care about whether the radio is active or not. You care about whether you can easily disconnect from crappy Bluetooth devices, or whether you can easily disconnect from broken cafe wi-fi to switch to cellular. The control center buttons provided by Apple do both of those things, without breaking Apple's ecosystem of devices.

Is this resulting control center behavior optimal? Sure is for Apple users. Everything that's broken disconnects and everything magic continues working. Is this optimal for tech nerds? Sure, if they're Apple users, because they quickly come to realize how useful "disconnect from this specific SSID today only, but continue using wi-fi when I go home" is. Is this optimal for people who want to aggressively control their radios at all times? Nope, sure isn't, you'll have to go to the Settings dialog and realize to do so the first time, presumably having missed out on endless Device Paranoia 101 courses that explain this.

Turning off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi is something that most users do not require of their device, and do not want of their device. Those that do want this for some sort of specific reason are the extremely rare exception, and just happen to be in slightly higher proportion here at HN relative to the rest of the world.

reaperducer
Telling them they shouldn't expect Bluetooth devices to continue working when they turn off Bluetooth will make them confused and eventually angry with you

Yep. Many greybeards around here have fought the battle of "Why do I need a modem to access AOL? I got a disk in the mail, that should be good enough!"

floatingatoll
Too bad their takeaway seems to have been “people are stupid” rather than “people had a point”. If AOL couldn’t make a useful program that worked in offline mode, with a content cache loaded on-disc and updated with content regularly, they were totally missing out on the “mail magazines to houses annually” strategy of using those discs for more than just trash waste. But people don’t understand modems and it was easier to mock them than to build a better product.
machello13
I don't agree with that. Some people will never understand anything about their phones, and that's fine, but I don't think the message "Disconnecting Bluetooth Devices Until Tomorrow" is at all misleading about the fact that it's only disconnecting devices, and not shutting down Bluetooth.
Lio
If it’s to meet user needs why can’t I opt to have real on/off in the control centre again?

Personally I think this is more “Maybe later” passive aggressive crap from Apple. You know, where they take the option to say no out of the UI.

floatingatoll
I made up an idea and tested it for this reply. It turns out you can use airplane mode for this already!

When you turn them off in airplane mode, they go completely off, and airplane mode remembers their on/off state distinctly from non-airplane mode. You get the cellular disable for free, since obviously if you're disabling wifi/bluetooth radios, you're disabling cellular radios too. (Otherwise what would be the point? Radio paranoia can't afford to be selective if it's truly justified paranoia, and cellular radios are infinitely louder than bluetooth/wifi ones.)

thefounder
I wonder, what apps and services it helps improve? Why would you want to turn bluetooth off but not really turn it off?
izacus
Some uses I know about:

1.) Indoor location (uses beacons to improve accuracy). This is transparent to app developers which used fused location provider and just results in very accurate locations.

2.) Bluetooth fast pair - https://developers.google.com/nearby/fast-pair/spec This is for feature parity with Apple "magical" AirPod pairing. You open the headphone case and immediately the popup appears asking you to connect them.

3.) Nearby APIs for device-to-device comms without internet https://developers.google.com/nearby

4.) Instant tethering for feature parity with Apple macos + iPhone tethering - https://support.google.com/pixelbook/answer/7504779?hl=en

ttty
If I disable Bluetooth I don't expect these features to be working...
thefounder
So you disable bluetooth...and then you are expected to pair with bluetooth headphones/airpods or connect to other devices(i.e mac) ?
gumby
> Why would you want to turn bluetooth off but not really turn it off?

A typical case I used to see is "let me switch off bluetooth so that my car doesn't keep connecting while I connect it to your phone" combined with "hey, how come my watch isn't connected to my phone?"

Now it works as the user expected.

This isn't how you or I might expect it to work but I suspect it satisfies most users' mental models.

This isn't intended to praise or condemn the behaviour, I'm simply responding to your question.

dariusj18
Probably apps like Tile, that don't need to have full Bluetooth connectivity, but still want to scan for Tiles every once in a while.
ajross
Any unboxing experience. I mean, naively this means that the doodad you just bought (like the IoT Sous-vide heater I got for Christmas) requires you to fumble with your settings to turn BT back on before you can pair it.

Now, sure, I'm sure the response of the people here is "But I turned it off because I want to have to use settings to turn it back on." And that's fine. But that's not the use case for most users, I strongly suspect. Having a phone that just works with crazy kitchen gadgets is something of real value.

A4ET8a8uTh0
I think you are right. I don't like it, but as a user, I appear to be in a minority. My wife is not concerned about tracking nearly as much as I am. She was ok with ads disappearing from her Kindle, but she does not want to fiddle with anything. And to be perfectly honest, the older I get, the harder it is for me to devote time to do that as well. I even accepted BT pairing in car. That said, I already placed a line in the sand on BT for oven/fridge/toaster/younameit.
miscPerson
I’m suspicious of your reasoning.

Do you have any support that users who turn off a feature — such as Bluetooth — want it to continue to “just work”?

That seems opposite of their expressed intent in turning the feature off.

maccard
my Bluetooth headphones don't support pairing with multiple devices. The easiest way to stop them from pairing with my phone when I want them to pair with my PC is to turn Bluetooth off on my phone. functionally, I don't care whether Bluetooth is off or not, I just want my headphones to pair with my PC. this has the added bonus of being easy to undo (turning on Bluetooth pairs with my headphones again)
thefounder
>> this has the added bonus of being easy to undo (turning on Bluetooth pairs with my headphones again)

I still seem to miss the "added bonus" compared with disabling the bluetooth completely.

maccard
sorry, I meant that it was an added bonus compared to keeping Bluetooth turned on and unpairing my device through the settings menu in my phone.
bryanrasmussen
Perhaps one loves Google and would like to help them increase their understanding of the world.

on edit: changed you to one and your to the.

kuzimoto
I don't think anyone should "love" Google. Sure I enjoy using some of their services, but at the end of the day they will sell every single detail they can gather about you to make money. That's not something to "love" even if they are using it for other interesting things.
bryanrasmussen
neither do I, but the question was why anyone would want to track bluetooth devices available even when bluetooth turned off and that extremely unlikely reason was the only one I could think of.
kuzimoto
Okay, well I completely misread your comment haha.
mtgx (dead)
OrgNet
I don't see this setting in Android 10... does it mean that it is now "impossible" to completely turn it off?
wartijn_
I second this. On my Android One phone (so pretty much stock Android) with Android 10, all it says is: "When Bluethooth is turned on, your device can communicate with other nearby Bluetooth devices."
sabujp
It's not at all clickbaity since "apps and services can still scan for nearby devices at any time" doesn't clearly indicate what's happening with that information. It should be better said as "To improve USER experience, apps and services can still scan for nearby devices at any time and extrapolate/derive/get location data, even when Bluetooth is off." This clearly indicates to someone that turning off bluetooth from the pull down menu doesn't make you invisible via blueooth which is what I've always expected.
ohmyblock
But to 95% of users turning off Bluetooth means using the toggle, doesn't it?
CalChris
Does improving device experience mean phoning home to Google to you?

When I do something to opt out, that should opt out. It is disingenuous to structure the preferences this way.

diebeforei485
Off should mean off.

They could do what Apple does, perhaps.

zepto
Except this is a lie. It’s not being done to ‘improve device experience’.
cptskippy
Using devices with GPS + WiFi to identify and catalog the relative geographic location of SSIDs is beneficial to other devices with WiFi capability that can benefit from Geographic location but lack GPS. The same is true of Bluetooth beacons.
dhimes
Such as? My watch, for example, uses the gps from my phone (if I would let it, that is).

And are you implying that Google is cataloging my SSID even though I have it "hidden?"

cptskippy
You're fixated on it being about you specifically and your devices and direct benefits. If your phone's WiFi detects an SSID at a location and 10 other devices confirm your findings, then when I come along and connect to that SSID, with my non GPS enabled Tablet,my experience can be enriched with coarse location contextualized information. The same is true of IP addresses.

> SSID even though I have it "hidden?"

A hidden SSID is only hidden when it's not being used. That is to say if you setup your AP to not broadcast it's SSID then it's only invisible so long as you have no clients connected to it. As soon as a client connects to your "hidden" AP then it's SSID is broadcast to everyone and their mother.

dhimes
As soon as a client connects to your "hidden" AP then it's SSID is broadcast to everyone and their mother.

Interesting. I've never seen it show up before. EDIT: I probably just wasn't looking for it.

cptskippy
Hiding an SSID only removes the name from Beacon frames that are broadcast. The SSID is still broadcasting beacon frames so it is discoverable and the name is still in Probe/Response frames. So a device passively listening can catch a Hidden SSID when it talks to a client.

So basically hiding your SSID is just giving you a false sense of security because it hides it from people who don't know any better but anyone who knows anything about WiFi security can find it.

kerng
Even if they state that somewhere in a hidden menu, its inappropriate and disrespectful.

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