The other day I posted about bluetooth advertising and how if you are shopping in Sultan Center you can now receive ads on your phone. I like many of you had some concerns regarding this service and how easily it can turn into spam. Well someone from the company responsible for this bluetooth advertising commented the following:
Hi, I’ve been following your conversations regarding bluetooth. My company is actually implementing these bluetooth services in Kuwait and I’m always interested to hear what people have to say about it. I agree with everyone that spam is a major problem which is why when we put our network together we were sure to set non-spam parameters. If you reject the message once, you shouldn’t receive another request for at least a week. Also, no matter which location you go into, you shouldn’t receive more than 3 messages in a week. If this is not the case in any particular location it’s probably because we are doing testing and optimization. Within the next few months we hope to bring a number of services that you would actually find useful, so bear with us. I think you’ll be impressed.
I think the fact that its limited to 3 messages a week per person is a good thing. But the big problem is that I don’t think its possible for us to opt out of this service. This means anyone with a bluetooth phone is forced to receive 3 adverts a week. Sucks.
Update: Nibaq pointed out something very important regarding this bluetooth service. Read below:
Very interesting. So it registers your MAC address of your phone. Even though you aren’t accepting messages when the machine does a search it will regonize your phone and store it.
Spread these machines around town not sending anything but just registering phones and what do you have? A wonder tracking device.
Sultan can see how many times you visit the store in a month, and which stores. You can even track how long a customer is at the store.
Just another reason to have my bluetooh on Non Discoverable mode or simply off.
