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The first time I have heard of innovative ideas of how to use mobile phones for advertising and marketing via Bluetooth was probably from Rudy here on m-trends. Last year, he reported how one of the political parties in Spain used Bluetooth to send ring tones, images and videos to the phones of supporters during party gatherings. Since then Rudy has reported on numerous other ways to use Bluetooth for marketing such as song downloads from ad banners in cities and recently when he wrote about Futurlink. Today I read an interesting article in one of Germany’s weeklies “Der Spiegel” which was quite critical.

The author’s criticism did not address the marketing or advertising scheme generally but rather focused on security problems and user behavior. In the past, many issues with the way Bluetooth was implemented on mobile phones were detected and it didn’t take long before tools appeared to exploit them. These would do almost anything from extracting phone book entries to establishing calls to expensive 0900 numbers without the knowledge or consent of the user. Also, malware was found which uses Bluetooth to replicate to other phones. It has to be said, however, that the user has to dismiss two security warnings before the malware could take.

The author of the article in the Spiegel voices concerns that in case Bluetooth marketing expands, more and more people would activate Bluetooth in their mobile phone to download information and afterwards forget to either switch Bluetooth off again or at least activate Bluetooth invisible mode again. Personally, I haven’t heard of any security issues with Bluetooth on phone models appearing on the market for a while. So the question is whether the media has just gone tired of the subject or if vendors have really learnt their lesson and fixed their Bluetooth implementations in newer models. After all, it’s not Bluetooth that’s insecure but flawed implementations.