Bluetooth is bad. You can't quit it. Here's what to do. (2025)

Harald Bluetooth, a 10th century Danish king, knew nothing of the wireless device connection technology that bears his name. But King Bluetooth died fighting a rebellion started by his son, which means both Bluetooths have a common problem: unexpected security issues caused by nefarious connections.

That's not just a cautionary tale for medieval monarchs. It's also smart for us in 2025 to beware of rebellious Bluetooths. Dependent devices (like your favorite Bluetooth headphones) can seem like your children, essential to your life. And they can also be treacherous if they hook up with the wrong kind of people, namely hackers and thieves.

Bluetooth has gone through a few iterations since 2019, when Mashable advised turning it off as much as possible, and will likely be improved by widespread implementation of Bluetooth 6.0 in 2025. Bluetooth 6 offers devices the ability to know where the other one is, down to the centimeter, according to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) that oversees the technology. In theory, this should prevent so-called Man In The Middle attacks that can suck up data from devices, or control them.

The problem with Bluetooth

None of this, however, solves the essential cybersecurity problem of Bluetooth. A Bluetooth device just loves to shout about itself to the world. That's essentially what the low-power radio technology is, constant low-level boasting (again, like a child) while looking to play with others.

And it's up to you, as the parent, to turn off these traits when the child is most vulnerable.

To see the scale of the parental problem here, download one of the free Bluetooth scanner apps on the App Store or Google Play. I write this with BT Inspector open on my iPhone. It can see and name about a dozen of my devices, and see about a dozen more unknown devices, probably my neighbors'.

If any one of those devices does not require a pairing code or similar security for a connection, they're essentially open to any hacker that walks by. But hey, I mean, it's not like one of the most commonly used Bluetooth chips on the planet just turned out to have a bunch of nefarious undocumented commands nobody knew about before baked into it. Oh wait, it did.

Bluetooth creates unexpected vulnerabilities

Meanwhile, petty thieves have caught on to Bluetooth scanner apps. Time was when an opportunistic car break-in was just that, a gamble that there might be something of value in the vehicle. Now a scanner can tell you for sure, since any Bluetooth device in the car is likely pretty valuable.

I personally witnessed the efficiency of this kind of theft, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in 2024. A vehicle crawled along a line of parked cars, in broad daylight. Out jumped a man in a ski mask, carrying a smartphone; he ran immediately to one car, smashed the rear window, grabbed a bag, and had time to flip off the guy honking behind him before jumping back in the car and speeding off.

That's just the world we're living in now: Gone in six seconds, never mind 60. One Outside magazine writer, after testing Faraday envelopes and in-car safes, found some success wrapping devices in his car in tin foil. If you must leave devices in your car at a trailhead, say, we have a better solution: just turn Bluetooth off.

It's a Bluetooth world (and universe)

This is the solution overall: Simple awareness. Good Bluetooth hygiene, if you will.

You turn Bluetooth off on devices when they're in vulnerable situations (a parked car, a DEFCON hacker convention). You don't connect any Bluetooth device to a Bluetooth device that you don't own. (If you must, say in connecting your phone to a rental car, or connecting to a speaker at a party, you remember to delete the connection afterwards.) If a device doesn't have any pairing security, consider buying an alternative that does or make sure it's turned off when you're not using it. And if you're in charge of your organization's security, you get really paranoid about every leaky device in the office.

But as for consumers: is it realistic, any longer, to expect us to live a Bluetooth-free life? You might as well ask us to live without screens.

King Bluetooth is everywhere, and its conquest of the planet is just getting started. More than 5 billion new Bluetooth devices ship around the planet every year, and that number is expected to surpass 7 billion a year in 2028. That's the equivalent of every single person on the planet getting a new Bluetooth device every year. This cheap, easy, low-power connection technology, this glue for the Internet of Things, it's a universal standard.

As of 2024, it's even being used off-planet, by satellites that can detect a Bluetooth signal at a distance of 600 km. The company behind the satellites, Hubble Network, has a vision of connecting all Bluetooth devices on the planet via satellite — a much cheaper Starlink, essentially.

So you might not be able to avoid using Bluetooth on a daily basis – but switch it off when you're done with it and stay mindful of where you leave your Bluetooth-enabled devices.

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