Google May Have Found a Way to Make the Real-World Web Work

Honestly, there’s not much reason you would. Here’s your one-sentence refresher: Beacons, a bedrock of the “physical web,” are small transmitters that broadcast information about a location to nearby mobile devices. Bringing Home the Beacon You may not use beacons yourself—or realize that you have—but they’ve made sizable inroads since Apple first launched its iBeacon standard back in 2013. Silverman thinks a better implementation is to drive service; the Golden State Warriors, for instance, use beacons to make nose-bleed ticket holders aware of seat upgrade offers during the game. “People don’t have a really good feel for the digital exhaust that they leave as they go around the web,” says Joseph Hall, policy technologist at CDT.