Tuned in, turned on

Bluetooth mobiles have a novel and unintended use: facilitating anonymous sexual encounters. And that's just the beginning, says Charles Arthur

It's axiomatic these days that the acceptance of a new personal technology rises exponentially if it somehow speeds up relationships, and especially sex. Think of the internet and how online pornography has hastened the take-up of PCs. (Be honest: you thought that all those porn sites out there never got any visitors?) Conversely, one can argue that one reason WAP for mobile phones didn't take off in its first incarnation was that you couldn't get any sex stuff; instead, text messaging remains at the top of the heap for sexy interaction... as some high-profile stories elsewhere have demonstrated in the past couple of weeks.

With that in mind, what hope was there for Bluetooth, the short-range communications technology intended to replace cables to peripherals, such as printers and phones, with radio waves? How desperately unsexy: printers, scanners, computers. Blah. And that's before you get into the fact that it was wildly overhyped at the end of the Nineties, but didn't start to appear - and to work - until a couple of years ago.

It's now time to say that Bluetooth's future looks assured, however, and that it may even become the word on people's lips. Or phones. For a growing group have worked out how to use it to contact people they've never met who just happen to be in the vicinity and who'd like to have sex.

It's called "toothing" (you can probably guess why) and here's how it works, as told by "Jon", the 27-year-old man who runs the toothing forums at toothing. proboards28.com/index.cgi. On the train one day last November, he received a text message from "Angela" - a name not in his phone's contacts - saying he'd been "Bluejacked". He read up what that meant (basically, that the Bluetooth function on his phone was on, and someone had used it to send a message to him) and worked out how to respond to the mysterious Angela. "I get the same train every morning, stand on the same place on the platform, recognise the same faces, and unless 'Angela' was braving commuter traffic to make a one-off journey, it was pretty much certain I'd find her phone eventually," he explains.

"Conveniently enough, she was in the carriage (or at least Bluetooth device Angela was) the next day. I sent her a message about bluejacking, discreetly, and watched around for a beep. Nothing, but a few minutes later I got one back. Sent another - still couldn't find her. The messages got more and more flirty, and maybe she got careless, because after a couple of days (well, mornings) I had a fair idea of who she was. Eventually, she dared me to meet her by the toilets at the mainline station we were both commuting to. We met, and we had sex. And I guess that was my first 'tooth. Perhaps the first 'tooth."

And he's not the only one. The toothing forums above bear testament to plenty of other people who've participated. Toothing is here, and it's real.

But just as SMS became riotously popular almost behind the backs of the mobile operators (who wondered why people on pay-as-you-go tariffs were sending text messages rather than talking; answer: because it was cheaper), toothing is an application for this technology that has taken those who know mobile phones and Bluetooth completely by surprise. I asked David Birch, chief executive of the consultancy Consult Hyperion - which provides expertise in mobile phones and m-commerce as well as a host of interlinked applications - what he thought of toothing.

Now, Birch is one of your grade-A geeks, at ease getting his GPRS phone to connect via Bluetooth with his laptop so he can grab a few e-mails when he's out and about anywhere at all. He has also sussed out how to get an account at Apple's US-based iTunes Music Store, despite being British (you need a credit card that gets billed in the US). Yet when I explained toothing, there was a sort of nuclear silence, as though a bomb had just gone off in his mind.

Once he'd gathered his thoughts - which had evidently been dispersed some distance by this revelation - he remarked: "Well, it's just another example of the way that technology, especially communications technology, has unintended consequences. The only thing about this is at the moment you do actually have to scan for people in the area and send them a message." To a technology utopian, that's too much human interaction; much better when things just happen without you being involved.

And then his mind began working again, and he started to visualise more possibilities. "In the future you might be able to set your phone up so that it'll scan the crowd as you walk through and ask if anybody within 20 feet is up for it." Don't laugh. After all, most people never realise that the Bluetooth function on their phones is already turned on, and is merrily blasting the surrounding area with low-intensity radio waves.

The advent of Bluetooth and mobiles are all part of the trend towards pervasive computing, whereby we have computers all around us that are always on. Actually, this is already true; you're probably never that far away from a chip that's controlling something or other these days. But what's lacking is that the chips don't share their information very well; the train destination board in the terminus (where you were contemplating a bit of toothing later on) doesn't have any way to transmit the fact that the trains are all delayed to your phone handset before you get there.

You can argue that this is a good thing: that we don't want to be identified or interrogated or talked to by every microprocessor we happen to pass, no matter whether it's owned by someone or not. The effect would be uncomfortably like the moments in Minority Report (the film, not the short story) where the character John Anderton walks through a shopping mall and is assailed by personalised ads all yelling his name.

So it seems like a desirable circuit-breaker to me that one still has to make some effort to start off a toothing dialogue. After all, imagine the embarrassment if you found that your phone had set up an assignation for you without your getting involved at all. Why, you'd start to think that technology ruled your life.

network@independent.co.uk