[HN Gopher] Apple and Google deliver support for unwanted tracki...
___________________________________________________________________
Apple and Google deliver support for unwanted tracking alerts in
iOS and Android
Author : WalterSobchak
Score : 465 points
Date : 2024-05-13 17:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This is great and it came up at dinner last night which is kind
| of weird.
|
| Had the odd experience of going to a retreat where everyone sat
| listening to speakers, and then all went to lunch, and then back
| to the speakers, then all to dinner, then back to the speakers.
| And my iPhone popped up an alert that there was an airtag
| following me. (It wasn't of course it was an airtag in another
| attendee's bag to track their bag which they had with them, near
| me kind of randomly, but being driven by the same forces of
| movement :-)).
| larsnystrom wrote:
| I thought such notices wouldn't appear as long as the AirTag
| owner's iPhone was also near the AirTag? Maybe their battery
| died though.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| My wife fitted her luggage with AirTags but doesn't have an
| iPhone (just an iPad, normally turned off). The alerts I get
| are maddening, but I'd rather receive them than disable all
| alerting...
| kstrauser wrote:
| My understanding is you should only get the notification if the
| tag isn't with its owner. That's how it plays out in my
| personal experience. Back when AirTags were completely broken
| and didn't support family sharing, I'd get notified if I had my
| wife's car keys with me only when she wasn't with me, i.e.
| because I grabbed hers to run a quick errand.
|
| This notification would be utterly useless if that were no
| longer the case: you'd spend half your time on a flight or bus
| ride closing the unwanted and unhelpful popups.
| rsstack wrote:
| I use AirPods Pro but an Android phone. My girlfriend and
| friends we hung out with would complain about these, so I
| eventually found a way to turn off "Find my device" on the
| AirPods by connecting them to my iPad. I now can't track them
| but also people aren't mad at me for "tracking" them.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Huh, good point that I hadn't considered.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| Interesting. I've had Apple users recommend AirPods to me
| before, but I don't own any Apple devices so I already had
| a feeling it wouldn't work out. Would be insane if they
| would constantly be generating alerts on others their
| iPhones.
| rsstack wrote:
| I think if you use them out of the box, they won't
| generate the alerts. If I understand Apple's data model
| correctly, once I paired them to my iPad for the first
| time, they were enrolled to my iCloud account, and then
| the tracking system was enabled.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| So I'm screwed if an iPhone user ever pairs with my
| headphones, i.e. when I lend them to them?
| rsstack wrote:
| Ew, why would you lend in-ear headphones to anyone?
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| Just wondering if I understand the Apple ecosystem
| correctly.
| lozaning wrote:
| I took amtrak from Chicago to DC recently and my phone was
| constantly trying to tell me I was being followed/tracked
| cause someone else in the sleeper car had an airtag.
| kstrauser wrote:
| If that happens again, choose the option to stop notifying
| you about that specific tag.
|
| (Also, it's possible someone had slipped a tag into that
| person's luggage without their knowledge.)
| jtbayly wrote:
| It sounds like if it happens again, they can just choose
| to disable the AirTag completely?
| kstrauser wrote:
| Not if it's another person's.
|
| Edit: I think I misread that. When you see an AirTag
| popup, you can choose to ignore it for the day or
| forever. That's from my recollection. I haven't seen one
| in ages.
| jtbayly wrote:
| "iPhone can view the tracker's identifier, have the
| tracker play a sound to help locate it, and access
| instructions to disable it."
|
| I wonder if that last bit requires physical access to the
| tracker?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| 3.13. Disablement The accessory SHALL have
| a way to be disabled such that its future
| locations cannot be seen by its owner. Disablement SHALL
| be done via some physical action (e.g., button
| press, gesture, removal of battery, etc.).
| Ledvina, et al. Expires 22 June 2024
| [Page 26] Internet-Draft Detecting Unwanted
| Location Trackers December 2023 3.13.1.
| Disablement instructions The accessory
| manufacturer SHALL provide both a text description of
| how to disable the accessory as well as a visual
| depiction (e.g. image, diagram, animation, etc.)
| that MUST be available when the platform is
| online and OPTIONALLY when offline. Disablement
| procedure or instructions CAN change with accessory
| firmware updates. These are provided as part of
| the onboarding process (Section 7).
|
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-detecting-
| unwanted-lo...
|
| Yes. Physical access would likely be needed for most of
| these devices and would be sufficient for satisfying the
| RFC, based on the examples in section 3.13.
|
| So you might get a notification of a device "following"
| you because I have a tracker in my bag but no phone (or
| my phone is off, perhaps; or maybe it's just
| malfunctioning and mis-reporting as happens sometimes).
| You play the sound and find out it's in the bag
| underneath your seat on the bus, but that's _my_ bag. You
| could attempt to rifle through it and take my tracker and
| disable it, but I 'd probably stop you.
| kstrauser wrote:
| It does. Their instructions for disabling AirTags shows
| you how to remove their battery. That's a good thing: you
| shouldn't be able to remotely disable someone else's
| tracker.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| As others have pointed out, no, not without access to the
| Airtag. That said you _can_ make it beep which will cause
| the owner some surprise /confusion.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| How can I get my Android to stop notifying me about a
| specific AirTag? I searched quite a bit and couldn't
| figure it out.
|
| I get these unwanted alerts every time my wife and I
| travel with luggage that she's placed AirTags into. I
| guess my phone thinks the owner isn't present because she
| doesn't have an iPhone. We both have Android phones, and
| she also has an iPad which she used to configure the
| AirTags but it's normally turned off.
| JoBrad wrote:
| I get notifications about my daughter's AirPods following me,
| when she is with me. My daughter is part of my Apple Family
| plan, and the AirPods show up in my Find My devices. I
| thought this article was about handling those notifications,
| at first.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > you should only get the notification if the tag isn't with
| its owner
|
| My airtag occasionally thinks it's not with me and apple
| watch wakes me up in the middle of the night even though my
| bag is in the next room of this tiny flat.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Try chaperoning a bunch of kids on a field trip. Half of them
| have trackers attached to their backpacks, so you get a bunch
| of those notifications.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Yeah, I'm still trying to make sense of this, at all. Lots of
| technobable flying around and no big picture talk. Why the
| fuck would Google and Apple work together on this AND trash
| their tech at the same time. Feels like they are trying to
| stave off regulation.
|
| Someone will find a way around this. It's too fun of a hack
| to go unanswered for more than a week. Now only the criminals
| will have this physical tracking ability (well,them and
| Apple+Google).
| LorenDB wrote:
| It's interesting to see that Google takes this so seriously
| they're backporting it to Android 6. I guess they probably have
| metrics on what Android versions are still in active use, but I'm
| a little surprised that Android 6.0 would still be used heavily
| enough to warrant the backport. Regardless, it's good to see this
| sort of industry cooperation from companies who would normally be
| at each other's throats.
| tantalor wrote:
| Supporting Android 6 would be like supporting iOS 9.
|
| Apple is only supporting latest version of iOS (17.5).
| runjake wrote:
| _> Supporting Android 6 would be like supporting iOS 9._
|
| 1. Your point still stands, but this is because this update
| is probably shipping as a Google Play Framework update, which
| works on >= 6.0. Google is not (to my knowledge) releasing a
| new firmware.
|
| Apple would do well to decouple certain software components
| from iOS, IMHO.
|
| 2. In case others are curious about iOS version market share,
| statcounter's stats for April 2024:
|
| 17.4 (current until today): 51%
|
| 17.3: 22%
|
| 16.6: 4.3%
|
| 16.7: 3.18%
|
| 16.1: 2.8%
|
| 16.3: 2.12%
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-
| share/ios/mobil...
| tjoff wrote:
| Android 6: 0.79%
| tadfisher wrote:
| As a developer, that long tail of folks on the previous
| major version really sucks with fast-moving frameworks like
| SwiftUI. There's no way my company (a banking app) would
| drop 10% of customers, so we typically do N-1 for iOS
| support.
|
| Our Android app shipped almost 3 years ago with minSdk=24
| (Android 6.0) and we haven't had to update it.
| afavour wrote:
| The web browser is a big issue with this, too. A Safari
| release broke IndexedDB and they didn't release a fix for
| over two months because browser updates are tied to the
| OS.
| bzzzt wrote:
| If there's a critical security update they can release an
| update within days. So it's got nothing to do with the
| complexity of releasing a new OS, it's just that they
| found IndexedDB not important enough to warrant an out of
| cycle update.
| ilinx wrote:
| I write apps for a large regional grocery store chain,
| and we have to support N-2. Even then we get support
| emails every time we bump it up.
| flutas wrote:
| I work on Android apps for a food company turned media
| network.
|
| We, to this day...with no talks of changing it any time
| soon, support all the way back to Android 5.0 (released
| in November on 2014).
| Const-me wrote:
| I mostly work on Windows apps. People still complain when
| software drops support of Windows 7 released in 2009, or
| Windows 8 released in 2012. Despite none of them are
| supported by Microsoft.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| It'd be a more fair comparison to take into account
| Windows 7's EOL which was just a year ago IIRC if you
| coughed up Extended Support money, its broad install
| base, and it being the last actually truly decent Windows
| that had a consistent UI across the place and no ads.
| onlytime wrote:
| Windows 7 didn't have a consistent UI, though. In
| multiple places you could find Vista and XP-decorated
| panels. Your nostalgia is wrong.
| mavhc wrote:
| https://ntdev.blog/2023/01/01/state-of-the-windows-how-
| many-...
|
| Goes back to 3.1
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| That only continued to degrade with Windows 8 and 10
| though.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| So this has the downside of not being supported for
| Androids that don't use Google Play services right? Like
| the Amazon tablets?
|
| Still a big win overall I'm just curious what number of
| devices basically don't get important upgrades due to this
| method. (Surely a tiny amount compared to what you'd have
| if you relied on device manufacturers to update the OS.)
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Apple would do well to decouple certain software
| components from iOS_
|
| I'm not really convinced of this. When you control the
| entire hardware and software stack, and already provide
| updates for 7+(?) years per model, would doing this really
| change much? Google needed to do that because some cheapo
| manufacturers weren't really providing _any_ updates to
| speak of, and Google has limited ability to force
| manufacturers to provide updates on any particular
| schedule.
|
| It's funny, because to me this is really just the Linux
| model vs. BSD model, in a way. Linux base systems are
| cobbled together from various bits of software maintained
| by different people and groups. Many of those components
| can be updated independently of one another, including the
| kernel. The BSD model is to ship the entire base system as
| a versioned unit, and only update the entire thing
| monolithically. Android does the Linux model, iOS does the
| BSD model. Both models work just fine, depending on what
| your goals are and your distribution model.
|
| I think the one thing I'd argue Apple should decouple from
| the OS is Safari. A web browser (and the underlying OS web
| view) should be independently updateable, even after a
| device stops getting OS-level security updates.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Google and Apple have fairly different platform software
| update strategies so I was curious how the support windows
| line up. Android 6 was the last supported release on devices
| like the Nexus 5 and Xperia Z3 from 2013 and 2014. iOS 9 was
| the last version supported for devices like the iPhone 4s and
| 3rd gen iPad that shipped in 2011 or 2012. Going forward to
| 2013 iPhones you have the 5s which was last supported in iOS
| 12. It sounds like Google is able to ship this directly
| rather than as an OS update that would need to go through
| manufacturers, while Apple typically deploys these type of
| fixes by pushing an OS update. I'm curious how far back
| they'll go, they rarely ship security fixes more than two
| major versions behind the current release (so maybe down to
| iOS 15, supporting devices released in 2015).
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You're right iOS 15 got an update earlier this year.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_15
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > they rarely ship security fixes more than two major
| versions
|
| Every flagship iPhone since 2011 has gotten at least five
| years of OS updates, with additional years of security
| updates after that.
|
| For instance, the original version of the iPhone SE is
| currently in its eighth year of support, and just got
| another security update a couple of weeks ago.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Two different things, Apple provides a pretty long window
| of OS updates for each device but doesn't ship updates
| for older OS versions. For example the 1st gen SE shipped
| with iOS 9 which has not been getting updates for a few
| years, but it can run iOS 15 which still seems to be
| getting security updates.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| It probably seems odd when you're coming from a history
| of devices with a very short support window, but you
| don't need to worry about years when you only get a
| security update until you run out of years when you get
| the OS AND security updates first.
|
| For instance, that original iPhone SE came out in 2016,
| the same year as the original Pixel phone. The iPhone is
| still supported by Apple today, while the Pixel phone was
| dropped from support by Google five years ago.
|
| Google had to come up with a way to backport features to
| older unsupported versions of the OS because their
| support window was so abysmally short.
|
| Hopefully, this won't be an issue going forward, with
| Google promising a comparable support window in the
| future.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| One issue with iOS vs Android is that iOS has the browser
| tied to the OS ala Internet Explorer. Once iOS is no
| longer supported, you're now using an unsupported
| insecure browser. And all other iOS browsers sit atop the
| unsupported insecure browser in iOS.
|
| On Android, the browser is separate and you can install
| alternative browsers. The current release of Chrome for
| Android works with Android 8 which was released in August
| 21, 2017 and dropped January 2021. Android System Webview
| (the browser engine that other apps can use so they don't
| have to ship their own) works the same way and is
| independently updated from the OS.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Updating an app doesn't fix an issue that requires a
| security update, or a replacement driver.
|
| > Virtually any Android, Linux, or Windows device that
| hasn't been recently patched and has Bluetooth turned on
| can be compromised by an attacking device within 32 feet.
| It doesn't require device users to click on any links,
| connect to a rogue Bluetooth device, or take any other
| action, short of leaving Bluetooth on. The exploit
| process is generally very fast, requiring no more than 10
| seconds to complete
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2017/09/bluet...
|
| A browser update doesn't fix that and that and Blueborne
| was disclosed during the era when an Android device only
| had a support window of two of three years.
|
| iPhones from over a decade ago were getting security
| updates, including for the browser, for seven or eight
| years.
| daghamm wrote:
| This was from 2017, and nothing came out of it.
|
| Every month or so someone (usually a security company
| that wants to sell something) find a domesday exploit for
| android that is unpatchable, and then it gets patched or
| turns out to be a non issue.
| toast0 wrote:
| > the browser tied to the OS ala Internet Explorer.
|
| Internet Explorer was usually only loosely tied to the
| OS. Yes, many versions of Windows came with some version
| of IE, but you could usually install a newer version if
| you wanted. Every once in a while, a newer version of IE
| required a newer version of Windows, but that wasn't
| typical.
|
| As I understand it, on Apple systems, Safari comes with
| the OS and is updated together --- Safari updates come in
| OS updates. Mobile IE was very similar though, at least
| on Windows Phone 7 and newer.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > Safari comes with the OS and is updated together ---
| Safari updates come in OS updates.
|
| That's true on iOS but not exactly true on macOS.
| Upgrading macOS also upgrades Safari, but you can also
| install newer versions of Safari on older versions of
| macOS. You just can't have older versions of Safari on
| newer versions of macOS.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| iOS 17.5 supports devices back to the iPhone XS released in
| 2018.
|
| iOS 17 runs on 80% of current iPhones in use
|
| https://telemetrydeck.com/blog/ios-market-
| share-03-24/#:~:te....
| treve wrote:
| 10 years support seems pretty reasonable to me for a major
| operating system version, regardless of usage numbers.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| It would be nice, but I wouldn't call it reasonable. That's a
| LOOOOONG time.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Isn't 10 years pretty standard for windows OS versions?
| luyu_wu wrote:
| And 20 years for Linux :P MacOS and iOS really are the
| major outliers that convince people otherwise here.
| jmb99 wrote:
| Unless I missed a memo, Linux LTS is 2 years of support
| these days. Many distributions offer 10 year LTS
| releases, but I'm not sure of any off the top of my head
| that currently offer more.
| luyu_wu wrote:
| My point was more so that you can upgrade 20 year old
| devices to Linux 6.X! You're correct though.
| kelnos wrote:
| I feel like a couple things were mixed that aren't the
| same. The commenter upthread said 10 years for Windows OS
| versions. I took that to mean e.g. "Windows 11 will be
| supported for 10 years from initial release".
|
| Sure, you can often install a modern Linux distro on a
| 20-year-old device (though just as often, you cannot),
| but that's not the same thing as a single version of
| Windows being supported for 10 years. The analogous
| situation is indeed LTS versions of Linux distros, which
| certainly don't have 10-year support lifetimes, let alone
| 20.
|
| But the support lifetimes make sense for the various
| vendors. Apple doesn't need to support a particular major
| version of macOS or iOS for all that long, because they
| make sure new versions of their OSes will run on fairly
| old devices (all of which are devices they've built, and
| have full control over), and they aggressively push
| people to upgrade to new major versions as they come out.
|
| Microsoft has a lot of customers who value stability and
| consistency above all else, and on top of that, they have
| to support a wide variety of hardware that they don't and
| can't control. Supporting a major version of Windows for
| many years makes sense for them.
|
| As for Linux, there's no one single source, so a rolling-
| release distro can decide to only support the bleeding
| edge, whereas a cloud provider might roll their own
| distro for server use and decide to support that for a
| decade, if they think that's what their customers want.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Phones have a far shorter shelf life.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| > Google takes this so seriously they're backporting it to
| Android 6
|
| Or for contractual reasons, or for some technical reason it was
| easy enough to be "why not"
| xarope wrote:
| Or they are pursuing a gov related project, and this was
| mentioned as a showstopper...
| seanalltogether wrote:
| Google made a deliberate decision long ago to detach library
| and feature support from the operating system due to
| manufacturer fragmentation. So most of their new stuff
| automatically works with old versions of android
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Same for security updates. A lot of new features and security
| patches get updated via the Google Play Services to older
| versions of Android as well.
| SubzeroCarnage wrote:
| Google Play System updates provide very few security
| patches and this only applies to devices with Android 10
| and higher and most APEX modules are only updatable in
| later versions.
|
| I track security patch counts of monthly Android Security
| Bulletin vs available APEX vs my aftermarket backports for
| A7 through A13 here: https://divestos.org/pages/patch_count
| s#aggregatePatchCounts
| danieldk wrote:
| And the annoying thing is that on some phones (like
| Samsung phones recently, twice), the Play System updates
| get blocked for months on end. Worse, people who buy a
| new device are often stuck on ancient versions.
|
| I recently tried an Android phone again for a few months,
| and the update/security situation is still a mess. E.g.
| Samsung does monthly updates on more premium phones. But
| a former flagship like the S22 would sometimes only get
| the update near the end of the month, even before the S24
| is out. Having a phone with known CVEs for the better
| part of a month is... meh.
|
| For some vendors, like Samsung, things are much better
| than a decade ago, but it's still a far cry from Apple
| rolling out updates to all models simultaneously.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> Having a phone with known CVEs for the better part of
| a month is... meh._
|
| Out of curiosity , have you ever encountered any malware
| that exploits said CVEs? If a month delay would be so
| dangerous, Android users, even of new devices would be
| getting pwned left and right, let alone Android users of
| device no longer getting patches.
|
| Source: Android user of old phone who hasn't been hacked
| yet so I'm not sure where exactly the dangers are, as the
| attack surface is mostly the web browser and the apps,
| both of which are scanned and covered by up-to-date
| patches from Google Play Store/Services even on my ageing
| phone. So as long as you don't browse extremely dodgy
| websites, and don't download shady apps you should be
| good as nothing else can't get to the Kernel CVEs on your
| unpatched phone.
|
| Yeah, I'm sure some crafty malware dev can whip out a
| targeted virus that can exploit the chain of open CVEs on
| my particular phone through a MMS message or something,
| but I'm not sure targeting the 100 or so users left still
| using this old OnePlus model that's worth less than 20
| Euros used (pointing to a user without much income), is a
| good use of their skills and time, when they could be
| frying much bigger fish with that know-how like going
| after Microsoft's Azure or something.
|
| Nor am I being targeted by state actors who have these
| means. And if you are being targeted by state actors,
| they have access Zero-Days that even Apple or Google
| haven't patched yet so you're not safe anyway no matter
| what phone you have.
| autoexec wrote:
| > If a month delay would be so dangerous, Android users,
| even of new devices would be getting pwned left and
| right, let alone Android users of device no longer
| getting patches...Android user of old phone who hasn't
| been hacked yet so I'm not sure where exactly the dangers
| are
|
| What are the odds that you'd ever know if you were
| hacked? If you have root access on your device your odds
| of being able to see something amiss are probably
| somewhat better than if you don't, but even then I
| wouldn't count on it. How many people detected
| Predator/Pegasus? It isn't just state actors taking
| advantage of zero days. A zero day gets that malware on
| your system, but once it's infected how would you know?
| There have been reports that millions of android phones
| are infected at the factory. (https://www.theregister.com
| /2023/05/11/bh_asia_mobile_phones...)
|
| We know mass infections happen (see
| https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-nine-
| mil... and https://www.wired.com/story/android-gooligan-
| ghost-push-hack... and there have been some bold (if
| unverified) claims that most android devices are/were
| infected with something
| (https://www.zdnet.com/article/bt-almost-every-android-
| device...).
|
| I don't know how you could possibly be confident that
| your device isn't infected with something. The devices
| are designed to keep you from having the ability to poke
| around too much at their internals and the radios make it
| difficult to monitor exactly what's being sent/received
| to the device.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> What are the odds that you'd ever know if you were
| hacked? _
|
| Would you know?
|
| _> I don't know how you could possibly be confident that
| your device isn't infected with something._
|
| Easy, my bank account is still full.
|
| How are you confident your phone isn't infected? Being up
| to date is no guarantee. Until you can poke around with
| root access to inspect everything it's still
| Schrodinger's cat in a black box you trust to not be dead
| inside.
|
| Because how would malware ever make it into my phone? It
| doesn't just magic itself onto your device once it stops
| received updates. It needs an entry point off the attack
| surface. And what's my attack surface since all your
| examples don't apply to me?
|
| I never download shady Apps from the likes of Huawei
| AppGallery lol or even off the PlayStore and I don't use
| Android 5. All apps I use are whatsapp and Google chrome,
| and I also don't browse shady websites on my phone.
| mavhc wrote:
| True, given that the average android phone probably needs
| 100s of CVEs patching, it's kinda weird that there's not
| obvious epidemic of phones being hacked
| autoexec wrote:
| > Would you know?
|
| I very much doubt it.
|
| > Easy, my bank account is still full.
|
| That assumes the malware is intended to take your money
| instead of your data, or even just your internet
| connection. Malware can be used to attack/infect other
| devices or even just click ads. What kind of harm could
| someone who had full access to your device, including
| access to your internet activity, texts, location,
| camera, and microphone do to you without telling you
| about it (blackmail).
|
| > Because how would malware ever make it into my phone?
|
| Maybe it was installed at the factory. Maybe it came from
| literally any one of the many many vulnerabilities that
| made it possible to infect your device without any
| indication. Android phones have been compromised via text
| message, via Bluetooth, via QR code, and via apps.
|
| It's great that you aren't doing anything obviously
| risky, but that isn't a requirement to get infected and
| the problem is you just can't know. You aren't the admin
| of the device. You don't have the authority to control
| what it does. You aren't allowed to see what it's doing.
| You can't see who it's communicating with or when.
| steve_rambo wrote:
| I've also used phones which haven't received any updates
| for years without any obvious problems. Just maintaining
| basic digital hygiene like you do. In theory, one could
| use a zero-day in a web browser (like the recent libwebp
| vulnerability), then exploit one of the numerous CVEs in
| one of the system libraries or the kernel, and own the
| phone that way even without you doing anything worse than
| visiting a random website. For example, that's how one of
| the the first methods of jailbreaking PlayStation 4
| operated.
|
| Your average Joe six-pack like myself probably shouldn't
| really worry about it though, it seems more likely to be
| used against really high value targets.
|
| You might want to try out another web browser that has
| aggressive ad blocking (Firefox, Brave, or Vivaldi should
| do it) since ads are one of the major methods of
| spreading malware.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| >You might want to try out another web browser that has
| aggressive ad blocking (Firefox, Brave, or Vivaldi should
| do it) since ads are one of the major methods of
| spreading malware.
|
| Under rated advise. Too bad said Joe six-pack donesn't
| follow it because it thinks other browsers "have viruses"
| gruez wrote:
| >Easy, my bank account is still full.
|
| To be fair, it's non-trivial to convert hacked bank
| credentials to actual cash, due to anti-fraud measures,
| KYC rules, and reversibility built into the finance
| system. A better indicator would be $1000 worth of BTC on
| an unencrypted wallet not being hacked.
| vel0city wrote:
| > It needs an entry point off the attack surface.
|
| Considering how many vulnerabilities have been in the
| media stack of Android, all that would take would be an
| image or an autoplay video on a website.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| So why haven't I or anyone else here with Androids been
| hacked already, if it's so "simple"?
| vel0city wrote:
| Are you suggesting we've got a statistically valid sample
| of Android users here to suggest that drive-by RCE
| exploits that have been published and patched on modern
| Android devices are essentially just a fantasy and aren't
| actually concerns at all for unpatched devices? And that
| the people in this sample would always clearly know their
| device _was_ compromised?
|
| FWIW, while I don't think I personally had an Android
| device hacked, I do think I've had family members with
| devices potentially hacked. One family member running an
| older version of Android continued to have lots of
| accounts constantly getting stolen despite using a
| password manager and unique complicated passwords. Pretty
| much any time they'd be logged in to an app there would
| begin to be fraudulent orders or other mischief on that
| service. They never installed shady apps. Rotate the
| password on another device, no problems for a while. Log
| in on the phone again and within a day or two have the
| mischief start again. All that stopped after replacing
| the device.
|
| Another family member started getting popover ads on
| their device despite not having any odd apps installed
| that would be the cause. Even after a "factory reset" the
| popover ads continued to plague the device, as if it was
| embedded in the ROM.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| >Easy, my bank account is still full.
|
| That one is probably not valid.
|
| My bank app is sht, The 2FA is EMBEDED in the app; in the
| beggining it was a separate app. It also needs Google
| Play Services. And I live in a third world country with
| little accountabilty. On top of all that, most people use
| very cheap chinese phones which never get any update.
|
| Still, bank accounts have never been depleted through
| hacking of phones.
| mass_and_energy wrote:
| YSK:that zdnet article was (thankfully) corrected in this
| subsequent article in which BT refuses to release their
| data:https://www.zdnet.com/article/bt-backpedals-on-
| claims-almost...
| Namidairo wrote:
| > Samsung does monthly updates on more premium phones.
| But a former flagship like the S22 would sometimes only
| get the update near the end of the month, even before the
| S24 is out.
|
| This is complicated by their rolling updates per country,
| it can be few weeks between the first CSC (3 letter
| identifier for country and carrier variant) to receive an
| update and it being rolled out to the final one.
|
| I was towards the end of that update cycle, so the
| Android security patch level could become quite detached
| from the actual month.
| daghamm wrote:
| I think you are mistaken.
|
| If something is actively exploited they definitely don't
| wait to months end. Also a Google update is not urgent if
| the vulnerability is not really exploitable on Samsung
| (they have some additional security) or a fix is already
| backported.
| curt15 wrote:
| Does this mean system-wide libraries can be shipped via APKs?
| gpm wrote:
| Yes, that's what google play services is.
| danieldk wrote:
| And/or Google Play System updates, which are a separate
| thing and usually needs to be triggered by hand to get it
| timely.
| wolpoli wrote:
| Is this the reason that my old mid/low end android
| devices become unusable even through they no longer get
| updates?
| darkwater wrote:
| That's probably more related to storage performance (I
| guess eMMC) decreasing over time
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| >Is this the reason that my old mid/low end android
| devices become unusable even through they no longer get
| updates?
|
| More recent versions of apps (like whatsapp, which
| requires to be updated regularly) are unnecessarily more
| demanding. Try disabling Play services, all Bloatware,
| all quasi-bloatware (calendar, contacts), all the way to
| the default keyboard. (pm disable-user --user 0)
|
| Install FOS replacements with no internet connectivity,
| e.g. from f-droid and such (not affiliated)
|
| It is easier to buy a new device, but I get attached to
| my pal ;)
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Most of the memory in a phone is flash. All flash memory
| has limited write cycles and there's a speed/lifetime
| tradeoff, also. Flash devices normally actually have more
| memory than stated, writes go to empty pages that then
| replace the original, which is then wiped. Every cycle
| the cell grows slightly weaker until one day it's too
| weak.
|
| In the best case when a page write fails the memory
| controller discards the page from the pool, when the pool
| becomes exactly equal to the official size the device
| goes into permanent read-only mode. (Which would brick
| any device it's built into. A PC you could pop in another
| drive, a phone you can't.) Many devices have failure
| modes worse than this.
|
| The better the quality of the memory the more margin it
| has, and how much you write to a drive has little to do
| with how big it is--from a practical standpoint life
| expectancy is roughly linear with size.
| toast0 wrote:
| FWIW, WhatsApp claims support back to Android 5.0, and if they
| haven't changed their support decisions since I left, that
| means there's a significant amount of users in the wild on
| Android 5.0. I'm not surprised Google only goes back to Android
| 6, they were always dropping versions from support before WA
| did; their threshold must be higher.
| flutas wrote:
| Yep, my company would lose a significant amount of our users
| if we updated from Android 5.0.
|
| A lot of the early Fire TV devices are still out there
| running Android 5.0, and they are actively used.
| beAbU wrote:
| WhatsApp majority userbase sits outside of the US, and it's
| deeply embedded in many 3rd world countries. I'm not sure how
| their European userbase compares with the African/Asian
| userbase.
|
| I reckon the WhatsApp userbase OS distribution skews much
| more to older android versions compared to an app that mostly
| enjoys US/1st world country userbase.
| toast0 wrote:
| Certainly, the WhatsApp userbase is skewed. But most of
| WhatsApp Android users are also Google Play Android users
| (certainly not all, WhatsApp publishes the apk directly),
| so if WhatsApp doesn't want to cut off X million users on
| Android 5, but Google is ok with not supporting it, Google
| almost certainly has a higher threshold value required to
| keep support. I'd guess the Android 5 users with Google
| Play and not WhatsApp outnumbers the Android 5 users with
| WhatsApp and not Google Play, but none of those statistics
| are public.
|
| With the number of Android devices out there, it really
| makes more sense to think about it in actual user/device
| count rather than percentages.
| zadokshi wrote:
| They are taking it seriously because of the legal liability
| issues. Their lawyers are clearly worried about the legal
| implications of their devices being used to track people and
| things for illegal purposes and want to make sure they have a
| level of protection against lawsuits from consequences of
| tracking devices used for illegal purposes. There are already
| cases of women being stalked using these devices.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| > Their lawyers are clearly worried about the legal
| implications of their devices being used to track people and
| things for illegal purposes
|
| Just that Android devices are not involved in tracking of
| AirTags, as of today only iOS devices actually share the
| location of AirTags back to Apple.
|
| They maybe want to change that, but considering the huge
| amount of volume disparity between AirTags and Google's tags,
| I assume Apple would have to pay Google for the service of
| extending their tracking-network...
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Here in Asia, people are still on the older Android versions.
| So maybe try switching the filter on the website besides US.
| mattl wrote:
| Where in Asia? Does it vary much by country?
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Philippines, I am not sure how accurate the link is below
| but it is almost certainly possible people are moslty on
| older devices.
|
| https://deviceatlas.com/blog/mobile-os-versions-by-
| country#p...
| ferongr wrote:
| This is a 2019 article with figures from that time. So
| it's wildly out of date.
| kyrra wrote:
| This is powered by Google Play Services (aka: gmscore).
| https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/9037938?hl=en
| josefx wrote:
| I just recently pulled out an old phone that originally ran
| Android 6 for a project, hardware wise it still runs perfectly.
| The only thing wrong with it is that I can't upgrade it to a
| newer Android version.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| From what I understand, backporting won't make a difference,
| unless vendors integrate it into their custom OS installs, and,
| from what I hear, they aren't really giving legacy support much
| love.
| pompino wrote:
| > It's possible the tracker is attached to an item the user is
| borrowing, but if not, iPhone can view the tracker's identifier,
| have the tracker play a sound to help locate it, and access
| instructions to disable it.
|
| That means someone can steal your stuff, and then disable the
| tracker so you can't find it. Most people and myself included
| were sticking these cheap tags on everything we own, and it was
| genuinely useful during travel or in scenarios where theft was a
| consideration.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| > That means someone can steal your stuff, and then disable the
| tracker so you can't find it.
|
| This is by design. AirTags were never marketed as an anti-theft
| device. They had anti-stalking features from day one which
| were/are at odds with anti-theft.
|
| It was marketed as helping you find things that are lost,
| nothing more.
| pompino wrote:
| Design doesn't matter after a point - you have to meet your
| users on their turf. Most people were using it for other
| reasons - and if Apple's stance is, fine - don't buy it, then
| so be it.
| asdfaoeu wrote:
| There's two products here Bluetooth trackers and phones.
| People don't want to buy phones that expose themselves to
| tracking by other people.
| pompino wrote:
| Every phone is already being being tracked and logged.
| What youre really saying is that people often tolerate
| some tracking if done by CIA/phone
| company/Apple/Google/FB. We're just playing with
| semantics here. Tracking is either acceptable or not. The
| only real solution is to go off-grid.
| tdeck wrote:
| It's reasonable for a person to have a threat model
| that's more concerned about their violent narcissist ex
| attaching an AirTag to their car than about the CIA.
| PurestGuava wrote:
| It's astonishing how few people actually seem to realise
| this.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| If the FBI wants to obliterate me, they can get a warrant
| and send goons to my house. The costs of preparing for
| that threat model are excessive, so I don't.
|
| If some scumbag ad company wants to track me, they can
| eat shit on my adblocker and not track me. The cost of
| preparing for that threat model is trivial, so I do.
| wolfendin wrote:
| CIA/phone company/Apple/Google/FB/some rando are all
| different, independent, situations; as a reasonable adult
| I have decided that some of them are acceptable, some of
| them are not.
| ezfe wrote:
| It's been that way since day 1
| pompino wrote:
| No, not in a free society. For any product, users should
| be free to use it for any (legal) use they see fit.
|
| Artificially limiting the use of a product goes against
| the hacker culture.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture
| sodality2 wrote:
| You're free to use the purchased device. You're not free
| to demand changes. It's not like you're unlocking
| functionality that should be built in. Changing this
| would require patching the firmware of every iPhone
| iamthirsty wrote:
| > You're not free to demand changes.
|
| I mean, technically you are -- doesn't mean anyone will
| listen.
| criddell wrote:
| Hacker culture would mean working around the limitation,
| not complaining that some consumer product doesn't work
| exactly how you want it to work.
|
| FWIW, there are videos on YouTube showing you how to
| silence the speaker. No idea if they work or not, but
| it's hacker culture at work.
| Uehreka wrote:
| > For any product, users should be free to use it for any
| (legal) use they see fit.
|
| None of these companies ever agreed to be bound by that
| value, and aren't under any obligation to adhere to the
| tenets of Hacker culture. Hackers as a group have failed
| to convince the public that these things matter, so as
| far as these businesses are concerned, they don't.
|
| Like, I agree, it sucks when companies restrict what I
| can do with a device. But when that happens I don't talk
| about it like they betrayed me, I knew what I was buying
| and decided to buy it anyway.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Hackers as a group have failed to convince the public
| that these things matter_
|
| I distinctly remember friends at Apple being surprised,
| in the aftermath of San Bernadino, at the backlash they
| received for refusing to break the encryption on the
| shooter's phone for the FBI [1].
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_enc
| ryption...
| pompino wrote:
| Do you think online protests or discussing these issues
| results in any tangible outcomes? (I do)
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Using a tech device to find and disable hidden trackers
| is pretty "hacker culture".
| tdeck wrote:
| So why are you trying to artificially limit the use of my
| phone to alert me to other people's tracking devices?
| neallindsay wrote:
| I can use a steak knife as a screwdriver but I wouldn't
| expect it to be good in that role.
| chollida1 wrote:
| The reason apple designed it this way is so that someone
| can know if they are being tracked. If an air tag not
| associated with your phone is close by for a certain
| period of time, then it notifies you that you are being
| tracked.
|
| This is a safety feature and its been there since day
| one.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| The device, from the beginning, was not designed as an
| anti-theft tracker. It's always had features that made it
| unsuitable for this use case. At every point Apple has made
| it very clear they're not interested in meeting users on
| that turf.
|
| Users can say they're not interested in it because it
| doesn't suit their needs - that's completely fine.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| > Most people were using it for other reasons
|
| Source? I just use them to find my keys and remote, didn't
| know it was popular to try and recover stolen property
| given the alerts when you're near not-your-airtag for any
| length of time.
| macintux wrote:
| There have been news articles since practically the day
| of release. I tracked stolen keys to a house a few miles
| away, but didn't feel like risking my life for them.
|
| There are any number of products allowing you to mount
| them inconspicuously.
| pompino wrote:
| Its not just popular, police departments have recommended
| it.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/28/airt
| ags...
|
| https://www.axios.com/2023/05/24/apple-airtags-track-car-
| thi...
|
| https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/apple-air-tags-
| travel-...
|
| https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/police-urge-
| caution-in...
| superb_dev wrote:
| To no one's shock, the police departments are giving poor
| advice
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Police department recommendations are often wrong, and
| often based on either poor information about the domain
| the advice is being given in or actively-promoted (by
| police leadership) disinformation.
|
| Police agencies aren't systematic domain experts except
| in the application of force to obtain compliance, as well
| as not having an interest in accurate advice.
| CPLX wrote:
| The killer use case here, as I think most people have
| figured out, is figuring out where your stuff is when it's
| in a system you don't have visibility into. Like if UPS
| says it's "on the way" from NYC to LA or something, and
| especially if the airline isn't sure where your luggage is.
| It's just spectacular for that.
|
| And of course where did I leave my keys and is my backpack
| in the car or at work stuff, but that's the
| obvious/advertised use.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> helping you find things that are lost, nothing more.
|
| So it is now on me to know whether my object is lost or
| stolen? Even if I magically knew all the details, that isn't
| a bright line rule. One person's "lost" luggage is another's
| stolen electronics. Clearly, more people are using these
| things to track down stuff that has been taken rather than
| find the remote control lost somewhere in their living room.
|
| Will apple allow people to disable the tracking of other
| people's iPhones too in the name of privacy? What if my wife
| leaves her phone in my car? Can I get tracking disabled on
| that phone so she cannot track my location?
| happyopossum wrote:
| > So it is now on me to know whether my object is lost or
| stolen?
|
| This isn't new - AirTags have always been this way. The
| only thing changing today is the cross-platform and
| 'standard' aspect to it...
| microtherion wrote:
| > So it is now on me to know whether my object is lost or
| stolen?
|
| No. AirTags let you track your objects whether they are
| lost or stolen. It's just that they also alert potential
| thieves to their presence, so any reasonably competent
| thief will be able to disable them.
|
| > Clearly, more people are using these things to track down
| stuff that has been taken rather than find the remote
| control lost somewhere in their living room.
|
| My use cases are to (a) find items that I misplaced or lost
| somewhere on my own. (b) track the whereabouts of luggage
| that got lost by an airline.
|
| These cases are not particularly hindered by anti-stalking
| mechanisms.
| cyberax wrote:
| > My use cases are to (a) find items that I misplaced or
| lost somewhere on my own. (b) track the whereabouts of
| luggage that got lost by an airline.
|
| You are technically not allowed AirTags in luggage
| because they contain li-ion batteries.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| AirTags are allowed in checked bags.
|
| https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/hazmat/packsafe/r
| eso...
|
| The battery would be under the "In Equipment" column, not
| the "Spare" column.
| jerlam wrote:
| Nor do AirTags contain lithium ion batteries, they use
| standard non-rechargable CR2032 cells.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| CR2032 batteries are lithium batteries, so they do fall
| under the rules for "Spares" (no to checked baggage).
| They are permitted "In Equipment" for checked baggage.
| They are on the "Lithium Metal" row as one of the three
| example photos.
| eropple wrote:
| For the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_io
| n_manganese_oxide_ba...
| microtherion wrote:
| At some point, airlines were raising concerns, but the
| rules have changed.
|
| When I recently pointed out to the lost luggage
| department at an airport that I knew for a fact that the
| luggage (or at least the tracker) was right at the
| airport, they did not appear to be surprised or concerned
| at all.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Clearly, more people are using these things to track down
| stuff that has been taken
|
| Clearly, adding "clearly" before a slight rephrasing of the
| unsupported assertion made upthread doesn't turn it into a
| supported claim.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Perhaps something was lost in translation then. The most
| likely reason to lose things is because they are stolen.
| nexus7556 wrote:
| Uhh, I don't know about that. Since getting airtags I've
| misplaced my car keys multiple times, left my wallet on an
| airplane, and had multiple airlines misplace my luggage. In
| that same time I've not had anything stolen.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Your anecdata is not data
| peddling-brink wrote:
| But it serves to counter a ridiculous sweeping
| generalization.
| kibwen wrote:
| Anecdata suffices to counter anecdata.
| freedomben wrote:
| It is when it's countering other anecdata. If anyone has
| actual data then by all means show it and that will trump
| the anecdata, but without that, anecdata is all we have.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Not for me. It's cure for forgetfulness.
| stephenr wrote:
| I don't know where you live but that isn't at all true
| anywhere I've lived.
|
| I've had two reasons to need to "find" things with AirTags
| where I specifically didn't know where they were:
|
| - airline bungle, so luggage was left at a transit airport.
|
| - forgetting where something had been put down.
|
| But the most common usage is the opposite, positive
| confirmation: we've just left for the airport, check if
| everything says "with you" once you're a few hundred meters
| down the road.
|
| If the most likely reason for something to be "lost" is
| that it was stolen, maybe you should move somewhere with a
| less than apocalyptic level of petty crime.
| amelius wrote:
| I was told airtags stop working when the tag moves along
| with an iphone (for privacy reasons). This would happen
| on an airline.
| geocar wrote:
| Nonsense.
|
| - https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/681961/Common-lost-
| items-k...
|
| - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lost-and-found-
| the-...
|
| The most likely reason to lose things is you're distracted,
| and fun fact: if you're a man you're more likely to blame
| someone else for it.
| sambazi wrote:
| > The most likely reason to lose things is because they are
| stolen.
|
| you should probably move
| zarzavat wrote:
| There's not many places in the world where theft isn't a
| concern. Just small villages where everybody knows each
| other, and repressive countries.
|
| Singapore is the only place I've been where I didn't
| worry about theft.
| franga2000 wrote:
| There's a big difference between "theft isn't a concern"
| and "theft is the main reason things are lost". A place
| where you're more likely to get your things stolen than
| you are to misplace them is definitely a place with
| above-average crime rates.
|
| And while I don't know where you've been and what your
| tolerance level for "worrying about" theft is, I've never
| worried about theft anywhere but very touristy places in
| huge cities.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| Theft is a concern where I live in Brooklyn but its an
| order of magnitude less likely that I lose something to
| theft vs me misplacing it
| michaelt wrote:
| Perhaps zarzavat just isn't prone to losing things.
|
| Personally, I'm careful enough with my keys etc (and
| lucky enough) that I don't lose them - I lived for
| several decades before the invention of the airtag, and
| developed habits not to lose things.
|
| On the other hand, bicycles getting stolen? That happens.
| jb1991 wrote:
| > The most likely reason to lose things is because they are
| stolen.
|
| That gave me a good laugh.
| weberer wrote:
| It sounds silly, but I understand where he's coming from.
| I used to live in Philadelphia. You couldn't leave your
| bag down on the subway without someone running off with
| it right before the doors closed.
| freedomben wrote:
| Wild. a family member of mine has paranoid schizophrenia
| and if something isn't where she thinks it should be she
| immediately jumps to "it was stolen." Even if the glasses
| are on her head or the phone is literally in her hand,
| she'll declare it was stolen and get upset.
|
| It makes me wonder if she lived in one of those places
| earlier in her life (before I knew her) and might be more
| justified than it seems... ?
| jb1991 wrote:
| I know lots of people think that when they can't find
| something; it doesn't mean it is schizophrenic behavior
| in and of itself. I remember as kids discovering that
| other friends of mine also jumped to that conclusion. To
| my knowledge, none of us then or are now schizophrenic.
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure. I also live in a place where you can't leave your
| belongings unattended even for a short time without a
| high risk of them getting stolen. But there's a simple
| solution to that: don't leave your belongings unattended,
| ever. Everyone I know who lives where I live knows that,
| and the incidence -- at least among my friends -- losing
| things to theft is super low.
|
| I don't think this is a _good_ situation, mind you, but I
| think people in my circle still misplace things orders of
| magnitude more often than their stuff gets stolen.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| I've lost my car keys hundreds of times and they were
| stolen exactly 0 of those times.
| oblio wrote:
| They weren't marketed but it was implied. If you forgot, they
| had to patch them a while after release due to stalking
| concerns so that "day one" point is moot.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| I watched the release live. They have altered the timings
| of the anti-stalking notifications but they were there on
| day 1.
|
| Edit: here is an article around the time of release
| describing how they work: https://www.washingtonpost.com/te
| chnology/2021/05/05/apple-a...
|
| > To discourage what it calls "unwanted tracking," Apple
| built technology into AirTags to warn potential victims,
| including audible alarms and messages about suspicious
| AirTags that pop up on iPhones. To put Apple's personal
| security protections to the test, my colleague Jonathan
| Baran paired an AirTag with his iPhone, slipped his tag in
| my backpack (with my permission), and then tracked me for a
| week from across San Francisco Bay.
|
| > I got multiple alerts: from the hidden AirTag and on my
| iPhone.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| It's interesting to think about how AirTags generally go
| against the wishes of the owner of the device.
|
| The AirTag has anti-stalking protection. An important
| feature, but not something the owner of the AirTag may want.
|
| iPhones share the location of nearby AirTags with apple. Good
| for the owner of those AirTags, but the owner of the iPhone
| may not want this.
| Shank wrote:
| > The AirTag has anti-stalking protection. An important
| feature, but not something the owner of the AirTag may
| want.
|
| Yeah, that's like, the issue with trackers. If I buy an
| AirTag to stalk my ex girlfriend, why should Apple want to
| help facilitate that goal?
| freedomben wrote:
| You're right of course, but this represents a huge shift
| in the way we think about our computers now, and speaking
| only for myself I don't think I like it.
|
| It used to be that when you bought a computer, it was
| _yours_. It did _your_ bidding, nobody elses. Security
| features it had were about keeping _other_ people out,
| not keeping _you_ out of your own device.
|
| Now, mostly IMHO thanks to Apple, the idea has really
| shifted. The owner of the device is a "threat" just like
| anybody else is. The device protects itself against
| unauthorized actions from the owner, and it does what the
| mother company wants it to do, _regardless of the owner
| 's desires_. If the owner is trying to stalk somebody,
| then that's a better outcome than having the stalker
| enabled, but we don't get to pick and choose which things
| the device follows it's owners desires or the mother
| company's. If the mother company wants you using their
| chosen DNS servers, or exfiltrating user data for
| analytics, or showing you ads (Amazon especially), that's
| what will happen. Now that we've made it acceptable for
| companies to behave like this, they are going to (ab)use
| it to the max. I think this is a tragedy of the commons
| personally. People optimizing for individual use cases at
| the expense of the collective, leading to disastrous
| results for the collective.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Isn't this a success of the commons? Apple decided on
| behalf of everyone else to use THEIR phones to find YOUR
| missing thing. That's a win for you as the owner of the
| AirPod. In order to make that decision palatable to the
| crowd, they tried to make sure your ability to use their
| phones without asking had minimal opportunity for abuse
| (they don't want you to be able to track them with their
| own phone).
| freedomben wrote:
| > _Isn 't this a success of the commons?_
|
| I've not heard that term before and can't find it, but I
| think I know what you mean. If it seems like I've gotten
| it wrong, then please let me know :-) Thanks that is a
| very interesting question. To some extent it may depend
| on perspective.
|
| I don't think so, because this isn't the commons doing
| anything, it's just a dictator with all the power forcing
| people to make the right choices. At least in the case of
| government enforcement, there's (ostensibly at least)
| some rights you have and limits/restraints on the
| government, including democracy which keeps it in check
| against abuse.
|
| When it's a private corporation like Apple or Amazon just
| making these decisions, you have little to no recourse
| (except maybe switch brands, but there aren't many viable
| options out there for most of these devices. It's not
| reasonable to point most people to the Pine Phone for
| example).
|
| To be the opposite of Tragedy of the Commons, I would
| think it would need to be people self-organizing or self-
| regulating to prevent the tragedy. If a powerful overlord
| forces it, I think it's something else.
| burnte wrote:
| > It used to be that when you bought a computer, it was
| yours. It did your bidding, nobody elses. Security
| features it had were about keeping other people out, not
| keeping you out of your own device.
|
| Yeah, but when your device can infringe on others, it's
| ok to curtail those features. No one has unlimited
| rights.
| AnarchismIsCool wrote:
| That's a very problematic argument though. My the same
| logic you could say "people shouldn't have free speech
| because they might say something mean.
| burnte wrote:
| There are already limits on free speech so that's not a
| great counter argument.
| freedomben wrote:
| There can be legal consequences to some speech, but our
| voice boxes haven't been flashed with firmware that
| limits our ability to use certain words. This is not at
| all analogous to what Apple is doing with iPhones. To be
| the same, it would have to listen/parse everything you
| say and filter out the offensive parts so other people
| don't hear them. It would also need strong technical
| measures to prevent you from flashing your own voice box
| firmware that allows you to bypass Apple's restrictions.
| If you can point to an implementation like that, then you
| may have a point, but I'm entirely unaware of the
| existence of such a thing.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| Cameras (including iPhones with cameras) are allowed to
| be sold, even though you can point them at someone's
| bedroom window and infringe on their right to privacy.
| That's just one example. Another example is my right to
| peace and quiet in the quiet area of a train. Yet iPhones
| will happily blast noise out of their speakers there, and
| I have experienced many iPhone users doing so. When can I
| expect the phones to ship with a volume limiter?
| burnte wrote:
| Yes, but you can't point them up skirts, or walk up to
| their bedroom window (you have to be at the public
| sidewalk/street).
|
| Cell phones already have volume limiters, too:
| https://www.theverge.com/23729051/ios-android-samsung-
| phone-...
|
| Not great counter-arguments.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| What are you even talking about? There's nothing about a
| camera that prevents someone from putting it in a tree.
|
| And that link about the volume limit? Come on, dude.
| That's a volume limit _which the user can configure to
| protect themselves from hearing damage_. Not even close
| to what this discussion is about. It doesn 't even apply
| to the speaker! Completely irrelevant.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _but you can 't point them up skirts, or walk up to
| their bedroom window (you have to be at the public
| sidewalk/street)._
|
| What? iPhones will prevent you from doing that? How?
|
| > _Cell phones already have volume limiters, too_
|
| I wonder if you've missed GP's point... Your volume
| limiting link looks like a feature that the _user_ can
| control. That means that Apple isn 't preventing iPhone
| users from violating _other people 's_ right to quiet in
| quiet areas.
| comex wrote:
| > iPhones share the location of nearby AirTags with apple.
| Good for the owner of those AirTags, but the owner of the
| iPhone may not want this.
|
| You can turn this off. Though, doing so is bidirectional:
| it also prevents your phone from sending out its own
| Bluetooth beacons when it's not connected to the Internet,
| for other phones to pick up. Which might not be what you
| want. But if you're worried about privacy impact, it
| probably _is_ what you want.
|
| Also keep in mind that the protocol already minimizes
| privacy impact by, among other things, encrypting the
| location coordinates with a key Apple doesn't have.
| atommclain wrote:
| Yeah, I think the point of these devices is for locating lost
| items, not stolen items. Trying to handle the stolen use case
| but not allowing nefarious tracking seems to be at odds with
| each other.
| pompino wrote:
| Sure, but the owner of the product gets to choose what they
| use it for. "You're holding it wrong" strikes again.
|
| If Apple's position is - "then don't buy it", they can come
| out and say it. They certainly have that right.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > If Apple's position is - "then don't buy it", they can
| come out and say it. They certainly have that right.
|
| They have done that since day one, when AirTags shipped
| with anti-tracking features enabled...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Depends on what you're trying to track if it's stolen. A
| compartment in something like a car or an eBike that allows
| removal only by using an actually high-security key (i.e.
| something that LockPickingLawyer can't pick) or power tools
| that would seriously compromise the structural integrity of
| the thing in question would be something I'd pay serious
| money for... but no manufacturer of anything I'm aware of has
| actually gone that far.
| close04 wrote:
| VanMoof bikes connected to the Find My network if I
| remember correctly. I thought you can pay for access.
|
| But to disincentivize theft, any device would have to be
| built in such a way that swapping the electronics or
| discarding that tracking module makes the device you were
| protecting worthless. Lots of secure handshakes between
| paired components, very secure software kept up to date,
| etc. which sounds unrealistic in most cases.
|
| Together with that network access fee probably makes such
| solutions economically infeasible today.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I thought you can pay for access.
|
| Or I could just buy an AirTag on my own.
|
| > But to disincentivize theft, any device would have to
| be built in such a way that swapping the electronics or
| discarding that tracking module makes the device you were
| protecting worthless.
|
| Not really. It just needs to be so difficult to remove
| without a key that thieves _physically cannot_ remove /
| disable the tag without threatening the stability of the
| bike, car or whatever.
|
| Doesn't need to be perfect, all it needs to do is provide
| sufficient survival time against your average crackhead.
| close04 wrote:
| An AirTag is a _lost_ item tracker. What I was mentioning
| is a _stolen_ item tracker. Very different propositions.
|
| You're proposing something that may be a paradox. The
| only way to make something physically hard to remove is
| to integrate it. Locks are proven to be ineffective for
| this purpose. When this ideal lock is invented you will
| simply lock your bike with it directly and achieve the
| goal of theft deterrence to begin with. No need for
| tracking if stealing the bike destroys it.
|
| Getting an AirTag into a mechanically locked compartment
| of your bike is useless. You even mentioned LPL so you
| know any such lock will be bypassed in a matter of
| seconds, maybe even less time than it takes you to put
| the AirTag you just bought in there. So your theoretical
| protection model hinges on something that doesn't exist
| yet: a lock that you can easily open to put an AirTag in
| and service it but that nobody else can unlock.
|
| Car or e-bike manufacturers paying for access to any
| "find my" network means they can heavily integrate the
| expensive electronics in a way that makes removing the
| "tracker" part truly impossible (it's on a main
| controller chip) or severely devalues the object if you
| do (the chip/board is prohibitively expensive and
| impossible to find on the open market). It's more
| expensive and kills self repair but reliable anti theft
| might be worth it to you. Think of the iPhone model here.
|
| At the end of the day the Find My network exists to be
| used by different manufacturers [0]. The unpickable lock
| doesn't.
|
| [0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apples-find-
| my-networ...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > An AirTag is a lost item tracker. What I was mentioning
| is a stolen item tracker. Very different propositions.
|
| There's two different types of "stolen items"... you got
| organized theft, stuff like people stealing cars that are
| then parted out in Eastern Europe [1]. And then you got
| stuff like people going for joyrides - this is something
| that can be solved by even a decently hidden AirTag.
|
| [1] https://www.auto-motor-und-
| sport.de/news/autoeinbruch-report...
| close04 wrote:
| No I get that. For cars it's actually a lot harder
| because they have a lot of valuable parts that can't be
| meaningfully secured.
|
| And joy rides are the worst of all because the
| perpetrators aren't around by the time you locate your
| car of bike. Locating it is actually the least of the
| worries, it's usually crashed somewhere or thrown in the
| river.
|
| But a phone, e-bike, or expensive camera, etc. are better
| served by integrated "Find My". If it gets to Shenzen
| it's lost anyway but otherwise removing the activation
| locks or location mechanism in practice will destroy the
| core of the device.
|
| Locking an AirTag behind a mechanical lock cannot achieve
| the same. It takes a minute to pick or drill the lock and
| ditch the AirTag in an envelope to Shenzen. Think of LPL
| and what lock can prevent that. The lock is still the
| weakest link and if it can't protect the bike directly,
| adding layers of complication directly relying on the
| same weak link seems pointless.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Yep. That ruins half the value of AirTags. It's a limitation
| that their competitors, like Tile, didn't have until very
| recently.
|
| Every time this comes up, someone butts in with "they're for
| _lost_ items, not _stolen_ ones! ", which is technically
| accurate but pedantic beyond reason. "Stolen" is a special case
| of "lost" for most people. In both cases the object is out of
| the owner's possession. "Stolen" just means it's deliberately
| missing and not accidentally so.
|
| I understand, sympathize, and support the idea of making life
| harder for would-be stalkers. My gut instinct says non-
| notifying AirTags would make life harder for many more thieves
| than the self-tattling AirTags does stalkers. Apple and Google
| agree with each other that inconveniencing those losers
| outweighs abetting thieves. That's their decision to make. I'd
| still be irritated if I couldn't find my lost-with-the-help-of-
| a-thief bike because my AirTag told the thief I was looking for
| it.
| smeej wrote:
| I think the idea is that thieves that have already been
| successful at removing the item from your possession are much
| less of a threat to your life than someone who is actively
| tracking where you are. It's a debate worth having, which one
| should be the priority, but I can appreciate the logic of
| doing it this way.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I can, too. I can also think of counterexamples: if a
| person is broke, they use their bike to get to work, and
| someone steels it, that's going to give them a very, very
| bad week. There's some hard calculus there I'm glad I'm not
| in charge of. Blocking 1 stalker is clearly more important
| than blocking one sunglasses thief. I suspect that blocking
| 1,000 bike thieves would have a bigger societal benefit
| than blocking 1 stalker.
|
| These are hard questions. I can appreciate the challenges.
| And yet I'd still be highly peeved if I could my AirTag
| laying on the ground because it alerted a thief who then
| removed and discarded it.
| barkbyte wrote:
| Stalking is way more common than successfully recovering
| items with a tracker like this. It's usually a bad idea
| to even try. I followed a tracker into someone's yard
| only to discover that the thief had thrown the tracker
| over the fence and I was just trespassing.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I think we can agree that victims of domestic abuse and
| stalking have a risk of physical harm and that physical
| harm trumps property rights / being peeved right?
|
| This is a 0-sum choice & erring on the side of not
| letting this product be used for stalking seems like a
| sane choice. There are stalking products you can go buy
| that are more expensive that can give you the theft
| protection you want. Apple's and Google's monitoring
| network is unfathomably large and can passively monitor
| any device anywhere in the world. The threat vectors they
| have to balance against abuse is completely different.
| kstrauser wrote:
| You say that right after I give an example of where
| property crimes can seriously mess up someone's life.
| Yes, 1 person's personal safety is more important than 1
| person losing a convenience item. If it were a choice
| between 1 person's safety and 1,000,000 persons'
| transportation, I'd pick the latter every time.
|
| The choice Apple faced clearly isn't 1 stalking victim
| against 1,000,000 people unable to get to work. I use
| that example to show that it's not as simple as "safety
| vs annoyance". Apple and Google ran the numbers and erred
| on the side of safety. That doesn't make it an automatic
| or simple choice.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Think about it this way - without AirTags and with
| AirTags + anti-stalking, your bike theft scenario is
| unchanged. Without airtags and with AirTags without anti-
| stalking, your personal safety scenario is worse. Those
| are the discussions I remember when I worked on
| CoreLocation at Apple. It had nothing to do with running
| the numbers, at least pre-development. I would be
| slightly surprised if someone tried to put numbers to
| that - Apple is pretty values-based when it comes to
| those kinds of decisions.
|
| The stalking issues go well beyond personal safety.
| Police officers, judges, politicians and cops who now
| have to worry about someone chucking a $25 airtag in
| their car which is much easier to do innocuously and
| those people have power to craft regulations and laws.
| Abortion rights are even more contentious now & stalking
| comes up there.
|
| There just isn't a scenario where opting in the entire
| world-wide smartphone community into enabling mass
| stalking at a never before price point is a net positive
| - there just aren't enough poor people with stolen bikes
| to shift that equation. There's a reason AirTags
| destroyed Tile - Tile's network is laughably small &
| would always be that way compared with the reach you get
| at the OS level. That drastically shifts the threat
| model.
| kstrauser wrote:
| We'll never know. The personal safety issues are
| important and I'd never argue otherwise. Having cheap,
| effective crime deterrence seems like it could be a nice
| thing if you could wave a magic wand and remove the
| stalking angle. Apple keeps adding features to those
| ends, like the new Stolen Device Protection updates, that
| shift the risk-reward math for device thieves. I could
| still buy a cheap used phone and stick a SIM in it, hide
| it in a victim's car, and use that to track them without
| alerting them to it. And still, we get nice tools like
| Find My because more people are likely to lose their
| phone or have it stolen than to stalk their exes with it.
|
| I understand the personal safety issues. They're
| important. I get it. That doesn't stop part of me from
| wishing I could use these cheap, convenient lost item
| devices to help me track down stuff that wasn't exactly
| accidentally lost.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Buying an old phone or watch and using FindMy is a
| compelling counter argument. The problem is that the cost
| of that is meaningfully higher - it's a $25 one time
| purchase vs ~$50-100 + a recurring ~$30/month. The size
| of the device is another one - the phone or watch is
| substantially bigger than an AirTag (or how small an
| AirTag could become over time). Finally, a phone or watch
| has a much shorter battery life to support tracking. You
| could trade off accuracy for a much longer battery life,
| but you're still capped to maybe a couple of days or even
| a week if you really know what you're doing. That's
| compared with ~1 year of unattended AirTag use.
|
| As for crime prevention, I think you're overestimating
| how much of a benefit that would have. Stolen device
| protections remove the value from the stolen device.
| That's not the case for your stolen bike - thieves don't
| actually care if you can track the device because a)
| knowing where your stolen property is doesn't actually
| aide in it getting recovered b) as long as they can move
| the stolen product along quickly enough the information
| becomes too stale to action on it (remember - police
| usually need a search warrant). My cousin's car got
| stolen with AirTags in it but he got lucky in that the
| police did something about it - plenty of news stories of
| AirTags in cars with people trying to get the police to
| do something and the police not being able to for a
| variety of reasons. And that's cars which are orders of
| magnitude more expensive than bikes that police won't
| bother with. Look up VanMoof theft stories to convince
| yourself that tracking is useless: https://www.reddit.com
| /r/vanmoofbicycle/comments/zbexyr/upda...
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Smart watches are not meaningfully larger than airtags if
| you take the wristband off, and a cheap prepaid plan for
| $5 or $10 would be more than sufficient. You also don't
| need FindMy because the cell network itself can
| triangulate.
|
| There are also dedicated devices, such as this one -
| https://www.t-mobile.com/devices/iot/syncup-gps-tracker-
| devi... - and lots of companies in China make similar
| products.
|
| There is a genuine need for anti-theft technology. Apple
| doesn't have to address that market, likely because
| they're afraid of brand damage, but stalkers already have
| plenty of options available.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| As I said, the battery model is drastically different for
| active trackers. 7 days of surreptitious monitoring vs 1
| year changes the risk profile of noticing these trackers
| / how many you can have before the logistics of
| recharging all of them wears on you. And if you're
| unlikely to recharge each of these every single day, your
| protection drops on average to 3.5 days.
|
| It's not just brand damage - passive tracking using every
| single smartphone opted into the tracking vs active
| tracking where you have to expend more battery AND pay
| for an ongoing cellular connection each month is a
| tangibly different use-case with different threat models.
| nsagent wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your experience at Apple. It's really
| valuable to understand exactly how decisions are made at
| big tech companies, especially for sensitive issues like
| this.
|
| That said, I'm saddened that the approach seems
| shortsighted, since it doesn't sound like it considered a
| holistic picture, but rather was based on a specific
| value judgement. This seems to put other issues, like the
| whiplash around the approach to CSAM into perspective.
| servus45678981 wrote:
| That isn't enough reason to make these things useless. A
| knife can be used to kill someone and to cut meat. And we
| still haven't removed the sharp edge, have we?
| zeroimpl wrote:
| Even if the tracker didn't alert the thief, how hard is
| it for a thief to find a tracker on the bike on their
| own? I don't think an AirTag is going to save too many
| bicycles.
|
| Seems like the calculus would only make sense when you
| are talking about big expensive items - cars, boats, RVs.
| But for those you probably want a non-bluetooth solution.
| matsemann wrote:
| The bikes getting stolen here are people's "cars".
| Electric cargo bikes with room for two children is what
| people use to get around. Getting that stolen ruins daily
| logistics for people. They cost up to $10k, which is a
| significant amount of money. People should really rethink
| the societal cost of bike thieving, they are both more
| expensive and more integral in how people move around.
| Not just children's toys.
|
| I _only_ want AirTags or similar to guard against
| thieves. So if that is not going to work it 's quite
| useless for me. Luckily for bikes, there is
| https://bikefinder.com/
| vel0city wrote:
| So I've got the tools to cut that thick bike chain but I
| somehow can't pull device inside the handlebars out or
| destroy it? It looks like their special tool is just a
| star security bit.
|
| And also, would it really hold up to just being cut with
| whatever tools the thief used to cut your bike chain?
| pompino wrote:
| Yes, I think the PR backlash for such features is too great
| that it spoils them for the rest of us.
|
| When people "misuse" any technology, it seems the consensus
| nowadays is that the responsibility is shared between the
| technology creator/owner and law enforcement. Personally, I'm
| not fully sold as this is mainly a sociopolitical question.
| skybrian wrote:
| Thinking system-wide changes through is what public policy
| is all about, and the same should probably be true of
| shipping devices in the tens of millions.
|
| (That doesn't mean it's easy. Doing pilot studies is a good
| idea.)
| kstrauser wrote:
| I think you're right. I get the push toward that consensus.
| There are plenty of makers ( _cough cough Purdue
| Pharmaceuticals_ ) who make awful, abusable things and then
| say, hey, it's not our fault people are misusing them! It
| still sucks getting caught in the middle.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| It would 100% be used for stalking & be directly
| contributing to easier violence against victims. Not sure I
| buy the argument it's purely because of image PR reasons vs
| there being a genuine well-founded harm-minimization
| strategy for why it's designed this way.
| pompino wrote:
| You can call anything you do as a "genuine well-founded
| harm-minimization strategy", but nobody is out there
| banning knives and gardening shears and shovels and
| baseball bats and other tools that can contribute towards
| "easier violence" because of the cost to society. You
| either have an absolutist/ideological view on this, or
| you're willing to compromise. Ultimately its a matter of
| perception, and then too, some people are easier to
| convince than others.
| trallnag wrote:
| Countries like the UK are absolutely banning knives,
| forks, etc.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I really don't understand your argument here. No one is
| banning you from building stalking devices. Apple and
| Google have chosen by themselves not to do that & are
| working to standardize their particular implementation
| (which you can also see in this thread there's a lot of
| support for). That's very different from banning knives
| and gardening shears.
|
| And I think you are taking a very US-centric view. For
| example, switchblades & similar quick-open knives aren't
| legal in many jurisdictions. So yes, many countries
| recognize that tools have a trade-off and are willing to
| legislate their usage depending on problems being
| observed.
|
| It's very rare to find a true absolutist on any idealogy
| unless they're completely blinded - it's just that they
| draw the line further away than someone else / need a
| stronger argument to convince them. For example, I'm
| going to guess that you're not in favor of laissez faire
| with respect to nuclear weapons & tech - cause that shit
| is actually really easy and cheap to build these days &
| the sole difficulty is the regulations that surround it.
| pompino wrote:
| >I really don't understand your argument here. No one is
| banning you from building stalking devices
|
| I use airtags to not just locate lost stuff, but also as
| a potential means to find stuff when stolen. Its not
| about me wanting a way to stalk someone, what a bizarre
| thing to say!
|
| >It's very rare to find a true absolutist on any idealogy
| unless they're completely blinded - it's just that they
| draw the line further away than someone else / need a
| stronger argument to convince them.
|
| Oh, I'm not a libertarian, I'm firmly pro-government. I'm
| just not pro-nanny state. I'm willing to compromise if
| the other side is too. However am I not allowed to
| complain, even a little?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > Its not about me wanting a way to stalk someone, what a
| bizarre thing to say!
|
| Please describe how what you're asking for is different
| than stalking the people who stole your stuff? More
| importantly, how would Apple/Google know how to
| differentiate between the two use-cases?
|
| > However am I not allowed to complain, even a little?
|
| You can always complain but your complaint is pretty non-
| sensical because this is private corporations making a
| decision and government isn't involved, so it's unclear
| how this is a nanny state. Go build your own tracker that
| meets your specifications?
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| And yet tiles have been out for something like a decade
| and I've never seen a news story about them being used
| for stalking.
|
| 100% indeed...
|
| Stop your screeching that is feeding the asinine moral
| panic that has resulted in these things becoming
| worthless for tracking packages and stolen items.
| stephenr wrote:
| How would anyone know they're being stalked that way if
| the device explicitly doesn't notify the person it's
| stalking?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| 1. You need to go compare the reach of how good Tile's
| tracking is vs literally nearly every smartphone being
| opted-in transparently into tracking these tags. This is
| drastically different.
|
| 2. Tile is a smaller target, so "I've never seen a news
| story" just means the reach of any such story is smaller.
|
| 3. Maybe Tile already has similar protections? It's
| against their TOS [1]
|
| 4. Tile has been sued for stalking [2]
|
| 5. Tile is offering an anti-theft feature provided you
| have to use biometrics & give them a government ID and
| you have to agree that they'll sue you if you use it for
| stalking [3]. So Tile too is clearly concerned about the
| stalking problem, they're already being sued around it, &
| they're a drastically smaller target than Apple and
| Google (no one is going to craft legislation around what
| Tile is doing). Apple is 3x the size of Tile by itself.
|
| You can disregard it as moral panic but how would you
| distinguish that from a genuine concern of the potential
| for an abuse for a technology? Strict liability isn't
| popular these days but it has ebbed and flowed as a
| doctrine. Failure to try to try to do a good faith
| attempt to prevent this problem would certainly land
| Apple and Google into hot water when a case of stalking
| inevitably happens using these devices.
|
| [1] https://support.thetileapp.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/44102774937...
|
| [2] https://whlawoffices.com/blog/why-was-tile-sued-for-
| tracking...
|
| [3] https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/16/tile-takes-extreme-
| steps-t...
| kstrauser wrote:
| 3. Tile doesn't (or at least didn't as of when I replaced
| my last one with an AirTag). I don't put much weight in
| the TOS bit; I'm sure it's against Apple's, too.
|
| 5. If Apple launched an AirTag Pro at twice the price
| with these controls but otherwise identical hardware, I'd
| be all over it. They're leaving money on the table.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Here's a news story about stalking:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/06/business/apple-airtag-
| law...
|
| Here's Tile adding anti-stalking features:
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/17/tile-launches-its-anti-
| sta...
|
| So which is it? Is it unjustified moral panic with 0
| evidence of harm & Tile isn't doing anything or are you
| just upset that these big companies aren't building the
| product _you_ want to buy?
|
| With 5 you're now shifting goal posts by introducing a
| non-sequiter to my point 5. I've clearly highlighted that
| Apple always balances money-making opportunities against
| their values around privacy & public safety. No one is
| forcing you to buy this product. You should also fully
| expect to see Tile utilize this standard so that they can
| leverage the reach of having every smartphone in the
| world scanning for these instead of just other Tile
| customers.
| bloppe wrote:
| It's a fundamental tradeoff. And who's affected in each case?
|
| The anti-stalking bias degrades the product for people who've
| bought an AirTag and become victims of theft. It's a limited
| population. People are unaffected by default.
|
| The anti-theft bias means everybody is a potential victim of
| stalking. If I have no interest in AirTags, anybody else can
| still tape one to the bottom of my car and track me wherever
| I go. Everybody is potentially affected.
|
| Even if theft is far more common than stalking, an anti-theft
| bias would be a tough position for Apple to defend if it
| means they're potentially facilitating stalking for the
| entire population. It may not be ideal, but I can understand
| it.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| You also have the situation where if air tags did not have
| the anti-stalking features, there would be far more
| stalkers in the world. I'm sure there's many people who
| would not buy a GPS logger and connected to someone's car,
| but they might "forget" an airtag in someone's car, were it
| not for the anti-stalking alerts.
|
| I suspect if Apple went the Anti-Theft route, thieves would
| not stop thieving, they would just start searching large
| stolen items for air tags before bringing it to wherever
| they may.
| criddell wrote:
| Apple doesn't want stalkers and they definitely don't want
| any part of leading people into confrontations with thieves.
|
| AirTag isn't the right product for you. Buy a tracker from
| somebody else.
| trallnag wrote:
| This so much. Confronting thieves is always a bad idea. I
| prefer to view it in a positive light. The thief probably
| needed the stolen item more than I did. The thief is happy,
| I am happy for the thief. The overall happiness in the
| world has increased!
| meindnoch wrote:
| Imagine being this cucked.
| mft_ wrote:
| Not sure what I'm missing here, as Airtags have long worked
| like this - that as long as you had an iPhone or an Android
| phone with the anti-tracking app installed, you'd be notified
| of being stalked.
|
| So if your bike thief had an iPhone, they'd be able to find
| the tag anyway?
|
| AFAIK the only major difference is that it's now being baked
| into the Android OS so people don't need to actively download
| the app.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| There is a big liability issue for these companies if they
| say its for tracking stolen items. Anecdotally according to
| reddit threads, police don't care if you have the tracker
| showing its at the thiefs house, thats not enough evidence to
| do anything and its not an active crime with people in danger
| worth being prompt about. law enforcement also don't want you
| to confront the thief due to the risk of that situation
| escalating. If these companies start advertising for stolen
| items they are effectively encouraging vigilanteism and you
| can imagine how much of a legal headache that will be as soon
| as the first airtag user is shot dead.
| dhosek wrote:
| It's not the police can't do it, it's that they don't
| _want_ to do it.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Airtag pinging a location that may not even be accurate
| is not a reasonable cause for search nor even enough
| information to know where to search in some cases.
| Imagine the airtag says it is in an apartment complex.
| Which of the hundreds of units in that building do you
| decide to barge through and search? All you have is a 2d
| map and 35ft resolution on a good day.
| caf wrote:
| It's not enough for a search but it's enough to knock on
| the door and ask.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| How do you expect this to work out? "Hey did you steal my
| phone?" Again if its a multistory building you aren't
| finding the correct door.
| dhosek wrote:
| Yes, but it should be enough if the victim of the theft
| was able to walk into the store and see his bike there.
|
| If you ever have something stolen, ask the cops how much
| time and effort they'll dedicate to finding the stolen
| goods. They do not care.
| vundercind wrote:
| I believe you'll find that tracking your stolen items is just
| a recipe for frustration when you tell the police where your
| shit is and they act like _you're_ the asshole when you
| expect them to do anything about it.
|
| (And no, this isn't connected to current politics--I've not
| known cops to care about tracking down stolen good no matter
| how much evidence you can hand them, since at least the 90s)
| phatskat wrote:
| > inconveniencing those losers outweighs abetting thieves
|
| This feels incredibly minimizing for people who have been
| stalked. Or people fleeing domestic abuse, human trafficking,
| or other forms of abuse where controlling a person's movement
| is a large part of the harm being inflicted.
|
| Stalking covers a wide range of activity that impacts people
| who are usually in a vulnerable or dangerous situation. The
| people who would use tags to track people aren't just
| "losers", they're pimps, rapists, murderers, abusive spouses,
| and so many other awful things.
|
| Inconveniencing them far outweighs someone stealing your
| luggage.
| FriedPickles wrote:
| It's possible to build your own tracker atop the Find My
| network without these anti-stalking features. The Find My
| network can even be abused for low bandwidth data transfer from
| any point in the world with an occasionally nearby iPhone.
|
| https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack
| neilv wrote:
| Unfortunately, OpenHaystack is not as open as I'd hoped.
|
| > _All you need is a Mac and [...]_
| sodality2 wrote:
| That's because Apple themselves limit access to
| authenticated (but supposedly anonymous - aka doesn't
| matter whose) Apple IDs before allowing access to the
| geodatabase
| jimbobthrowawy wrote:
| Not for long, since cross compatibility with android is
| apparently coming.
|
| IIRC, they need you running macos to get the data via a
| plugin for apple mail. If you only needed an appleID, it
| could likely be done in a web browser.
| lolinder wrote:
| The cross compatibility is only for anti-stalking
| features, and is probably implemented in such a way that
| you couldn't use it to implement a tracker that works in
| both systems.
| jimbobthrowawy wrote:
| You're right. I think I misremembered a news article I
| read about a week or so ago, that I can no longer find.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| What I don't get is why nobody seems to have done the
| work to reverse engineer the onboarding workflow, and why
| Apple doesn't allow onboarding on Mac devices. I had to
| buy a (used) iPhone just to onboard AirTags, despite
| onboarding Mac devices works without one.
| microtherion wrote:
| > It's possible to build your own tracker atop the Find My
| network without these anti-stalking features.
|
| Are you sure? It seems to me that the anti stalking features
| depend on the _stalkee 's_ / tief's software stack, not the
| stalker's stack.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| The biggest anti-stalking feature is that the tracker will
| beep when it's notified when it's moving in proximity with
| a phone or other device. So obviously it's trivial to
| create a tracker that doesn't beep.
|
| Your phone can also refuse to send notifications about the
| location of a nearby tracker if it thinks it's being
| tracked, but if there are a bunch of other phones nearby
| that can relay that information there is nothing to stop
| them from doing so.
| microtherion wrote:
| True, you can build without any acoustical feedback (or
| maybe even feedback not triggered by the find my network,
| but only by your own app).
|
| But the target's phone will still be notified that
| "Someone else's tracker is moving with you", won't it?
| OptionOfT wrote:
| If I were to do this on a certain chip and put it in a random
| person's car, wouldn't they get a message showing 'X found
| moving with you'? Or is that only implemented for AirTags
| themselves?
| pests wrote:
| > So now it is on me to know whether my object is lost or
| stolen?
|
| Sounds like you responsibility - your belongings, you
| should know where they are or if they are missing.
|
| How would you have survived before AirTags?
| hackernewds wrote:
| What an asinine comment, I can only presume was written
| on a Palmyra stone tablet
| pests wrote:
| This was posted to the wrong comment, apologies.
| imp0cat wrote:
| Yes, they would, it tracks all BT devices, not just
| Airtags.
|
| But even with an unmodified tracker, it's quite hard to
| locate one in a car, because there is a lot of hiding
| spaces (especially if you put one in some hard-to-reach
| space such as under the carpet in the cabin etc...).
| anabab wrote:
| what if you do a tracker that randomizes bluetooth mac
| address every few minutes?
| imp0cat wrote:
| That would probably work. Not sure if one actually exists
| though.
| nurple wrote:
| And also modulate transmit power as RSSI is often used
| for distance and movement calculation.
| m463 wrote:
| I wonder if there will be a way for airports to disable airtags
| this way.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| They are already pretty worthless as far as air travel goes
| in my experience. Airtag indicated my bag was on the tarmac
| at the first airport pretty much until it dropped in front of
| me in the baggage carriage at the last airport. Effectively
| it gives me zero information I didn't have already from the
| old analog method of using ones eyes and following up with
| airline staff.
| m463 wrote:
| I remember reading about airports wanting passengers to
| disable their airtags.
|
| I wonder if they would find a way to use this to disable
| ALL the airtags in an area.
|
| For example, put a UAL airtag on a plane, and use that to
| disable all the other airtags.
| kalleboo wrote:
| That was a case where Lufthansa was confused about the
| difference between (volatile) Li-ion rechargeable
| batteries and the (benign) Lithium single-use coin cells
| in the AirTags. They retracted their stance on them after
| a day or so. It was a fire hazard thing, not a "we don't
| want you tracking items" thing.
| m463 wrote:
| hmmm... that might be what I read.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Lufthanasa, like other airlines, was pissed that
| customers were routinely catching their employees
| claiming their luggage was "lost" when it was sometimes
| even sitting a few dozen feet from the person who was
| claiming the luggage was lost, so they made up some
| obvious nonsense about them being hazardous.
|
| Unless you think a huge, high-end airline "got confused"?
| It wouldn't have been against regs even if ti was a
| lithium ion battery because it's so tiny. What do you
| think they do about the _millions_ of electric
| toothbrushes and shavers people travel with that have
| much larger lithium ion batteries?
|
| They retracted it because it ended up causing a Striesand
| Effect, putting a lot of sunlight on how airlines do a
| _very_ brisk business selling "lost" luggage.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > They retracted it because it ended up causing a
| Striesand Effect, putting a lot of sunlight on how
| airlines do a very brisk business selling "lost" luggage.
|
| ... and lots of cases of "lost" luggage being due to the
| fact that _decades_ after implementing paper tags,
| neither airlines nor bag /trolley manufacturers have
| gotten their asses together and worked on a standardized
| way to reduce instances of tags simply getting ripped off
| during handling.
|
| Like, it wouldn't even be that hard. Place a long, wide
| recess maybe 2mm deep along the entire trolley, where the
| tag can be stuck in and is guarded that way against
| conveyor belts or other bags ripping off the tag.
|
| And maybe invent a system where you have to scan your
| boarding pass and the tag barcode to leave the baggage
| claim area to reduce the amount of cases where people
| have taken the wrong bag.
| kalleboo wrote:
| > _Unless you think a huge, high-end airline "got
| confused"?_
|
| Having dealt with battery regulations with airlines,
| couriers and postal services many times, yes, yes I do.
| They _routinely_ fuck it up, even claiming that AA
| Alkaline batteries are too dangerous to ship.
| stephenr wrote:
| Their utility is directly tied to how many Apple devices
| with gps and data are in close proximity to them.
|
| I get significantly better responsiveness from them at an
| Australian airport or Singapore airport than I do at
| Bangkok airport. That doesn't mean they don't work, it just
| means it's unrealistic to expect minimum wage baggage
| handlers in Thailand to have an iPhone in their pocket.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| What about baggage handlers at two major US hubs where
| this bag flew? Plus presumably an entire plane of iphones
| and that plane is certainly not a faraday cage.
| vel0city wrote:
| Its crazy, but sometimes people have non-Apple devices.
| There's a decent chance none of the baggage handlers had
| an Apple device on them when they were handling the bag,
| or they were only around the bag so briefly it was
| between the airtag's chirps.
|
| There's a good bit of separation between the cabin and
| the cargo hold. I imagine it could be pretty difficult to
| get a read from a low power tag deep in a bag in a pile
| of other luggage with several other big metal plates
| between.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > That means someone can steal your stuff, and then disable the
| tracker so you can't find it
|
| This has _always_ been the case with AirTags. They 've had
| anti-stalking notifications since day one, and disabling one is
| as easy as a quarter test of the case to remove the battery.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Most people and myself included were sticking these cheap
| tags on everything we own, and it was genuinely useful during
| travel or in scenarios where theft was a consideration.
|
| It has never been advertised for that has it?
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Can you please describe what scenario you imagine an airtag
| would be useful in tracking down a stolen item in an airport?
|
| I ask because I'm at a loss. BLE from these little devices has
| ~40ft of range on a good day, and even if a mesh network were
| involved, I fail to see what the airtag could do that would
| help you recover your item. Sound an alarm? Great, the thief
| knows where it is now, and they can just yank it out and throw
| it in the trash. Give you GPS coordinates? Great, that'll
| really help after you find security, tell them what happened,
| convince them it's urgent, and explain to them what they're
| looking at when you show them the app. Of course that all
| assumes the airtag (or a nearby mesh device) has a useful GPS
| fix, and the thief hasn't already found the tag and thrown it
| in a trash can or something.
| radicality wrote:
| Imagine you put an AirTag somewhere deep into your suitcase,
| and someone malicious steals it and then drives off with it.
| With the current model, the thief will get notified there's
| an AirTag traveling with them, and they can play a sound,
| find it and remove it / disable it.
|
| Imo without these features it would be rather unlikely for a
| thief to find AirTags quickly or even realize it's there.
|
| The ~40ft range is more than enough, the global mesh network
| of all iPhones is the whole point of the AirTags, there's no
| "gps fix".
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| Google Maps generally shows my location inside of airport
| terminals pretty accurately, so it stands to reason that the
| network of iPhones in a terminal could plot a tracker's
| position pretty well. If someone has your bag and you know
| which direction they're moving, you could possibly catch up
| and get close enough to either spot it or (assuming you have
| an iPhone 11+) get a Ultra Wide Band fix to finish
| pinpointing it.
|
| Bury the tracker somewhere too inconvenient to locate and
| remove quickly, and they'll count on not removing it until
| later (or they'll just ditch it once it starts beeping).
| exabrial wrote:
| Sigh. I get it there's been a few abuses of the technology... but
| it was literally already ripe for abuse anyway.
|
| Whether Apple intended this or not: The real world primary use
| case for AirTags is still tracking stolen crap. I would to _not_
| want to alert thieves to the presence of an attached tracker in
| that case. I guess tracking your lost luggage is likely a #2, but
| if you were to survey what people were actually using them for,
| I'm betting it'd be #1 above.
|
| The only way I can think of solving this is allowing a silent
| mode on the tracker that requires both a private key from the
| user (to avoid getting NSL'd) and a private key from law
| enforcement (Apple / Google already have law enforcement portals)
| and finally one-way hashing the keys and publishing the results
| to a public irrevocable block ledger. One could see if your key
| was on the list to see if you Airtag was silenced, but you
| couldn't pick out specific tags that were silenced. The law
| enforcement agency's keys would also be hashed and published,
| allowing us some transparency on who is requesting the most tag
| silences, so we could monitor the monitors. If this were bundled
| up in a blockchain, and the tags were programmed only to act on a
| blockchain, we could avoid abuse and gain a useful feature.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > Whether Apple intended this or not: The real world primary
| use case for AirTags is still tracking stolen crap.
|
| You're conflating _your_ primary use case with _the world 's_.
| 95% of the AirTags I'm aware of in the wild in both my family
| and friends are used for finding misplaced items - not stolen
| ones.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Same thing.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| A misplaced item I left in the office will not be following
| a third party about. And so will not be mistaken for
| stalking them.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| A lot of people seem to have trouble realizing that their
| experience isn't everyone's experience. Good call out!
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| > You're conflating your primary use case with the world's.
|
| But this is not what you're now doing?
| chatmasta wrote:
| > I would to _not_ want to alert thieves to the presence of an
| attached tracker in that case
|
| Unfortunately, this is practically indistinguishable from:
|
| > I would _not_ want to alert my wife to the presence of an
| attached tracker in her purse
| sunshowers wrote:
| To be honest, no, as someone with pretty severe ADHD I use
| trackers exclusively to find stuff I misplaced a few hours ago.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Wait, Google is literally the world's largest unwanted tracker,
| right?
|
| Are they going to alert Android users that they have been
| tracking them?
| foepys wrote:
| I'd argue that Apple is operating on the same scale, at least
| regarding physical presence.
|
| Apple disallows disabling Bluetooth and WiFi easily because it
| allows them to track their air tags everywhere.
| Gigachad wrote:
| They don't "disallow" turning off Bluetooth easily. You can
| trivially do it via the settings app. The control panel pull
| down does it temporarily because that's what most people
| want. 99.9% of people are turning off wifi because the wifi
| connection they currently have is acting up. So turning it
| back on tomorrow so the user doesn't forget and ends up
| chewing through mobile data is the obvious best UX.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Nah, this is clearly a deliberate dark pattern from Apple.
| They could easily add a long-press option on the Bluetooth
| icon to fully disable it. But they don't.
|
| My solution is a Shortcut to disable Bluetooth, triggered
| by a widget on my Home Screen. It's annoying that I need to
| allocate space for that, but at least I can (actually)
| toggle Bluetooth without opening Settings.
| sbuk wrote:
| Clearly.
| lapcat wrote:
| Except that every single iOS update, including today's iOS
| 17.5, silently re-enables Bluetooth even after you
| specifically disable it in the Settings app.
|
| FB9992639 "Thank you for filing this feedback report. We
| reviewed your report and determined the behavior you
| experienced is currently functioning as intended."
| astrange wrote:
| It's because people come up with all kinds of cargo cult
| things they think will increase their phone battery but don't
| actually matter or make it worse. Going into the app switcher
| and hand killing all apps is the other one.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Will be fun in a train full of passengers and tracked luggages
| moving all together.
| sigwinch28 wrote:
| At least for AirTags before today, this functionality allegedly
| only triggers when the device is not near one of the owner's
| iPhones/iPad/Macbooks.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| Will be fun on a United plane full of passengers and tracked
| luggages moving all together.
|
| Happy?
| throwaway63467 wrote:
| Will this work with malicious tags as well? I.e. tags that are
| designed to not communicate with a given phone but with other
| devices nearby? Can that be detected? My understanding is that
| regular tags will communicate with all phones, but maybe there's
| a way to differentiate who to respond to or change identity for
| every ping? Not familiar with the exact protocol but basically
| many different tags near a phone wouldn't trigger the warning, so
| if a tag can produce multiple identifiers that the adversary
| controls it could still evade detection?
| IshKebab wrote:
| There's some info about Apple's network here:
|
| https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack?tab=readme-ov-fil...
|
| Seems like in theory you could do that, though there are
| definitely heuristics you could apply to detect those tags,
| depending on how stealthy they are being.
|
| Also on the servers side Apple could just limit you to a
| reasonable number of tags.
| winterdeaf wrote:
| As far as I am aware, there is no way to stop malicious tags
| without modifying the protocol to authenticate the messages
| being broadcast as originating form a genuine tag. [1]
|
| Making a tag that is not trackable is currently as easy as
| flipping a bit in the BLE advertisement. The same message is
| broadcast to all phones, but yes, a tag could also produce
| multiple identifiers and evade detection. [2]
|
| [1]: Section 8 of "Abuse-Resistant Location Tracking: Balancing
| Privacy and Safety in the Offline Finding Ecosystem".
| https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1332.pdf
|
| [2]: "Track You: A Deep Dive into Safety Alerts for Apple
| AirTags".
| https://petsymposium.org/popets/2023/popets-2023-0102.pdf
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| The broadcast isn't signed by some kind of hardware key?
| Nevermark wrote:
| So if someone steals my luggage they can drive around with it
| until it alerts them and they turn my luggage tracker off?
|
| I am not complaining.
|
| What it amounts to, is that the digital world enables so much
| information gathering and using flexibility, we need fine grain
| permissions and controls for our devices and services, so they
| "do the right thing" for all kinds of corner cases.
|
| But we don't have an information infrastructure for that, so the
| best we can do is balance concerns.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| > So if someone steals my luggage they can drive around with it
| until it alerts them and they turn my luggage tracker off?
|
| It's a common misconception that Airtags and similar products
| are designed to help you locate stolen items.
|
| They not. "Tracker on stolen device" and "Tracker planted for
| the purposes of stalking" are indistinguishable situations.
|
| They're to help you find things that you lost. They're amazing
| for that. They're _sometimes_ helpful for finding stolen things
| too, but that is a side-effect.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I'd like to repost this as a top-level comment because a lot of
| people are complaining about the same thing:
|
| It's a common misconception that Airtags and similar products are
| designed to help you locate stolen items.
|
| They not. "Tracker on stolen device" and "Tracker planted for the
| purposes of stalking" are indistinguishable situations.
|
| They're to help you find things that you lost. They're amazing
| for that. They're _sometimes_ helpful for finding stolen things
| too, but that is a side-effect.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Will this affect battery life? I can see how Apple's proprietary
| AirTags don't affect battery (of smartphones around them) much,
| but if they're trying to detect other companies' trackers it
| seems less likely that the battery impact is quite so minimal.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| It's exactly the same protocol. That's the point.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Annoyingly, though, you can't get a device that is trackable on
| both iPhone and Android networks.
|
| Which is annoying, because I have an Android and my wife has an
| iPhone, and it would be nice to be able to both track the same
| objects.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Aren't there third-party devices like Tile that you could use?
| Sure, it can't be tracked by every iOS and Android device, but
| it's not like there aren't trackers that you and your wife
| could both use.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| True, there are devices that work with both. But they use
| their own, much smaller, tracking network, rather than having
| one ubiquitous network.
| hanniabu wrote:
| How does the tracking network size affect functionality?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > How does the tracking network size affect
| functionality?
|
| Ability to actually find lost items. AirTags are so
| successful (in the US) because of the ubiquity of iPhones
| which are, effectively, constantly reporting on the
| location of detected devices. A smaller network of
| listening/reporting devices will not be as effective
| unless it happens to be very popular right in the area
| the device was lost.
| mplewis wrote:
| If there are more devices that can see your stolen
| device, there is a higher likelihood you will be able to
| track your stolen device.
| ihuman wrote:
| The devices don't have any GPS. Instead, they have a
| unique ID that phones see, and report their location to
| Apple/Google/Tile. If the network is bigger/denser, then
| your devices is more likely to be detected, and detected
| more often.
| daemonologist wrote:
| These trackers work by connecting to nearby phones, with
| the phone supplying GPS information and uploading it via
| its cell connection. So a Tile tracker will only get its
| location updated if someone with the Tile app is nearby,
| and since Tile users are relatively rare the tracking is
| only reliable in very busy places.
|
| Apple and now Google trackers on the other hand build
| this functionality into the OS (or Google's near-OS
| bundle for Android), so if basically any phone comes
| within range of the tracker it will provide a location
| update.
| yreg wrote:
| You can always glue two Chipolos together. Interesting that
| they don't offer such product yet though.
| crhulls wrote:
| CEO of Tile/Life360 here - I made a meta comment but I'll
| call out that because all Life360 users now scan for Tiles,
| and we are on 1 in 8 phones in the US, our network is
| actually huge. The small network thing is a misperception.
| We bought Tile knowing we could supercharge their
| previously small network.
| swat535 wrote:
| Please stop promoting your product multiple times in the
| thread, it feels like spam and doesn't add much value to
| this discussion.
| RobertRies wrote:
| I think it's pretty fair to make this clarification and I
| don't fault a company for wanting to squash
| misinformation about their product. I found it to be a
| useful comment because I had no sense of the scale of the
| Tile network, and I did have an intuition that it was
| much smaller.
|
| I have zero affiliation with Tile and I have never bought
| any device like this of any sort, but this is useful
| information to me as someone who has been the target of
| frequent bicycle theft.
|
| The criticism I will agree with is that it does feel
| worded a with a bit of a corporate polished tone that
| does give that vibe. edit: I think it's largely the
| "supercharge" descriptor.
| fphhotchips wrote:
| I disagree. There's a clear disclaimer of who they are,
| and they're responding to a specific criticism.
|
| Their comment at the top level also has that disclaimer
| and while it's written in a bit of a marketing tone, it
| adds substantive value to the discussion.
|
| One major value of HN is that we get people who are
| actively involved in building various pieces of
| technology directly engaging with the community. When
| there's a strong disclosure of who they are, that's
| almost always a good thing. (Of course, some
| organisations don't encourage that disclosure and that's
| a little more ambiguous).
| gnicholas wrote:
| Like @RobertRies, I found this comment useful. I've never
| bought a Tile but now that I know they have this much
| penetration I'm somewhat more likely to. I also had not
| seen the other posts by GP, so don't find it redundant.
| hellcow wrote:
| This very same company used to sell real-time location
| data of your family:
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/9/22820381/tile-
| life360-loc...
|
| Personally I wouldn't purchase anything connected to that
| network, even if they now say they stopped selling
| precise data.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I was in the location data space. These guys got out
| completely. It was a big loss to the industry since they
| had great coverage. They definitely weren't lying about
| that.
| wasteduniverse wrote:
| Wow, that's awesome. This is the closest I've been to
| someone directly exploiting my privacy for financial
| gain. Thank you for linking that article.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I'm a Tile owner (soon to be ex-owner), and I think your
| response is a little disingenuous. When Google announced
| recently they'd open up their Find My Device network to
| bluetooth trackers, I assumed for sure Tile would be on
| board. I was dismayed to discover Tile _specifically has
| no plans_ to join the Android Find My Device network,
| unlike Chipolo and Pebblebee. So I switched to Pebblebee.
|
| The Life360 network may be sizable but it's going to me
| nowhere close to the iOS or Android networks, and it's
| going to get a lot smaller with folks like me leaving. If
| Tile supported the Android Find My Device network I would
| have stayed.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Thanks for pointing me to Pebblebee. Recommend trying it
| out?
| hackernewds wrote:
| I lost my wallet in Seattle, which fwiw is a first tier
| tech city and it still is detected once every 4 days
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Thank you, that's useful to know.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Tile is essentially useless, especially compared to airtags,
| annoyingly.
|
| I had a tile, however I fianlly got rid of it when I was
| unable to locate my keys in my house. It sent me on a wild
| goose chase saying that it had been last seen near my bins.
|
| I was in the same room as them for the first 15 minute of it
| beaconing.
|
| Airtags seem to acutally work reliably, and because you don't
| need the app running, has a good network to find them outside
| of my house
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| A true hacker would duct tape the airtag to the android phone
| and call it a day.
| notfed wrote:
| I'm pretty sure my neighbors are getting tracking alerts for my
| airtag in my house. The speaker keeps going off.
|
| They're 70 years old. I'm sure seeing "AirTag found moving with
| you" is confusing them and possibly freaking them out.
|
| I bought the airtag for my dog, but now am having second
| thoughts, I'm just imagining all the freakouts I'll cause when
| walking on trails.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > I'm just imagining all the freakouts I'll cause when walking
| on trails.
|
| You'd have to follow someone for 30+ minutes without your phone
| (or other device if you paired it with something else) nearby.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Seems pretty easy to do on popular urban trails to be honest.
| Some of the trails in my town have a group of people every
| like 30 feet and its pretty easy to end up keeping pace with
| them the entire hike unless you walk faster and pass them up.
| lanewinfield wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, you have to be actually traveling (i.e.
| beyond the house) with an unknown airtag for it to start
| alerting you. If your neighbors are not traveling with you
| places, it's probably not what's going on.
| Kronopath wrote:
| Yes, but it's not always perfect.
|
| I've been notified of an "unknown AirTag" while I was home.
| When I checked the locations it was seen with me, it was a
| random zigzag within a block or two of my home.
|
| I'm pretty sure what happened is that the AirTag belonged to
| one of my neighbours, there were some GPS distortions
| happening that made my phone think it was moving slightly, it
| kept hearing the AirTag's signal, and it assumed I was being
| stalked while wandering near home. This person might have the
| same thing happening to them.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Same results with the zig zag for me and a neighbor.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| If thats the case, then I must have gotten a stalker the same
| day as I got a new neighbor moving into the adjacent unit.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| As soon as the new neighbor moved in I got airtag notifications
| for days until I silenced them. I can see the prompts being
| scary/confusing for a lot of people. It basically says "unknown
| airpod is following you around!!!!" almost making you think you
| have a stalker that put one on your car, when really its the
| neighbor getting home from work and tossing their keys on the
| counter near your wall.
| perfmode wrote:
| It's beautiful when we can cross boundaries and agree on
| fundamental goods that benefit us all collectively.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| But of course, no messaging. They would rather let us fight for
| that.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| WhatsApp/signal/telegram/Discord/MMS/snapchat/etc
| yieldcrv wrote:
| America masquerading as a class-free society doesn't
| address people's desire to have a class-based society, so
| they seek that freedom where they can
| LVB wrote:
| I think we're slowly getting there, right?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38293082
| y04nn wrote:
| You know what would be even better? That they agree on a common
| standard for interoperability between both systems. They both
| work in the similar way and do the same thing, this would be
| great to have a standard.
| happyopossum wrote:
| FTA:
|
| "Apple and Google have worked together to create an industry
| specification"
|
| ...
|
| "Apple and Google will continue to work with the Internet
| Engineering Task Force via the Detecting Unwanted Location
| Trackers working group to develop the official standard for
| this technology."
|
| That's what is happening here. I'm not sure why people are
| always quick to assume negatives without doing even the most
| cursory reading of linked articles.
| talldayo wrote:
| I think the problem they're referring to is that we're being
| dragged through this brouhaha to stop an unintended side-
| effect from a proprietary network. In an ideal world Android
| users can detect unwanted Airtags because the protocol is
| documented and open. In the world we live in, Google has to
| go out of their way to solve problems Apple is inventing for
| them.
|
| The only possible interpretation of this is that Apple knows
| their current system wouldn't survive antitrust inquiries. So
| they're making a pathetically marginal concession ("well we
| _did_ let you track the hostile users! ") to cement the
| rationale of a pointlessly insular system. Once again, Apple
| is refusing to fully solve a fixable problem in order to
| artificially create a market in which to sell their solution.
| y04nn wrote:
| I should have made my point clear, but I'm referring to the
| tracking compatibility feature, that an airtag would be
| compatible for geolocation with the Android ecosystem and
| vice-versa toward building a global single tracking network
| instead of having 2 coexisting networks.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| "Apple and Google will continue to work with the Internet
| Engineering Task Force via the Detecting Unwanted Location
| Trackers working group to develop the official standard for
| this technology."
|
| IOW:
|
| "BigCorpA and BigCorpG will continue to work with Why Must
| This Task Force No Longer Focus On Progressing The Common
| Good And Instead Now Need To Focusing On Helping Try To
| Mitigate The Mess That Big Corps Are Causing via the Trying
| To Unfuck BigCorpA's Massive Privacy Oversight working group
| to develop an official standard which only BigCorpA and
| BigCorpG will have the resources to implement."
| poszlem wrote:
| What truly bothers me as a user of both an iPhone, an airtag, and
| a Samsung, is the seemingly nonexistent option to "ignore this
| AirTag forever". I usually leave my iPhone at home, carrying my
| AirTag in my wallet. Yet, every day, I receive a notification
| about an AirTag tracking me. I wish there was a way to
| permanently disable this alert.
| enhancer wrote:
| Just vote with your wallets and maybe they will come up with a
| better solution because clearly people use them in case of theft
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| No one will touch theft with a 40 foot pole because then they
| are effectively calling for vigilante justice and a
| confrontation is liable to escalate.
| drozycki wrote:
| Mayor Adams and the NYPD will
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/nypd-urges-
| citizens-...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Mostly because GTA is a larger crime worth prosecuting, and
| there are like 4500 car thefts in NYC a year apparently.
|
| For bread and butter theft, a bike theft in this case, an
| owner tried to get the orange county sherriff involved.
| They managed to come to where the ping was hitting, knocked
| on the door, couldn't do anything, had to leave. The bike
| owner went vigilante in this case and took the bike back,
| forcing the orange county sherriff dept to release this
| statement:
|
| "As much as the convenience of technology plays a vital
| role in the quality of our lives, we want to remind our
| communities to utilize their local law enforcement services
| when they've been victimized by a crime instead of placing
| themselves into harm's way."
|
| "GPS tracking devices, like an "AirTag", are used for
| tracking property like bicycles, backpacks, etc. Putting
| such devices onto property items will help you locate those
| items if missing or stolen; however, pursuing its recovery
| in a vigilante manner because the GPS device depicts its
| location could place you into a physically dangerous
| predicament."
|
| https://abc7.com/ebike-theft-airtag-aliso-viejo/13091749/
|
| For a point of reference on the policing culture in Orange
| County, they are currently running an ad campaign where
| they have "Crime doesn't pay in Orange County, you steal we
| prosecute" plastered on LA city and county busses. Its a
| little bit more active than other areas to say the least.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| > AirTag, Find My accessory, or other industry specification-
| compatible Bluetooth tracker
|
| What is this other industry spec?
|
| > Chipolo, eufy, Jio, Motorola, and Pebblebee
|
| What about Tile?
| solardev wrote:
| I wish I could figure out how to configure my own trackers to
| stop beeping at me. I previously had an iPhone, but switched to
| an Android, and now my Airtags all think they're someone else's -
| even though they come home to the same place as my iPad and Mac
| every night. I can't figure out how to tell Apple they're
| actually mine, so they just keep randomly chiming in my backpack
| every few days... and my Android phone keeps warning me :(
| Bloating wrote:
| It all belong to the fruit, including you
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Excellent work teams. Now expand the tracking networks to each
| other's phones.
| tristor wrote:
| As someone that duct-tapes hidden AirTags in my luggage
| (replacing former use of Tile, but AirTags have a bigger network
| and I use an iPhone) this is not good news for me. I have close
| to a 0% concern about stalkers, and I have a significant concern
| about thievery while traveling. I have an AirTag in my luggage,
| on my keychain, in my wallet, and in various other places
| /specifically/ to ensure that while traveling I can recover my
| belongings and deter thievery. This just ruined all of that.
| jerbear4328 wrote:
| Well, anti-stalking notifications for AirTags have existed on
| iPhones (and Androids with an app) since the beginning. This
| only adds built-in support to Androids as well. So, sorry to
| break it to you, but your system has always been set up to
| notify any thieves with an iPhone (or a free app installed).
| Anti-theft is an anti-goal for the AirTag, and, in my opinion,
| that is the correct choice, because vigilantism is really not a
| good idea. What would you do with the location of your stolen
| item? Report it to the police, they won't do anything, and you
| shouldn't go to that location, the risk isn't worth it.
| matsemann wrote:
| Vigilantism is a straw man, though. No one said anything
| about going to that location. And police being useless isn't
| necessarily a global phenomenon.
|
| Just knowing that you _might_ be tracked when stealing would
| have been a massive deterrent. Now you know you can just hang
| out with the stuff you 've stolen half an hour to see if it's
| tagged, and then take it home without repercussions.
| r00fus wrote:
| AirTags explicitly claim they aren't for anti-theft. I use them
| to track my luggage so they don't get sent to the wrong
| airport, not to deter thievery.
|
| All the same I wonder how this will fare on airlines where many
| people are doing exactly your setup for their carry-ons.
| harshaw wrote:
| I have two airtags on me at all time. So my wife can find my
| wallet or my keys. I have an android. The iPhone network is
| larger so Apple seems more useful. And I can do nothing about
| these alerts.
| sneak wrote:
| This is only possible because the unique identifier that an
| AirTag transmits only rolls over once per day.
|
| This means with a network of trackers, it is possible to track
| the location of a single airtag over the course of a 24 hour
| period even if you aren't the owner.
| winterdeaf wrote:
| This is such a charade. Making "invisible" airtags is trivial
| [1], and I wouldn't be surprised if such airtags are being
| manufactured en-masse.
|
| We allowed the creation of a global tracking network under the
| false pretense of privacy. The entire Find My security model
| falls apart when considering "malicious" tags, and Apple knew
| about this from the start.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/Guinn-Partners/esp32-airtag
| foota wrote:
| In that case, couldn't someone just make a tracker tag using
| GPS and a mobile connection?
| emayljames wrote:
| these devices are way more insidious though, a gps/mobile
| tracker would have more limitations due to it being less able
| to be hidden and less mobile.
| wepple wrote:
| GPS+mobile tracker:
|
| - 4x the cost plus ongoing fees
|
| - 2x larger
|
| - can't buy it at any big box store
|
| - relies on a third party who can also see what you're
| tracking
|
| - battery limited to weeks, not years
|
| Accessibility and features make these way more compelling
| gerdesj wrote:
| A German Uni's (Darmstadt) IT mob developed an app called
| AirGuard that has been doing tracking device monitoring for some
| years now. I have it running right now.
|
| Why on earth re-invent the wheel? A bunch of clever folk have
| been doing this for years.
| neilv wrote:
| Thanks. People on GrapheneOS and who otherwise value open
| source can get it via F-Droid:
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.seemoo.at_tracking_detect...
| gerdesj wrote:
| "and who otherwise value open source"
|
| I hope that we can all applaud and value open source but the
| world is a mad place.
|
| Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.see
| moo.at_t...
|
| I can't find an Apple version so I might suppose that either
| Apple's nose is out of joint with regards the name, or an
| Apple version was never released 8)
|
| In the end this is a very decent resource and it should have
| been covered off by phone floggers, years ago. It's rubbish
| that G and A are presenting this as something new that they
| have come up with.
| kop316 wrote:
| My understanding is several OSS licenses are incompatible
| with publishing on the App Store:
| https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8479/is-
| there...
| userbinator wrote:
| I believe the title parses as "(unwanted tracking) alerts", and
| not "unwanted (tracking alerts)" as I read it initially.
| The28thDuck wrote:
| It's awesome that they are doing this, but doesn't that
| incentivize people to use trackers that are not to that
| specification?
| theshrike79 wrote:
| People always worry about malicious tracking and conveniently
| forget that you could buy GPS+cellular trackers years and years
| ago. They are 100% undetectable and very precise.
|
| AirTags always need an iDevice to be close by to update their
| location.
| wepple wrote:
| > They are 100% undetectable
|
| Nit: they're very very detectable, just not using your off
| the shelf phone.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| If we assume it's hidden so well it can't be found visually
| and doesn't transmit data constantly (deep sleep for X
| minutes, get GPS fix, send location, GOTO 10) - how could
| it be found?
| xyst wrote:
| What about the unwanted tracking at browsers, within apps, across
| websites, device fingerprinting, and GPS triangulation?
|
| Oh wait, these companies need this to squeeze more ~~money~~
| value out of paying customers.
| crhulls wrote:
| CEO of Tile / Life360 here.
|
| We decided to opt out of the Google and Apple finding networks
| and the new proposed standards because it completely ruins the
| ability to use Bluetooth devices to deter theft. If you put an
| AirTag on say your bike, and thief steals it, they will get a
| notification and immediately just find and disable it.
|
| We actually built a (controversial) feature that lets you opt out
| of anti-stalking features if you scan a government ID. As of
| today, we have zero known instances of abuse--the friction of
| scanning an ID is enough to make a bad guy think twice, and a
| committed stalker can just go get an LTE-enabled stealth GPS
| device on Amazon. It is crazy that the press and regulators focus
| on Bluetooth devices when actual stalking devices are readily
| available.
|
| Some people are commenting on how small our network is. People
| don't realize that Life360 is on 1 in 8 phones in the US. We are
| huge outside of tech bubbles. If you are at an airport, mall, or
| anywhere with any meaningful density of people, our network is on
| par with the big guys. There is a J curve to the benefits of
| increasing density, and outside of rural areas we essentially
| have complete coverage.
|
| Beyond this, we just announced a new satellite-to-Bluetooth
| network this morning, and we plan to open it up to developers in
| 2025. It won't matter where you lose your stuff, we will be able
| to find it. And thieves won't.
|
| https://www.life360.com/find/
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Never thought I'd go for a Tile, but you make a compelling
| case.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Personally I feel like the anti-theft nature of these devices
| is massively outweighed by the horrible outcomes of stalking
| and clandestine tracking. They're not a theft deterrent, in
| fact they're generally hidden so a thief has no idea it's
| there. And what are you going to do, show up with a posse to
| get your stuff back?
|
| The world would be better if tracking devices did not exist.
| It's a shame you've decided to actively reject anti-stalking
| features.
| jaimex2 wrote:
| Try thinking before posting.
|
| You give the location of your missing property to the Police
| when stolen.
|
| Tile/Life360 is now a superior product while AirTags are
| basically useless paperweight.
|
| If you want to stalk someone you have always had numerous
| options including superior gps/cell based trackers.
| nvy wrote:
| >You give the location of your missing property to the
| Police when stolen.
|
| They will do nothing.
| FrankyFire wrote:
| Maybe in the US, I know several cases where stolen bikes
| were returned and thieves charged in central Europe. I've
| never lost anything, but had a bike stolen and I'm in
| fear of having another one stolen. GPS trackers are not a
| real option for me (monthly fee, high battery
| consumption, not having an e-bike which would make it
| easier). These trackers are a great idea and I do get why
| stalking is an issue. But I'm with the Tile CEO when it
| comes to other or even better options for stalking. GPS
| trackers are way more accurate and I assume that swapping
| them or recharging them is less of a concern in that
| case.
|
| It's a shame that stalking is a concern. It's a shame
| that this had to be implemented and effectively breaks
| the devices use case for most people. But I'm not even
| mad at Apple or Google, because I also think that it is
| their responsibility to protect people from being
| stalked.
|
| Tile is also not an option for me, in Europe pretty much
| no one uses it. I will still try my luck with Apple and
| Google/Pebblebee Tags. Does anyone have experience how
| long it takes until you get notified about a tracker
| moving with you?
| crhulls wrote:
| I am very open to being wrong and changing course, but let's
| have a data-driven decision.
|
| When we launched our anti-theft feature, we were clear that
| if we found there was widespread abuse, we would change
| course. We have had literally zero complaints of anyone being
| stalked with a device where anti-theft was enabled.
|
| And I think you are misunderstanding the new standards.
| Google and Apple will proactively notify thieves of nearby
| trackers, and allow a thief to disable it. This is next level
| bad for anyone relying on their tracking device to protect
| against theft.
|
| What is the data that would change your mind? I would change
| my mind if we found that more than .1% of our customers were
| abusing this feature.
| koolba wrote:
| How is it an anti-theft device if the thief doesn't know
| it's there?
|
| I could see this being used in the aggregate to ascertain
| drop off points or chop shops, but at an individual level
| it doesn't stop your stuff from being stolen. Even the
| aggregate case requires buy in from law enforcement to
| actually act on the information which is not a small thing.
| crhulls wrote:
| Sure, I agree with that. We did user testing and people
| understood the concept. It is anti-theft in the sense you
| have a real chance of getting your stuff back, unlike
| with AirTags and now Google network devices where thieves
| will just disable the tracker.
| rezonant wrote:
| > We have had literally zero complaints of anyone being
| stalked with a device where anti-theft was enabled.
|
| First, it's highly likely that someone being stalked
| wouldn't realize a tile device was the cause. Secondly, you
| said Tile and Life360 are on only 12% of devices. So
| _maybe_ 1 out of 10 stalkers will be _successful_ in using
| your device to stalk. That 's not enough data to state so
| conclusively that this doesn't happen. I'm sure if Tile was
| more popular (and thus more functional) and more stalkers
| knew they were the best devices for stalking, they would
| use them.
| hansvm wrote:
| As a personal bias, I believe companies like yours are
| pathologically unable to do the right thing. Take my reply
| with that in mind.
|
| I carefully examined life360.com, trying to put myself in
| the shoes of somebody who was stalked, magically divined
| that life360 was involved, and wanted to report the issue.
| The extent of my options on life360.com are:
|
| 1. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
|
| And that's it. There does not exist a "contact us" or other
| general mechanism, and there certainly does not exist an
| abuse reporting mechanism. If that happens to exist behind
| other filters or paywalls then it's not relevant when
| discussing how the average customer would interact with
| your website.
|
| With that in mind, I would expect an exactly 0% abuse rate
| regardless of how abusive your product actually is. You
| confirm that number. I'm not surprised.
|
| The ball is in your court. How do you prove to the world
| that you _actually_ care about abuse? How _should_ a real
| abusee interact with your website? Why isn't it obvious?
| What are the exact numbers? And so on...
| crhulls wrote:
| We have a member protection link at the bottom of our
| page - it is not buried. https://www.life360.com/member-
| protection-resources/
|
| We encourage people to first go to the police, and we
| work with law enforcement to help bring criminals to
| justice on a regular basis.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| That link specifically dissuades anyone who is a victim
| from contacting your company. It directs them to contact
| police or a lawyer, and you provide no ability in that
| link to contact your company.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Going to law enforcement is the way to resolve this. The
| company can then disclose the identity of the owner to
| law enforcement.
| caf wrote:
| Really puts the "we've had zero reports" in context
| though, doesn't it?
| golergka wrote:
| > They're not a theft deterrent, in fact they're generally
| hidden so a thief has no idea it's there.
|
| A potential car thief doesn't know if your car has an alarm
| on it either, but he just assumes that it does because most
| do. With wide enough adoption of these devices, it could work
| out the same.
| smt88 wrote:
| My 2022 car has a built in tracker. These will likely
| become standard.
| zarzavat wrote:
| If you think stalking is more common than theft then you must
| live in a very, _very_ low crime area.
| gpm wrote:
| Theft is more common. Each instance of stalking does more
| damage. I haven't the faintest clue how I should weigh the
| cost against the benefit here, but I certainly don't like
| how the CEO here is blatantly attempting to downplay the
| stalking-enabling-externality their theft prevention device
| has.
| Bloating wrote:
| Social projection is far more common than theft
| WheatMillington wrote:
| I didn't say it's more common, but it's FAR more serious.
| darby_eight wrote:
| > If you put an AirTag on say your bike, and thief steals it,
| they will get a notification and immediately just find and
| disable it.
|
| This is not a good fit for bluetooth. Bluetooth is trivially
| detectable whether it's tracked centrally or not.
| crhulls wrote:
| Humans are lazy. The average person who steals a bike is not
| going to pull out a Bluetooth sniffer. And if they did, they
| would probably find dozens of nearby devices (try it yourself
| - I just did and have 53 Bluetooth devices near me).
|
| Thieves will, however, reply to an alert that says there is a
| tracker following you and hit the "disable" button. Friction
| is key. Google and Apple are making it extremely easy for
| thieves. We are pushing back on this.
| lilyball wrote:
| Weren't you sued just last year for enabling stalking?
| crhulls wrote:
| Yes, and we will fight it and win. This was also before we
| launched our anti-theft feature by the way.
|
| If you want to see the insanity of going after bluetooth
| devices, just search "stealth GPS device" on google and see
| what comes up. Ebay is targeting me with an ad that says
| "Hidden GPS Tracking Device for sale" There are legit LTE
| enabled stalkers right there in plain sight.
| jaimex2 wrote:
| Did they lose?
|
| Being sued means nothing.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| HN FTW!
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > If you put an AirTag on say your bike, and thief steals it,
| they will get a notification and immediately just find and
| disable it.
|
| And if a stalker puts it there, me finding it is a feature.
|
| > scan a government ID
|
| Considering how badly companies keep my private data private,
| be it email addresses or even direct passwords, scanning a
| government ID for a $10 tag seems really bad from a privacy
| perspective. Once you get hacked too (like many other, larger
| companies have been), the hackers will have all the peoples ID
| scans too to use with another company implementing such
| features.
| rezonant wrote:
| > because it completely ruins the ability to use Bluetooth
| devices to deter theft
|
| I'd rather have the assurance that at-risk groups like women,
| marginalized people, and notable people are not at risk of
| having a cheap and easy to use location tracker attached to
| them. As others have pointed out, these trackers are not meant
| for, and are ill-suited to use as anti-theft devices. We've had
| Lojack like devices for years and they'll still work all the
| same regardless of the reporting standard.
|
| > People don't realize that Life360 is on 1 in 8 phones in the
| US.
|
| So that's 12% of devices. Another way to look at it is you have
| a 1 in 8 chance that the device will work and notify you when a
| potential reporting device approaches it.
|
| > CEO of Tile / Life360 here.
|
| As an Android user who is only now getting to use Bluetooth
| beacon tech like our iPhone friends have had with airtags for
| quite some time, I'm in the market for these devices. Your
| statement here makes me think I should look for devices other
| than Tile, even if they did participate in the standard.
| urda wrote:
| I used to love Tile, but nah this ain't it and I'm glad I got
| off your product ASAP. I'm not ok with how easily Tiles enable
| stalking.
|
| You were literally just sued for this
| https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/tile...
|
| Edit: Hey man I'm not engaging you on this, you chose to opt-
| out of this safety feature and you've enabled stalkers that
| target at risk groups like me. Nope.
| crhulls wrote:
| Yes, we were sued, but we will fight it and win. I think most
| people on Hacker News know to approach lawsuits with
| skepticism.
|
| And I feel like many people being critical of us are arguing
| with emotions and not data. You have to scan a government ID
| and agree to severe penalties for misusing our product. We
| have had zero instances of reported stalking from anyone who
| has enabled the anti-theft feature.
|
| Can you articulate with data why what we are doing is
| problematic?
| blincoln wrote:
| I briefly installed Life360 when some members of a group
| trip tried to sell the rest of us on it as a sort of
| emergency personal location beacon, like the colonists had
| in Aliens. It's one of the most domestic-abuser-friendly
| apps I've ever seen.
|
| Most of the people your products are being misused to stalk
| can't even turn off their location sharing because the
| person who's insisted they install the app/hardware will
| assume that doing so means they're off spending time with
| someone else, or whatever their personal paranoid fantasy
| is. Why would someone being subjected to that contact you?
| It would just enrage whoever is monitoring their movements
| when their account was suspended, or whatever your process
| is.
|
| The people misusing your products in that way don't think
| they're doing anything wrong, so they're not going to
| hesitate to have you verify their ID.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Most of the people your products are being misused to
| stalk can't even turn off their location sharing because
| the person who's insisted they install the app/hardware
| will assume that doing so means they're off spending time
| with someone else, or whatever their personal paranoid
| fantasy is.
|
| Other than location history, is there a big difference
| between Life360 and builtin iPhone location sharing? To
| me, that's not enough to put the product in a different
| category.
| gpm wrote:
| Direct link to complaint (amended version): https://storage.c
| ourtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.41...
| hedora wrote:
| Since you're in an at-risk group, I strongly suggest you look
| into the sorts of devices the CEO mentioned, especially if
| you own a car (or any portable thing that could hold a pound
| of batteries, like a bike or a scooter).
|
| Though some things in that space are marketed to stalkers,
| there are legitimate use cases for such technologies, and
| therefore the only LTE tracking devices I've seen in person
| were sold at reputable stores.
| csomar wrote:
| > As of today, we have zero known instances of abuse--the
| friction of scanning an ID is enough to make a bad guy think
| twice
|
| So all I need is a stolen ID and then not only I am stalking
| but also ruining another person's life?
| crhulls wrote:
| We use a third party and they do a liveness scan with a live
| camera feed so it is not nearly that simple.
|
| I'm sure we can come up with edge cases or potential ways
| people could cheat the system, but we are adding so much risk
| and friction to stalkers that they would likely just buy a
| real stealth GPS tracker with an LTE connection.
|
| As a genuine question, why is there no outrage for these
| devices that are literally marketed as stealth trackers?
| sprite wrote:
| Hi Tile Ceo,
|
| I was able to track down my stolen vehicle with the help of
| Tile and now put them hidden in all my vehicles since they
| don't alert like an Air Tag does.
| crhulls wrote:
| Glad to hear that! If you are up for it, can you email me -
| chris@life360.com - I'd love to learn more about your story
| hedora wrote:
| Hey; Tile user here. I can't figure out your iPhone app any
| more.
|
| It switches between modes at random (map, we'll notify you, and
| the signal meter) when the signal is weak, and it says we have
| to replace batteries constantly. (Even though we just replaced
| them -- is the tile shorted out internally, or do we have to
| reset a timer somewhere, or what?). Also, it spams upsell
| attempts while doing this. You may as well be displaying ads
| for competitors at this high-stress point in the UI flow!
|
| Other than the above stuff, which feel kind of like bugs, I've
| noticed it's hard to figure out which building (in a 1 acre
| space) our keys were last seen in. We own all the phones and
| tiles around here, so giving better precision probably wouldn't
| be a privacy issue.
|
| I'd rather go with a smaller, cross platform provider, but
| we're seriously considering switching to AirTag.
|
| Thanks for standing up for functionality vs. questionable
| privacy protection.
|
| Anyway, we're rooting for you; good luck!
| crhulls wrote:
| Weird- can you email me? chris@life360.com and I will forward
| this to get looked into. The map thing seems like a bug. I'd
| also like to learn more about your concerns on over upsells.
| hedora wrote:
| Steps to reproduce:
|
| Walk outside away from all other devices.
|
| Walk 100 paces. Put tile down. Walk back to where you
| started.
|
| UI flow:
|
| 1) It shows a map of across town (last ping was hours ago).
|
| 2) tap find -> your tile is nearby, wait while we connect
| (with done button)
|
| 3) timeout -> map shows a dot where the phone is, without a
| big uncertainty circle around it. Can't zoom.
|
| 4) reopen app. Map resets to across town (or, worse, 50 ft
| in the wrong direction, so you think it pinged a location).
|
| 5) walk to pick up keys. No music or phone notification.
| (Later, an email arrives, usually.)
|
| 6) tap around to debug (want to pay for smart alerts?)
|
| 7) (when someone else asks me for help). Where's my credit
| card?!? Tile is holding my keys hostage for $3!!
|
| 8) (if you didn't pick up the keys) go to step 2.
|
| This is deterministic on iOS with everything up to date.
| It's been like this for over a year across multiple iPhone
| generations.
| abalone wrote:
| _> As of today, we have zero known instances of abuse_
|
| Emphasis on _known_. The whole point of stalking is to hide the
| device and not get caught. How would a typical victim even
| discover it? Or even if they figured out they were stalked,
| that it was with a Tile device and thus report it?
|
| ID scanning is easy to defeat. This is just ripe for abuse and
| it's good that Apple/Google took measures to block stalking,
| even at the expense of anti theft use cases.
| gpm wrote:
| And if it was a tile device, that it had the "help me stalk
| people" feature turned on. And if it did have that feature
| turned on, that they should report it to tile. Generally I
| would expect a significant fraction of people in this sort of
| situation aren't reporting it to anyone.
|
| Considering the multiple examples listed in the lawsuit [1]
| that the CEO is aware of, there are certainly _stalking
| instances_ that they know about. Just none that they know of
| _since 2022 (when they introduced the anti stalking features)
| with the anti stalking features disabled_.
|
| [1] See links on page 13: https://storage.courtlistener.com/r
| ecap/gov.uscourts.cand.41...
| crhulls wrote:
| I won't repeat what I have said in other comments but scroll
| down for more specific thoughts on the points you make.
|
| At a meta-level, we don't think the bad behavior of a very
| very small number of abusive should degrade the product for
| tens of millions of good actors. Theft is unfortunately
| extremely prevalent and a key reason why customers by
| trackers - we think the greater good is to responsibly
| support this use case.
|
| We have put safeguards in place that make it tough to use our
| products to stalk, and while nothing is perfect, the only
| complaints of stalking we have received are from people who
| were allegedly stalked by Tiles that did NOT have the anti-
| theft feature turned on. By adding this ID scanning friction,
| which includes a liveness check, we have empirical data that
| the bad actors go elsewhere.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Thanks for commenting. I'm a fan of your products.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| This has reaffirmed my decision to use Tile. It seems it's now
| the most effective option for tracking my property among
| similar bluetooth tags. Stalking is awful but as you say there
| are many more effective tools for that, tools which will still
| be available to people who want to use them no matter what Tile
| does. If an effective product gets crippled - for a good cause,
| sure - but crippling it doesn't actually advance that cause,
| why do it?
| Bloating wrote:
| "We are huge outside of tech bubbles" ... Only the Bubble is
| huge! Nothing else exists outside the bubble. There shall be no
| exception.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| I do agree there is a role for an anti-theft device
| specifically where there is vastly higher requirements from the
| user (government identification, liveness checks, etc).
|
| I presumed such a device would require a low-power cellular
| service. Glad to see you're making it work using Bluetooth.
|
| That said these higher requirements should not apply if the
| device has these anti-stalking notifications.
|
| Btw I loved your TikTok account!
| Noble6 wrote:
| Judging from the pettiness of the negative comments against
| Tile, I have to assume it's the single greatest product on the
| market! Also, it appears your comment is being suppressed,
| because the age and number of replies should put it higher, but
| it's now buried hours later.
| N19PEDL2 wrote:
| > Some people are commenting on how small our network is.
| People don't realize that Life360 is on 1 in 8 phones in the
| US.
|
| Do you have any info or statistics to share about the size of
| your network in Europe?
| eythian wrote:
| > Some people are commenting on how small our network is.
|
| I'm currently in a city, and when I open the map it gives me a
| circle telling me that there are 1,807 people using tile in
| that circle. This city population is a bit shy of 1 million,
| and while the circle doesn't cover it all it does cover the
| densest parts, so if we conservatively say 400,000 people in
| that circle then that means that the percentage of people with
| the app is about 0.45%. Now I don't know if the Life360 users
| are included in that count, that said I also have never heard
| of anyone who uses it here.
|
| As an aside, I do wish the app were able to update more often.
| I have a tile tracker on my bike (and obviously the app on my
| phone), and I can leave a place, bike ten minutes to home, lock
| up the bike, go inside, and the app will often still tell me
| that my bike is where it was before I rode it home. I guess
| there's a battery tradeoff there though.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| "Specification-compatible" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here.
| Sure, there are plenty of well-behaved companies making
| standards-compliant beacons, but there's nothing preventing
| proprietary approaches. Even with RPA it should be possible to
| implement "unwanted tracking" alerts for BT devices showing any
| given profile in their advertising data.
| shermozle wrote:
| And here I was reading that headline and thinking it'd allow me
| to be notified when creepy adtech is stalking me. Of course not.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| So, why even bother with an Airtag then? I mean, they're useful
| in luggage and things that are easily stolen, so this just
| destroys any usefulness in that capacity. I bet you see a huge
| drop in Airtags being purchased.
| nexus7556 wrote:
| Its more than just theft. I've used airtags to find luggage
| misplaced (but not stolen) by airlines.
| euniceee3 wrote:
| Two points here: AirGuard provides tracker alerts without opting
| into any of the tracking networks.
|
| With Find My disabled, these Tracking alerts do not work.
| Bloating wrote:
| Based on the forums comments there is so much stalking, that
| everyone is stalking someone. Or, is this just a Cali thing?
|
| At least it explains why the roads are so busy. Though, I thought
| everyone was working from home... which would make stalking
| yourself much easier.
| xarope wrote:
| So if people are sticking these on valuable items, is the use
| case now for thieves to break into a house, wander around and be
| alerted when said valuable items (which are hidden or otherwise
| not obviously evident) are close by?
| janandonly wrote:
| You've identified a great use case.
| antoniojtorres wrote:
| I would hope the threshold that has to be crossed for the alert
| functionality to trigger is more than a few minutes of
| proximity. Both items would have to move to together to weed
| out false positives, otherwise you'd set everything off at an
| airport terminal...
| theshrike79 wrote:
| They would need to stay in the house quite a while to get the
| alert.
|
| They can't just go around the house waving a very expensive
| iPhone to find the items :D
| spuz wrote:
| An alert will appear only when your phone and an Airtag have
| been moved to multiple locations together over the last few
| hours.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| Can't the attacker(?) just buy a tracking device that don't
| implement this?
| sambazi wrote:
| sure, but that's not the point
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Kind of, in that traditional tracking device aren't aubject to
| this, but it's more expensive; you can't both leverage Apple or
| Google's network of devices as BT location receivers to track
| the target and "not implement this", since this isn't something
| implemented by the tracking device but by the receiver
| networks.
| majestic5762 wrote:
| They want to be the only ones spying
| nottorp wrote:
| Wait... are they alerting you about tracking that you don't want?
| Or are they tracking you even though you don't want it?
|
| And to nitpick, what kind of tracking do you actually want?
| emayljames wrote:
| Basically this is to stop stalking, where a partner or stranger
| is using these devices to secretly track the victim.
| ro_sharp wrote:
| Great, now I'll get more than two or three of these every day
| just because I live in a mildly dense city centre...
| phartenfeller wrote:
| I want a feature to save a tracker as unharmful. Friends of mine
| carry AirTags on their keys, and if I go for a walk with them, I
| get the tracker alert every time.
| ultrafez wrote:
| Strange. It shouldn't alert you unless the AirTags aren't
| connected to their own phones - do they leave their phones
| behind when going for a walk?
| jkestner wrote:
| I first read this as unwanted alert tracking. Like, I'd love to
| have my phone intelligently track and block unwanted alerts, from
| the apps and OS makers that spam me.
| Angostura wrote:
| Swipe the alert and tap options. You can opt to never see it
| again, or mute it for as long as you want.
| sneak wrote:
| I think the issue is that disabling notifications entirely
| from an application is undesirable; applications (Uber,
| Starbucks, Walgreens) will send you advertising
| notifications, but if you disable all notifications for the
| app because it's spamming you, you don't get notified when
| your car arrives, your drink is ready for pickup, or that
| your prescription has been filled.
|
| It would be nice to be able to simply switch to a non-spammy
| vendor in that case, but that's not how the market works in
| the US.
| jkestner wrote:
| I still need some functional alerts, but not the upsells. And
| when I opt out of notifications, some apps (ahem, Substack)
| then regularly pop up a modal asking me to turn notifications
| on. I know what I said the first time, and the 10th, MFer.
| chobytes wrote:
| Seems kind of pointless. The tech for tracking is widely
| available and straightforward to use. Has been for decades.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| That's quite the garden path sentence.
| codalan wrote:
| Going to be pretty funny when pranksters start putting airtags
| into places where they can't be found just to annoy people with
| unknown tracker alerts.
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