But nothing interops with AirTags yet and I'm 100% sure they never will, since AirTags relies on Apple's backend to work. The actual devices are the simplest part - and you can get 3rd party AirTags already.
Regarding "my friend left the envelope on a table in his house" not producing the "AirTag found moving with you" alert, this is obviously by design. You get the alert if the tag is planted on your person/vehicle and following you around, not if it happens to be sitting still in a location that you frequent.
The alternative is being constantly bombarded with alerts because other residents of an apartment building also own AirTags, which is not going to be useful to anyone.
Yeah, I'm wondering if the 3 days rule is for being around a certain iphone for 3 days. Otherwise, every person coming in contact with an old airtag would be notified as soon as they come in contact with it.
AFAIK if the owner iPhone checks in with the tag, then everything's fine again.
So if you're a jealous husband who wants to track your wife's whereabouts as she goes through the day before returning to your home every night, well Apple has the product for you!
Or if you're stalking Cindy, just walk by her place every few days... until she spends the night at Peter's, but hey, your iPhone will tell you that, and where to find them.
As others have said, there are widely available GPS trackers with cellular connections. There are, of course, also all the ways people did such things pre-GPS. i.e. just finding out where a person lives which is mostly pretty easy.
The GPS locators are heavier with shorter battery life. This has been my experience from GPS pet trackers. Since Bluetooth Low Energy does not require as much energy or range, the form factor is greatly decreased.
yes but if you just want to find where someone leves or goes, you don't need a device following them for a year. Ar day or two is enough, and GPS trackers give you that and a much greater accuracy.
You might realize this, but just for clarity, Bluetooth LE has similar range to Classic Bluetooth, with the exception of 125kbps LE long range coded PHY, introduced with BT5.0. You can potentially reach from 1km away outdoors.
The Nordic Semiconductor NRF52832 used in the airtag, unlike NRF52840, does not support this.
Apple seems to have removed support for long range coded PHY from iOS as well, so other vendors can't make use of coded PHY either. It was present in iOS 13, seems to be absent from iOS 14.
(Unrelated, but kind of sad that I got more information on how airtags actually work from a bike components review channel than dedicated tech reviewers)
Tech reviewers are too busy praising Apple and calling everything they make magical. There are very few real tech review sites that test devices based on objective criteria. They don't get as much traffic compared to websites like The Verge.
The Verge still has quality content as long as you keep in mind almost all of their reviewers live in the US, they are all in the Apple ecosystem, and they wouldn't be able to talk their family and friends if they switched to Android anyway.
They have no reason to be enthusiastic about anything that's not an iPhone or an iPhone accessory.
> There are very few real tech review sites that test devices based on objective criteria. They don't get as much traffic compared to websites like The Verge.
The industry has a very carrot-stick mentality. Gamers Nexus for example gets shit on by everyone especially when they call this shit out while the "real gaming" channels just go along with anything to get review copies.
Well that’s about 50% of the US market that you’re describing and honestly the US market is the number 1 priority for companies, followed by China. Other countries are faaaar behind in third+ place.
so it's nice that it notifies me there's an airtag on me but only when i get home - however if someone's nefariously tracking me, at that point it's too late.
Well, the problem here is that there's no easy way to prevent false positives otherwise. Imagine if you leave your phone at home but take your keys with an AirTag to go shopping using public transportation. Everyone on the bus or the train will be getting notifications about an AirTag that is following them. Same if you lost an item with an AirTag in that bus or train even if you had your phone with you when you boarded it in the first place.
That's why the alert only pops up when you get to a known location (home/office).
As for Android, I wonder if an app could be made for phones equipped with UWB radios that alerts you if a tag is always in close proximity, just based on the tags radio activity.
You don't need UWB for safety alerts. Simply bluetooth is enough. These tags send out a message every 2 seconds and have a predictable part of the rotating key so if you see the same fixed portion multiple times in a row, its very likely to be the same tag (unlikely that multiple different tags were near you one at a time with exactly the same fixed part) but if you do something like set up tracking stations at malls, there will be too many duplicates.
Or if you have an iphone and someone plants a samsung tag on you, you also get no notification. Someone could also just follow you home. Airtags at least prevent long term stalking which is difficult to pull off without them.
The cat is well out of the bag now. I think Apple, Google and Samsung all need to get together and standardize safety alerts.
Most tech reviewers publish the reviews right after the Apple embargo ends or just a couple of days after getting the product. For something like AirTags, where you want to try more complex usage scenarios, this is not optimal.
Keep in mind the idea of "other iPhones will help you find your tags" was not even a thing you could test for when the first reviews came in, since iOS 14.5 was not out yet. Testing Airtags, therefore, was extremely complex for some edge cases and the experience was not as serendipitous as it would be now.
It didn't help that Apple was not very open on how the anti-stalking features work exactly, for obvious reasons (you don't want people to figure out how to bypass them).
> Keep in mind the idea of "other iPhones will help you find your tags" was not even a thing you could test for when the first reviews came in, since iOS 14.5 was not out yet
My understanding is that this is not actually true. AirTags using the existing "Find My" network of devices and iOS 14.5 is not required for Airtags to be tracked in the wild. iOS 14.5 is required, however, to pair to an AirTag as the owner or get the "this AirTag is stalking you" notification.
>It didn't help that Apple was not very open on how the anti-stalking features work exactly, for obvious reasons (you don't want people to figure out how to bypass them).
This is not a very good reason at all. People have already worked out basically every detail a week later as well as how to remove the speaker.
All this did was spam the internet with billions of questions confused about these features and if they will be left with a bunch of ringing tags if they go on a holiday or take a bus.
Yeah, I just left my dog (her leash has an AirTag on it) with my parents on 5/8, and presumably the leash was sitting in their home somewhere.
They took her to the dog park on 5/9, and got the notification that an AirTag was following them. So I was gone for a little over 24 hours, but they only got the notification after they took the leash with them for a couple hours and then went home.
I believe the 3 days is for the audible beeping when it's moved, but they haven't seen that yet and they marked it as "pause safety alerts" so I'm not sure if it'll still beep.
Edit: Also, I have a bag at home with an AirTag and it's constantly updating location, so presumably one of my neighbors has an iPhone that's nearby. Kind of cool that it updates so frequently, and I'd say it was worth replacing my Tiles because of it.
It's just to see what they're doing with her, not really to track the dog if she runs away (she's a pug, she doesn't move far or fast). My parents are on my Find My Friends so it's not like I can't see where they are, but it's just peace of mind to know if the dog is with them.
I used to have a Tile and the AirTag is so much better with updating location just because the sheer number of iPhones.
That's a perfectly fine opinion, but not one my family subscribes to. We're all on each others' Find My Friends, and have no problem knowing who is where. I even have non-blood-related friends on there, as do some of my other family members.
It's more useful to know when someone is X minutes away when you're being picked up or whatever, so it's certainly not "ugly" to anyone that watches my dog either.
If they're on Find My Friends, they had to consent to that proactively. The dog's AirTag is less accurate or constant than what they're providing already.
Consent isn't universal or eternal. Without commenting on the relationship the commenter has with their family, in general, whenever you give someone something that leaks information, it's worth letting them know and allowing them to make a choice.
I always wonder how this sort of situation can happen. I kind of can understand it a little bit within a family, but how do you ask a friend if you can track them 24/7 without sounding like a giant creep?
At least here in Germany I would imagine that the only answer to a question like that would be "do you want to resurrect the stasi?".
> It's more useful to know when someone is X minutes away
Usually a quick message is enough for something like this.
I have several friends on Find My; it's just much easier when someone is driving or biking than texting them/knowing if they got home safely. Plus, who cares if my good friend knows where I am at any time? If I didn't want them to, I'd just disable the location. Imo, nobody is looking at my location constantly, and the convenience is worth it.
This isn't to say I'd allow this with anyone, or that everyone should do this—far from it—but it's a convenient tradeoff in this case, at least, for my friends.
> Plus, who cares if my good friend knows where I am at any time?
I would guess that my father would have also said "who cares" if his best friend knew where he was at all times. Until he found out that his "best friend" did detailed reports on him to the stasi for Years. You never know with these kind of things.
Giving up your privacy for the tiny convenience of not needing to spend 5 seconds to write a message after you arrived home sounds insane to me.
> If I didn't want them to, I'd just disable the location.
Why is that the logic you apply here? It could easily be applied the other way around: If I want them to know, then I can enable it temporarily.
Doesn't that make much more sense than the opposite?
Carrying around your phone is sharing your location with your cellphone provider and thus the government. The stasi analogy doesn't make a lot of sense anymore at that point.
Speaking as a fellow German, I would never share that info with friends, but using that feature with my SO or future kids, sure. Not to spy on them, but e.g. to know they're safe when I expected them to be home already.
Which is why you decide to just say "fuck it" and share your information with even more people? Did I understand you point right?
There are much more dangers than just the government even if I chose to use the stasi as an example. I just thought that it makes for a good example where you can know a person for years and still get betrayed by them.
To your edit: Especially using this with kids (probably pressured to do so) is icky. You can claim that you are not spying on them, but you are. Maybe for their safety, but safety is often used to remove rights like this. You still spy on them.
I don’t see anything wrong with giving an air tag to a child who doesn’t have their own phone. Even if you think modern parents are overprotective (and I do), there’s nothing constricting about giving your child a small trinket that lets you see their location. It’s a small bit of extra security for everyone involved.
I remember my cousin and I got lost in Disneyland once, because we both somehow forgot where the meeting spot was. We didn’t have phones, and we were, of course, fine—truth be told, Disneyland is probably among the safest places to get lost. But it would have been nice if we’d had a tracker that could just tell Dad where we were.
> I don’t see anything wrong with giving an air tag to a child who doesn’t have their own phone.
The negative I see here is that it teaches your child that giving up rights for the promise of more safety (or more likely just because an authority figure says so) is something good and normal.
Also teaching that the concept of constant surveillance is good and normal.
I don't understand why you would like to do this just in case or because "it would have been nice".
It should be implemented though that looking up one's location also notifies the person being looked up. That way there is a social barrier to looking up the location indiscriminately.
There's also the opposite scenario, willingly sharing location. This is pretty reasonable for a few reasons, but thinking of some for my female best friend:
- Going on a date
- While out running
- Going to a bar
Plenty of other things too but those come to mind first
I am not against location sharing for limited amounts of time. It could be reasonable to do, but for that you don't need to share your location 24/7 as some people here imply.
My wife likes sharing her phone's location with me full-time just in case she's ever in trouble, I'll know where to look for her. I, in turn, share my location with her. She's not very specific about what kind of "trouble" she's expecting, but it makes her more comfortable knowing that I know where she is.
It also comes in handy if, for example, she goes to the store and I realized I forgot something and want to see if she's still there so she can pick it up. Or when she wants to know how soon I'll be home so she knows when to start dinner (my bike ride from work is around an hour)
I have some very close female friends that sometimes go on dates with new people. They gave me the ability to see where they are so if I don’t hear from them I could find them.
I kind of can understand it a little bit within a family, but how do you ask a friend if you can track them 24/7 without sounding like a giant creep?
My dog has a "Whistle" GPS tracker on her collar. Friends have no problem with it when they watch her even though they know what it is and that it can track them every time they take the dog out. They even keep it charged.
You skipped over the Comment I replied to which contains the following:
> We're all on each others' Find My Friends, and have no problem knowing who is where. I even have non-blood-related friends on there, as do some of my other family members.
Along with a lot of replies that try to explain how constant surveillance of their friends is fine.
You tracking your dog and incidentally tracking a friend while they are walking said dog is completely different then tracking your friends 24/7 via their iPhone.
It does not make a difference if you track your dog with a GPS tracker or AirTag, but it is fundamentally different than what the comment was about.
It does not make a difference if you track your dog with a GPS tracker or AirTag, but it is fundamentally different than what the comment was about.
I'd find that more invasive if I was worried about tracking. At least with an app in my control, I can turn off tracking when I want to, but if I watch my friend's dog while he's out of town and he sees me walking the dog to his girlfriend's house every night, he's going to ask questions.
Well no, that's the advantage of my own device controlling when my location is shared -- I'd turn off the FindMyFriends tracking except for when I want to be tracked (like if I'm going out to meet friends and want them to be able to find me)
Google maps has a similar feature. It's similar to snapchat's map feature so many younger people don't think it's too too odd, except this updates in the background instead of whenever you open Snapchat. I just decide to share with close friends, they get a notification about it, and if they feel like it they can press a button to share back. I'm not worried that these close friends will utilize this information to rob me when I'm at work or to kidnap me but it's certainly an unnecessary vulnerability.
> but it's certainly an unnecessary vulnerability.
Why do it then? In another comment I shared that even people you consider best friends for years could betray your trust and even if we take that possibility away there is still the question of how secure that data is in their hands.
Are they going to leak it inadvertently? Can someone else gain access to their systems and spy on you through them?
> many younger people don't think it's too too odd
Don't you think that is bad? People are just getting used to loosing their rights for minor "convenience". Not to mention that getting used to constant surveillance isn't great either.
That’s what I’m using mine for. The keychain holder blends in with his other tags and.. why not? I sincerely doubt I’ll ever need to use it, but it’s cost effective insurance.
I have bought 2 for our outside cats. I call them in every night around Midnight so they aren't out all night, and I want to use the tags to know if they are nearby. The challenge has been coming up with a good collar attachment that isn't too bulky. You can get away with a bit bulkier on a dog, but not on a cat.
This is where I'm wondering if 3rd party MFI accessories could come into play. I'd love to see a smaller version for cases like this (maybe without the U1, with a smaller battery) that still work on the Find My network.
Yes, I was using a bluetooth based tracker I found on Amazon, but the slightly clunky medallion ended up leading to issues with her being able to clean her own chest, and she got tangles under it. It can be a real issue.
So I've also been looking for a way to use an airtag unobtrusively. My cat isn't outdoors, but I have a big house and she's very old and likes to hide. I'm afraid someday she'll be sick or worse and I won't be able to find her, so something like this would make me feel a lot better.
It's one I'm happy with, though it's not all that elegant. Just spent $50 on a collar with a space for an airtag because I'm a single man with too much disposable income :|
I have a bunch of leather for various projects, and am thinking of just sewing up a tiny pouch that can tie the tag "flush" on the collar. Tried a few 3D printed case ideas, but they just add more bulk.
Worst case if it falls off the caller is you just go find it (and come up with a better system).
I suppose the answer is "Apple minimalism" but I wondered a bit why the tags don't have a tab with a small hole sticking out. It seems it would be easier (and cheaper) to come up with ways to attach to things. (Though I suppose it would also be more fragile than what they did for attaching to keychains.
I think you’re on the right track about it being more fragile with a hole. Probably with wear and tear over time it might break apart. Much easier for Apple to “outsource” responsibility of attaching it to things and dealing with durability concerns.
Interesting! TBF, attaching to a keyring is the only obvious use case where I'd really need something like that and I've already ordered one of the (cheap) attach to keychain accessories. But love how people figure out this sort of thing.
Heck, I'd love a less bulky AirTag attachment for humans as well. My AirTag key ring is by far the biggest thing on my keychain (even bigger than my car keys), and it's so stiff that it often gets caught on other things on my pocket when I'm pulling my keys out. That never used to happen before.
This is probably the one aspect where Tile has been superior (for my use case). I never noticed the bulk of the Tile tracker on my keyring.
I'm keeping an eye out for less bulky attachments online. Everything I've seen so far emulates Apple's bulky keyring design.
Looks like Airtag [1] is 31.9⌀x8 (6,393.8 mm3). the Tile Mate with removable battery is 35x35x6.2 (7,595 mm3) and Tile Sticker is 27⌀x7.3 (4,179.6 mm3). do you stick it to your keyring or use the larger Mate with hole on the keyring?
For something more real-time, I really like the Whistle that our dog uses. It's a GPS-tracker that uses a cellular connection. You do pay a monthly fee (so more expensive for sure than an AirTag), but if the dog is running in a field you can find it. It also lives on the collar and includes an activity monitor, which has been helpful to know in the past that previous dog walkers didn't really do much with the dog.
Those are great for medium and large dogs, but too big for cats and small dogs. AirTags have a lot of potential in that regard. Even products without Apple's network like Tile are invaluable, because when a cat is lost and hiding it's much easier to come within a hundred feet of it and detect the tag than it is to spot it with your eyes.
I love that the alert says "If this AirTag is not familiar to you, Continue". I'm guessing that's supposed to be a scrollable region? Brings me back to the days when we had scroll bars.
The notification was described by Apple as being tied to you, person having an AirTag you don’t know, having a Home location on your iPhone’s “myself” contacts card, which presumably then also requires you to have certain System Services permissions to have been left enabled to allow recognition of location by the iPhone in question.
Phrasing clumsy, but essentially: If your iPhone doesn’t have a Home icon in Maps for your home, you might not get AirTags tracking protection. Someone should test, or ask Apple to clarify.
That assumes the person being tracked owns a supported iPhone device. So that probably means someone with an android, having AirTag planted on them, can be tracked freely by nearby iPhones...
>this is obviously by design. You get the alert if the tag is planted on your person/vehicle and following you around, not if it happens to be sitting still in a location that you frequent.
So, if some guy hides it in your bag at the airport, with the intention of finding where you live, and you get to your home within the same day, you wont be notified about it for many days, or possibly months, if you leave your bag stationary at home.
Doesn't sound like a very good design.
>because other residents of an apartment building also own AirTags
How about just showing you a single alert (or stationary info page you could check optionally) "Airtag that's not yours travels with you, still here"?
You could then ignore it at public transport (where you expect others with airtags to be travelling along), but you could start getting suspicious if you still get that a "foreign airtag that travelled with you is still nearby" when you're at your home.
because there has to be a trade-off between usability and privacy. Something following you for a few hours (max trip for airport to home) could be a stalker, or could just be an airtag on your uber driver. Excessive alerts is counterproductive because people eventually tune them out, which makes them useless.
>How about just showing you a single alert (or stationary info page you could check optionally) "Airtag that's not yours travels with you, still here"?
You'll get that every time you're on a subway/bus.
>Excessive alerts is counterproductive because people eventually tune them out, which makes them useless.
You don't need excessive alerts, you just a place in the UI that the user can check and see if there's an alert or not. To make it even fancier, add a red dot to the "Find My" icon.
I don't understand why "excessive alerts" and the image of a constantly ringing iPhone is presented as the only possible way to notify the user...
>You'll get that every time you're on a subway/bus.
Yeah, so? As stated above, it could just be an entry "foreign airtag travelling with you" in some UI screen that you open and broswe -- tagged with the date and duration it happened. You can then blisfully ignore it (especially since it can also show "it's not here with you anymore" when you go to your destination).
>You don't need excessive alerts, you just a place in the UI that the user can check and see if there's an alert or not. To make it even fancier, add a red dot to the "Find My" icon.
Isn't this just spamming but slightly more discreet? If there's a red dot next to the "find my" icon every day you go home you're going to tune that out as well.
>Isn't this just spamming but slightly more discreet?
The original concern was about "excessive alerts" annoying the user with new popups/sound etc. This is unobtrussive.
It's potentially useful information, that can just show the last 2-3 entries, and consumed at will. So not really like spam.
>If there's a red dot next to the "find my" icon every day you go home you're going to tune that out as well.
Most of the time, and it can auto-tone itself down, so it's only shown when you should actually pay attention.
I gave the example of when you're back home, and the same airtags that were potentially "following" you on the subway (e.g. some strangers' airtag) - no longer follow you, so it's ok for the red dot to go back to green.
But if a foreign airtag is close consistently (the same foreign one), it could show the red dot.
>The original concern was about "excessive alerts" annoying the user with new popups/sound etc. This is unobtrussive.
And in the next sentence I said the problem is that users eventually ignore them, not that they're annoyed by them (although annoyingness is also a problem).
>It's potentially useful information, that can just show the last 2-3 entries, and consumed at will. So not really like spam.
A red dot is distracting in and of itself. I myself went out of my way to hide app store notifications entirely because it had no way to hide update notifications.
>I gave the example of when you're back home, and the same airtags that were potentially "following" you on the subway (e.g. some strangers' airtag) - no longer follow you, so it's ok for the red dot to go back to green.
>But if a foreign airtag is close consistently (the same foreign one), it could show the red dot.
I feel like this is in the class of features that are theoretically useful, but nobody but the most paranoid actually use. You don't see google/android IMSI catcher or rogue hotspot detection for instance, even though it might theoretically be useful.
> So, if some guy hides it in your bag at the airport, with the intention of finding where you live, and you get to your home within the same day, you wont be notified about it for many days, or possibly months, if you leave your bag stationary at home.
Isn't this iPhone only, too? So if you have an Android phone and live near people with iPhones, your location would be identified but you would never be notified.
>So, if some guy hides it in your bag at the airport
Sounds like a lot of work. If I wanted to (which I don't!) probably easier to sneak a peek at the luggage tag. Which may be privacy shielded but probably not and would only take a few seconds in any case to lift a flap up.
> So, if some guy hides it in your bag at the airport, with the intention of finding where you live, and you get to your home within the same day, you wont be notified about it for many days, or possibly months, if you leave your bag stationary at home.
IMO, this is just proof that the impossible is being asked of Apple here.
Totally legitimate use case: you put an AirTag in your bag while at the airport. The bag is stolen and you use the tag to track the bag to the thief's home. You're able to recover your bag.
Illegitimate use case: you put an AirTag in someone else's bag while at the airport. That person takes it home and you use the tag to find out where they live.
In the first case, any form of notification to the thief would be non-ideal and go against the point of having an AirTag (tracking missing / stolen objects). In the second case, nothing but immediate notification would be sufficient. So unless tracking products are not to exist at all, there will have to be uses of them that are illegal but not technologically preventable.
The alert will just trigger if the tag is away from your own devices. If the tag is in another location than you, then it should indeed trigger the alert and make a sound after three days, no matter what.
The main complaint about it “tracking the friend” seems invalid. The tag isn’t “moving with him”, it’s sitting on a counter. That isn’t tracking, more accurately it’s basically a lost tag at that point.
I think this is a great question. And I don't have an answer for it. I do think it's much less clear though:
If I attach it to your car to find out where you're parking your car, according to your logic it also presumably wouldn't trigger. But it's still a problematic and unintended use of the technology.
What if I merely want to find out where you live, not where you are at any point in time. This creates lots of problems for people at increased risk here that to me aren't answered sufficiently.
The difference is that a tag mailed to someone didn't follow them and their iPhone, it just shows up one day. In that case the person sending the tag obviously already knows where you live anyway. In your example, attaching it to someone's car (presumably while at work, shopping, etc) it will follow them home and their iPhone would see that tag the entire trip until they get home at which point it would notify the tracked person.
So I am an evil stalker, and I want to find out where my target lives. I know the Target has a Spouse. I stalk both, and spot that Target uses an iPhone, but Spouse uses an Android phone. I attach the AirTag to Spouse's bag/jacket, in hopes they'll bring it home. With luck, from the POV of Target's phone, the tag will look like it just "showed up one day", at least for a while. End of story.
As a real me, I'd hope that one could bring the tag to the police, and law enforcement would be able to get the details on the person who owns it? Assuming the answer is "yes", this should deter most malicious use, as even with a burner iPhone/Apple account, the owner of that tracker would be exposing a big trail of their activities.
Another scenario is putting an AirTag on the bottom of someone's car, waiting for them to go home, going to their home, and taking the AirTag off. There's more risk here, but it's impossible to do.
Or to remove the risk, you can drain the battery til it's got just enough to go a few more miles. Then, it'll keep pinging you the location and die when it gets to their house. With 3 days of leeway, you don't have to be too exact.
It's even easier if you know they aren't going to using their car at the destination. Like if they're going camping or something.
In your hypothetical scenario what have you (the stalker) saved other than the trouble of following one of the targets home once? Or placing any number of existing tracking devices (like a cheap smartphone) in one of their bags? Or, you know, looking them up in the phone book?
you know people don't only go home. they have affairs, they may be undercover agents, or they may be doing something they're not proud of (legal or not).
All those things are possible with tons of device on the market, and has been possible for years. I don't really know what your point is. Yes, this can be used in a bad way. Just like the car you purchase can be used in a bad way, to kill pedestrians. But what is the point of those what-if scenarios?
You can justify anything with that logic: Guns are just an improvement on skull bashing, and there's rocks readily available everywhere!
The low cost, simplicity, network ubiquity, and availability of these devices is different. Nobody what-if's cell phones (after all they can be used to coordinate terrible actions) because they provide a useful service to most people, as do cars (which require license and registration btw). Misuse is mostly obvious and punishable by law.
Employing a massive, worldwide, distributed network which can run trackers just for lost trinkets, with the nefarious uses so easily in reach (and defenses not available to anybody not on your fancy ecosystem) is a scary thing.
As for other products that exist, I have no defense except that their purchase is either obvious, their presence notable "oops, somebody dropoed an airtag here" (relatively innocuous) vs "oops, somebody dropped a gps tracker here".
I don't know how e.g: tile deals with this, but at the very least it doesn't get to piggy back on my resources by default to trace me home.
These kind of devices have been available for years, including from Samsung who has just as many phones out there as Apple. Of course as soon as Apple makes one – taking extreme pains to address privacy concerns – everyone pops up to armchair quarterback.
The speaker is trivially disabled, and the AirTag continues to function.
> These kind of devices have been available for years
Devices like Tile do not have access to a global network of iPhones. SmartTag only works with Samsung Galaxy devices, and we've yet to see if it works beyond the current model. Apple will make this work for everything. My old iPad from 2014 still receives software updates!
There are gps trackers for dogs (I mention these because they are extremely available) that use cellular data. They track much better, faster, more accurate.
If I wanted to track someone to the point that I’d disable an AirTag speaker, I’d not bother with an AirTag.
> In your example, attaching it to someone's car (presumably while at work, shopping, etc) it will follow them home and their iPhone would see that tag the entire trip until they get home at which point it would notify the tracked person.
Okay, but is that really different than driving down a random street, choosing a random house with a car in the driveway, and thus learning that that car parks at that address?
Knowing that the car you chose to put a tag on at the store later parked at a certain address is hardly that useful, isn't much easier than just following the car from the store one time, and presumably wouldn't upset most people because most people's security models don't rely on their home address being private and thus no one ever following their car home from the store.
If the airtag is away from its owner for 3 days it will play an audible sound when moved, so in your use cases the airtag would reveal itself to the user after 3 days. That still does not seem ideal though, 3 days is a long time. Also, in the article I'm guessing it didn't chime because it was never moved, which also seems like something they didn't think about.
No, in the case of attaching it to the car it is moving with you (and would thus trigger the alert). Your point still stands though that it can be used like that to find out where someone lives.
As a user, I'd love the option to decide whether I want to help in this system or not. Similar to how I can opt-in to sharing analytics with Apple.
I just might help out. But the idea that by owning an iPhone I'm automatically opted into this and I can't (temporarily) disable it is concerning. Especially since the feature to alert users of the possible privacy invasion outlined here, seems to not yet be working as advertised.
It's unclear to me if the "Participate in 'Find My Network'" option is what I'm talking about. But I also don't remember being asked about this at any point.
I don't really think either of those things apply here, although the implementation is pretty crucial.
AirTags have some protections against using them to track people, and the AirTag network doesn't appear to leak any private information. That last part could be completely wrong, for all we know: it relies on the software to be correct. The whole point of the gizmo is to "track", and I struggle to come up with an improvement to their solution to allowing users to track things but not stalk people.
This is being automatically enrolled in some kind of public good, where "public" is the Apple ecosystem. Is that bad? I mean, I don't mind, but offering an opt-out seems... polite, at least?
They even might? It's not unheard of for Apple to release software on other platforms, however uncommon it might be. It's certainly not the kind of thing they do right at the time of release.
I don't imagine you'd get much penetration relative to running it on every device at the OS level, though. Probably rough on the battery running in userspace?
It doesn't seem like it solves a problem most people are likely to have.
They didn't try at all. I wouldn't personally sell a device such as this as I believe it is very ethically grey unless you seriously consider mitigation measures that are available to everyone.
They do provide as much protection as they possibly can to those who do not. The device will beep, and it works as an NFC tag to get information about what it is on non-iOS phones.
People are not going to use AirTags to more effectively stalk people than the existing GPS trackers on the market. GPS tracker would be much better in fact.
AirTag: Very economical (no monthly fee), 1 year battery life, no line-of-sight required, easily purchased without attracting attention or providing an address, unguaranteed data freshness, size of a coin.
GPS tracker: Monthly fees, 1 month battery life, line-of-sight required, slightly unusual thing to purchase & may be difficult to obtain without supplying an address, usually better data freshness, at least as big as a box of tic tacs.
It's not that AirTags would always be ideal for stalking, but considering the ease of availability & use, it's definitely going to happen. The most interesting part is that Apple decided to release this product. It's only a matter of time until AirTags are linked to a case of stalking (whether the best device for it or not) and when that article gets written, it's simply not going to be aligned with the brand image they typically aim for.
You forgot to mention: rats the stalker out immediately if the stalkee has an iOS device, or the first time someone with an iPhone hops in the car if they use Android.
The latter isn't something under the stalker's control, it's just a really poor tool for that particular type of antisocial behavior.
Plus it's tied to your Apple account, so we're talking about getting a fresh iPhone and ginning up an account, or leaking exactly who is doing the stalking.
The number of people who will try it isn't zero, we don't live in that kind of world. I don't picture it going very well for them.
> Plus it's tied to your Apple account, so we're talking about getting a fresh iPhone and ginning up an account, or leaking exactly who is doing the stalking.
iPhones can be grabbed used for fairly low prices, same for Apple accounts.
> The whole point of the gizmo is to "track", and I struggle to come up with an improvement to their solution to allowing users to track things but not stalk people.
Let the user block types of devices from using their "find network". And let them block individual devices from using the "find network" through their phone.
If everyone could see, every local device, there would be no private tracking.
I don't actually understand what you're proposing here?
Sibling comments point out that opting out of the AirTag network is a setting in a given iOS device, which I didn't know, but I don't think that's what you mean.
Very few people practice consistent logic regarding opt in versus opt out. In nearly every case I’ve observed people are pro opt in for things they don’t like and pro opt out of things do like. Hence the push to make organ donation opt out and privacy invasion opt in. I don’t think there should be an expectation of being consistent, it’s just an observation.
Funny how in this case, we're talking about two tracking efforts, so it would be expected that both were opt-in to respect our privacy. The difference is that one kind of tracking helps Apple make money, and the other doesn't.
How does helping other people find their lost items (with neither Apple nor the "helper" knowing where the item is, now who lost it) infringe on anyone's privacy?
> Especially since the feature to alert users of the possible privacy invasion outlined here, seems to not yet be working as advertised.
The AirTag was not moving, hence the lack of notifications. Otherwise you'd get a ton of notification practically anywhere you approach an AirTag. It is working as intended.
Yeah, the 'Settings > [Name] > Find My > Find My iPhone > Find My network' option will turn the collaborative tracking off. But yeah, it's buried, poorly explained, and an opt-out rather than an opt-in.
Wow, so you can actually find the settings through two routes, I didn't know that but it makes it even easier!
The only jump that is not immediately obvious is that the Find My settings are under your Apple ID settings. Everything else is blindingly obvious and is not confusing at all. You being confused does not mean the average person will also be confused. You could just be a confused person.
From there though, it is a root level option when setting up your phone and enabling "Find My iPhone".
I'm actually disappointed that the disabling of the network is even an option.
Bit of a tragedy of the commons situation if we have too many selfish people like you who want the benefits of being able to find their own phone when it's lost but not participate in helping find other people's.
It also comes up if you search for “location” or “privacy” in Settings. Not completely obvious but easily discoverable for anyone concerned about privacy.
> tragedy of the commons situation if we have too many selfish people
I can’t think of how helping the Find My network would compromise my privacy in any significant way. But I am still glad there’s an option to disable, there may be people for whom it is a concern.
Eh, I find it a stretch to consider things that need to be typed "discoverable" unless there's a user manual provided telling you everything that can be typed. This same reasoning is why many would consider GUIs (or text mode menu-driven interfaces) to be more user-friendly than CLIs.
Voice assistants have a very similar issue, but nobody likes IVR systems either, so who knows.
Not privacy but battery life. I don't necessarily want to constantly scan for bluetooth devices around me and have some process sending that identifier and my location to Apple, even if it's done securely.
> Bit of a tragedy of the commons situation if we have too many selfish people like you who want the benefits of being able to find their own phone when it's lost but not participate in helping find other people's.
What if you only want to turn off airtags? This false choice is caused by apple.
Because again, the network is a common good. Why should everyone else participate in finding your devices when you don't want to participate in finding theirs?
I do want to help them in finding theirs, but just their phones. Why can't i divide up my expense/risk and spend it how i want? I'm not mooching off anyone, because i don't have airtags to mooch of their network sharing.
Sure, I may just be a confused person but I also have used iOS devices for many years and I'm the go-to tech support for my friends/family as I'm sure most people on HN are. I use myself simply as a benchmark because I know that if something confuses me, it'll almost certainly confuse most of the non-CS people that I know.
Furthermore, when you disable the find my network it disables it for you as well. You can't just do it one way so it's not selfish.
"Find My Network: Participating in the Find My network lets you locate this iPhone even if its offline"
So in fact there is no option (there at least) to opt out of finding other people's AirTags unless you also want to opt out of finding your own iPhone, at least as stated.
That's because it's using the same "network" to track both. It wouldn't make sense to turn one off an not the other. When your device is offline it's acting just like the AirTags and pulling info from other nearby iphones.
Which is entirely fair, don’t you think? If you want to make use of the ability to find your phone while it’s powered off, you should help others to do the same.
Or is it the airtag functionality specifically that’s bothering you?
You can still have traditional Find My- the one where your phone connects and tells Apple where its GPS is. This switch is specifically for the networking, which allows other devices to help out when your phone is dead or otherwise not connected to the internet/gps.
If you were known to be the only person who frequents an area, then an adversary's Airtag planted there getting updated would notify them that you were present.
That's a terrible analogy. I don't allow android devices to use my "ios roads" as it is. Why does it matter if i don't want airtags to mooch off my network? It's not like airtags are providing their share of network back to me.
It is a network effect. Because people buy and use AirTags, they turn on their FindMy, which in turn benefits you when you want someone to find your own iPhone.
Everyone interested in finding their lost or stolen iPhone already turned it on. AirTags will bring up another small percentage of people. The sum of everything available to you, means you have this small price to pay to be part of it: contributing to finding stuff for others.
> While we find that OF's design achieves its privacy goals, we discover two distinct design and implementation flaws that can lead to a location correlation attack and unauthorized access to the location history of the past seven days, which could deanonymize users. Apple has partially addressed the issues following our responsible disclosure. Finally, we make our research artifacts publicly available.
Not something a regular dude off the street will be doing any time soon. =)
1) Where would you put it, there are already TONS of options for wifi / bluetooth / audio etc. This is where I would expect it.
2) You can just disable this stuff when you first get your phone it walks you through these prompts there. If you don't enable it - it is not enabled.
3) Spam should be opt-in - most people don't want it. But a lot of Apple stuff should be opt-out, because people do want it. Ie, turn on GPS / location features - folks really want weather, maps with turn by turn etc. Apple already over prompts on setup for my tastes.
Also there is not really any logical reason to disable it. Apple claims it has essentially no noticeable effect on battery or data usage. Your iphone scans for tags once every 2 minutes while it is also checking for notifications so there isn't even an extra cpu wakeup.
I thought that was kind of implied by the ‘Enable Find my IPhone’ setting that is required for the tags to work..which isn’t a condition I’m upset about. IE—want to benefit from this feature? Thanks for pitching in! Don’t want to be part of the helpful network? Okay, disable Find my IPhone
You phrase it as if it was some community effort. Since it's opt-out and people don't change the defaults several levels deep, it's a shadow service. How many Apple users know their devices are tracking other's devices?
IIRC, when I set up my iPhone, I was asked whether I wanted to turn on location services (which would be used with the Find My network), and separately asked whether I wanted to "participate in the Find My network".
I've updated my iPad but haven't yet updated my iPhone and just poked around in: Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Share My Location > Find My $iDevice
My iPad has the "Find My network" setting (toggled on) but I was a bit surprised to see my iPhone has what seems to be the same setting (also toggled on) but it's called "Enable Offline Finding".
Find My Network is described as "Participating in the Find My Network lets you locate this iPad even if it's offline."
Enable Offline Finding is described as "Offline finding enables this device to be found when not connected to Wi-Fi or cellular."
Which makes me wonder if "Find My Network" is just a repacking and rebranding of something Apple has been doing for a long time. Regardless, I'd prefer to have opted-in. I suppose it's possible at some point I opted in while setting up a new device with "Find My" but I'm not sure. I certainly had no idea there was a way to find my iPhone even when it wasn't connected to wi-fi or cellular signal.
E- It seems this feature was added ~2 years ago and it did indeed use bluetooth and "crowdsourced" Apple devices[1]:
> Offline Finding uses a background process called "Search Party" to broadcast and receive Bluetooth beacon signals at regular intervals, and it can even do its work when the device is in a sleep state. And it does this with limited battery impact for all devices involved, so you should see little to no difference in power consumption.
And whether it was turned on by default seems to depend:
> By default, if you had Find My iPhone, iPad, or Mac turned on before updating to iOS 13, iPadOS 13, or macOS 10.15 Catalina, Offline Finding should already be on. However, if only one of the device's had the Find My service enabled but not another device, it may not have turned on automatically. To make sure it's on, check the following.
Default is powerful. I think one of the most important reason that ATT freaked out ad vendors, is because its default setting is "disable tracking". I would imagine that if Apple prompt user with a pop up asking "do you want to participate?" many would choose no because why not. And then AirTag won't be as effective.
I did get a little pissed that the Find My Network isn't opt-out, even though I would likely choose yes.
You see this in organ donation. Opt-in is abysmal, but it's the reverse when they switch to opt-out. I get the utilitarian reason for the change but it's ethically and morally dubious.
Informed consent is the gold standard, except when it's not.
The economist Richard Thaler (who wrote the book Nudge & won Nobel for behavioral economics work) has, I believe, actually argued against opt out in this case because defaults are so powerful next of kin will also argue there was no informed consent.
Once we provide sufficient funding to coroners and the rules around how the human tissue procurement industry operate are fixed, I might be on board with it if it were accompanied by a big enough public awareness campaign.
> Informed consent is the gold standard, except when it's not.
You're thinking of medical research and experimentation.
In the practice of medicine the Hippocratic oath takes precedence over everything else so of course informed consent gets thrown out when there is concrete evidence that it interferes with medicine's purpose: healing people.
When's the last time someone gave informed consent while unconscious and bleeding out after a car crash or shooting? That's why we have DNRs.
What do you mean? It asks you at setup time "would you like to enable Find My iPhone?" If you click yes, then it is enabled. That sounds like opt-in to me.
Note that even opting out of sharing analytics with Apple results in your Mac, iPhone, or iPad sending lots of usage and activity data to Apple all of the time. That analytics opt in/out screen is more marketing than reality.
For example, your device hardware serial is sent to Apple every time you open the App Store, like a permanent supercookie. Analytics are sent whenever you stream a video or make a FaceTime call, even with analytics off. Location Services sends your location 24/7 to Apple over the network, et c.
Apple's approach to co-opting the Apple-branded hardware that you own to benefit Apple is a poor one.
Back in the early 2000s when hand-held GPS receivers/loggers started becoming relatively cheap, some white-hat hackers tried sending them through the mail to see how the postal system worked and produced several articles and presentations on the results.
It turned out the USPS took a very dim view of this kind of thing.
I can't find any of this research now, of course, because all the search engines want to sell me tracking devices and package tracking services.
Sigh. SEO and other kinds of "almost search spam" has being reducing the utility to search for certain phrases impossible. It's about time search engines create a filter like -selling:shirts so it can go back to working as it should.
> Is it legal to put a GPS tracker in a package and send it to a fan mail P.O. Box in hopes that you could see where the celebrity lives after it’s picked up from the post office?
which is another 'fun' use of AirTags I hadn't considered :/.
I think it's absolutely fair to hold Apple to a higher standard here because of their reach. AirTags being an Apple product has made them much more popular than Tile, meaning any odd person will know about them. That makes it more likely that technically non-sophisticated people try to use them for malicious purposes.
Plus, the FindMy network is much larger in certain parts of the world, and some people might not even know they're helping track AirTags that are being used for malicious purposes. There's so much more potential for abuse now than there was before.
People are somehow expecting all nefarious people to be some kind of tech savvy geniuses who will order dozens of AirTags, disable the speakers and hide them everywhere just to track people they're stalking.
If they really want to do it, there are a bunch of better ways to achieve the same goal.
Also, Apple can adjust the amount of time before a lost tag starts beeping remotely.
The reason this works so well is the massive amount of IOS devices participating.
I have some Tile-trackers (which I think used to be the biggest player in this space - until Apple came along), and while they are OK, the number of devices tracking them is abysmal compared to the Airtags.
Someone had their rental car broken into, and their stuff stolen. He had a Tile on his keys, and noticed that he got a ping outside of SLU in Seattle, so he posted in the /r/seattle subreddit.
I happened to be working there at the time, so I messaged him and went for a walk. It took me about 30 min to find his keys (his bag was gone, they must have dumped it elsewhere) in a bush, which I was able to mail back to him.
So, I bought a couple Tiles since that was proof to me that it worked.
But, looking back, over the day or so it was there, he only got two pings to my recollection: one person that walked by (and caused him to post to Reddit), and me once I found it. AirTag's network is just so much bigger. I'm pretty convinced you would get at most a single ping if you mailed a Tile somewhere.
I also use a Tile in my snowboard bag. I was always able to confirm the bag made it on the plane because my phone would connect through the floor of the plane into the cargo hold, but I'd be very lucky if I got a ping when the bag was in the baggage belt system underneath the airport.
Tile was a great idea and worked well if you had other Tile users nearby. It's not really their fault the network is so small, it's a hard problem to solve to seed that network unless you happen to own a billion devices...
Tile just announced they’re partnering with Amazon so that Tile devices will participate in their ‘Sidewalk’ network. This will help them compete with the network of Apple’s billion+ ‘Find My’ devices.
Sidenote, but it's kind of amusing to me that you were working there but you only felt confident enough to buy them after you saw them work in the field like that.
Yeah, Find My is an app that needs your location services to work. ...If your Location Services is off, or your Find My app doesn't have permission to access Location Services, it shouldn't be able to report your device (nor other peoples' devices) location to Apple.
They does seem to do the trick. I’m ok with using a service like that to find a phone, but to utilize the devices of others (while a noble idea) creeps too far into the scary for me.
"The point of these alerts is to let people know if they’re being tracked surreptitiously by someone who placed an AirTag in their bag, their pocket, or their car. Three days is already much too long, but the fact that no alerts are occurring after four days is disturbing."
As I understand this feature monitors the signal strength of nearby airtags to identify ones that are travelling with you. In this case, if the person left it on a table at their house, they would constantly be moving in and out of range, so it's not moving with them.
"It’s also not clear how often AirTag locations update. I gave my partner an AirTag last week for her to take when she went on an errand, driving about 20 miles from home. Since she has an iPhone, I expected to see frequent updates in the Find My app, but that wasn’t the case."
Again, this is probably by design. If it worked as the author expected and gave you frequent updates, it could easily be used to track an unsuspecting person's location. This design seems much better. It still will give you enough information to locate your lost item, but it is not enough to track down the location of a single iPhone user.
> "It’s also not clear how often AirTag locations update. I gave my partner an AirTag last week for her to take when she went on an errand, driving about 20 miles from home. Since she has an iPhone, I expected to see frequent updates in the Find My app, but that wasn’t the case."
This is almost certainly a product of iOS battery management. Presumably there was only one iPhone in range during the drive (GF’s). If the iPhone isn’t plugged in, then it generally doesn’t update its precise location unless it detect “substantial movement”, which is normally triggered by thing like switching cell tower.
Net result is the AirTags location only get updated when the nearby iPhone thinks it’s power efficient to do so.
How long until they tag these to our ears and assign us a personal number? With Elon's offer of servitude[1] on Mars and these, we may encounter George Oswells 1984 pretty soon.
Airtags, just another piece of e-waste to poison the planet.
Totally yeah, no car though. I walk in to a shop and I'm already tagged. I walk in to the streets, I'm tagged. There's no hiding from surveillance. But now to allow a tag report back where your X is located is ridiculous.
Why you want to submit to a heat map of your objects, and what you do with them, I don't know. Call me cynical. I pity the people who feel its a fantastic toy when normally it's the same people criticizing about X FANG company thing. Yet they go and buy the recent crud they release. Talk about hypocritical.
That might make you the only person to have never misplaced your keys. It's not exactly uncommon. In the above scenario, finding of an umbrella prevents waste as otherwise you need a new one.
I have ADHD and live in an apartment <1000sqft and have lost my keys moments after finding them, but before I made it out the door. My second most frequently used command with my smart home setup is "Where's my phone?". I ordered 4 air tags. As to the e-waste concern, I'm trusting Apple's recycling program to handle them for me once they're no longer in service. It's admittedly not ideal for the environment, but I think it's better than the companies that sell disposable commercial trackers that are intended to never be recovered.
There are a few interesting things you say here. I won’t comment on the others, but the e-waste one is a valid point.
I wonder how many more of these have sold than is “necessary” just because they are cheap and nifty, only for the purchaser to get bored with it after a while and forget about it?
And to add, how long will it last until Apple forces you to upgrade your iDevice because "it's not compatible with this version. Not like that's ever happened before.
We have plenty of history here... so the answer is "somewhere around 5 years".
Example: iPhone 6. Released 2014, last sold 2016, lost new OS support in 2019. It's the newest iPhone that isn't compatible with AirTags. And with AirPod Pro and Pro Max you can only use it with regular Bluetooth, not the enhanced Apple proprietary version.
AFAICT the 6 to 6S upgrade involved doubling the RAM from 1 to 2GB, and the CPU improvement was almost doubled (+70%). The pace of raw improvement has slowed a great deal since then.
even just the battery waste alone will be insane. the coin cell batteries only last a year and they are non-rechargeable so if someone gets their first airtag in their teens and uses it throughout their life then that's at least 40+ batteries. its kind of nuts when you think about how many people will end up using these
hopefully they would be recycled in some responsible way but thats wishful thinking. future archeologists will have a interesting time figuring out why there is such a dense layer of coin cell batteries on top of a layer of fidget spinners
Vincent van Gogh. Born 2043, Brabant, Netherlands. Child prodigy in arts, sciences, and engineering. Graduated from Erasmus University, Rotterdam in 2055 with joint masters in particle physics and fine arts. Exhibited at the Louvre at age 14. Discovered a universal nontoxic perpetual energy source at 16 and joined staff of the Huge Monad Collider that same year as doctoral researcher in functional cosmology. There, proved that spacetime is lazily evaluated and that speed of light arises as input latency in underlying algebra. Disappeared November 23rd, 2063, leaving behind notes for a "personal temporal debugger" and a diatribe, hidden in a stencil of rats, railing against the prevailing culture of universal citizen tracing. Last sighted in background of art documentary, Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010); current whereabouts within continuum unknown, assumed to be still at large. Eartags never found.
> How long until Apple decides to discontinue the tags on their current generation of devices forcing you to upgrade?
I’m confused: what would require an upgrade?
Unless iPhones stop supporting Bluetooth, which obviously won’t happen, or ultra wideband, which is not impossible but very unlikely, these devices will work with iPhones effectively forever.
I am very unhappy about this new tracking service.
Scenario: sinister stalker (government agent, for example) attaches an airtag to my car. All iPhone users in the area will be happily reporting tag location and helping stalker in his malicious designs.
How do I protect myself against this, if I am an Android user?
They are much more expensive and require way more power, so they can't track you for a year without recharging. Also, they need to transmit data using cellular network, which also drains a lot of power.
The problem is that this new service makes such snooping very casual.
That may change, as people realize how easy it is to track others. Will there be stories of guys who 'accidentally' leave their keys/backpack/jacket in the car of some girl who gave them a ride home from a party?
I wouldn't be surprised if within a year we start seeing devices that can scan for nearby Airtags/Tiles/etc. so you can see if there's anything in your car before you head home.
>Will there be stories of guys who 'accidentally' leave their keys/backpack/jacket in the car of some girl who gave them a ride home from a party?
Damn, that is a good point. It'll be very difficult to prove that anyone stalking using AirTags had malicious/illegal intent. Far harder than, say, a purpose-built GPS tracker.
you can get ones that can last 3-4 weeds and cost about the same and unlike airtags there are no anti stalking measures, not to mention tile is exactly the same. Snooping was already very easy and casual and all airtags are doing is making people realize it and of all the trackers the only ones with any sort of anti stalking.
<$30 Bluetooth low-energy trackers (eg Tile, TrackR, Cube) that don't use cellular and last for years on coin cells also exist.
Obviously, without GPS and without cellular they rely on being near someone with a smartphone in the crowdshared location system. I think Tile (prior to AirTag) was the biggest, they've got around 10 million sold, probably on the order of 1 million active users once you discount people who own multiple units, or replacements of previously sold Tiles, etc.
As a Tile user, this was sufficient for my needs. If I lost my Tile in a public place, something like 1 in 300 people had the app and I'd have decent odds of getting an update in a couple days. I inadvertently left my bag in a coworker's car once, they don't have a Tile but it pinged a couple times during their commute as they passed other cars with Tile owners. But neither they nor their neighbors had Tiles, so it didn't give their home address. Tile doesn't make a big deal out of mitigating car-tracking or stalking abuses of its products, because it's not really big enough to be a problem. Now, though, there are something like 120 million iPhone users. I don't know how many choose to opt out of the default "Find My" setting, I'd guess that both that population and the population of people who even know it exists are both negligible, so I assume something like 150 in every 300 people are in Apple's crowdsourced location service.
Speaking of populations that may or may not know something exists: lots of people who don't know about and wouldn't buy a GPS car tracker are likely to end up with an Airtag on their keychain. By introducing the product, Apple is inviting the idea "what if I dropped that in someone's bag" to come across a hundred million minds.
Scale matters. At Apple volumes, mitigations like this are smart and will likely prevent crimes from occurring. At Tile's volume, it doesn't matter that much. I'm sure Tile (or a niche manufacturer of GPS fleet trackers) would love to have that problem, but they simply don't.
The airtag will start making sound after being separated from its owner for 3 days. That at least gives you the opportunity to locate and disable the airtag.
Good job nobody has posted a teardown of the device, with detailed notes on how to open it without damage and where the speaker is mounted. Otherwise anybody could prevent their airtags from beeping and alerting their stalking targets that they're being tracked.
If you're going to go to that much trouble, at that point it would be easier to use one of the countless pre-existing GPS trackers on the market[1] (which don't have such privacy-aware features) to stalk a victim.
Unlike Airtags these don't participate in Apple's global location tracking network.
I think it's also important to consider that Apple getting into this market does a lot to normalize use of trackers and also make them commercially ubiquitous.
I do wonder if Apple will add monitoring of the speaker output to ensure it's still working. You could actually just do this with just the accelerometer: they might even be able to add it with a firmware update.
The quickest solution would be to stop using Android.
Any cellular device will report its location to the nearest cell tower. This data is sold to private parties and available to query nominally by law enforcement only but really to any bidder willing to pay Zumigo or Microbilt a fairly reasonable fee.
Further that location is in realtime and contains historical breadcrumbs.
The periodic pings from your device not masking it's MAC address by attempting to query nearby wifi points, your bluetooth sending out rotating EID's are useful for in store tracking of customers but worse than running footage through collected CCTV footage. Likewise the wifi/bluetooth breadcrumbs are worse data than the LTE pings we're already getting.
To buy my phone location data the perpetrator needs to know my phone number firsr, which can be not that easy.
Ok. Another scenario. A serial rapist sees a girl he likes at the shopping mall, exiting her car. He attaches an AirTag to the car, and in a few short hours he knows where she lives.
Of course, he could do it with GPS tracker, but such tracker needs to transmit data, and cellular connection is rarely anonymous, creating risks for the perpetrator. So this wonderful technology makes all sorts of stalking much more accessible.
Or they could just do it the old fashioned way and just follow them in their car.
Or just tape a burner android phone to the car.
Or tape a GPS with cellular tracker using a burner SIM to the car.
Cellular connections are more than anonymous enough in most countries, and its not like a perpetrator in you scenario is gonna be leaving the device on the car for an extend period of time.
At the end of the day stalking someone who isn’t actively defending again being stalked is pretty trivial. AirTags don’t really change the status-quo that much. They’ve just shone a light on an existing issue.
You're missing the point. When OP says "How do I protect myself against this, if I am an Android user?" it's clear that the more relevant point is meant to be "if I am not an iPhone user".
He won't be participating in the network, but he's also unable to be warned of being tracked which does seem unfortunate.
Unless I'm mistaken, he's being warned of being tracked by the AirTag beeping when moved, and displaying information on any NFC capable device (such as most Android phones).
AirTags are talking regular Bluetooth 5, not some magic Apple variation of it, right? That would imply my Android phone should be able to see them. For example, I should be able to poke at them using nRF Toolbox app I have installed.
(We have only so many iPhone users in Poland, and I currently live in a small town, so I can't just experimentally check it right now.)
If that's true, then one should be able to write an app that scans for AirTags in the background and warns you about their presence. I'd hope someone will do this. I'd also hope this would eventually be included in the Android OS itself, perhaps as a generalized facility to detect Tile/AirTag-like devices around you.
Long time ago, there were these things called "beacons", that IIRC started with Apple introducing iBeacon spec/protocol. They used BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) to announce themselves. Some of those were used for the purpose of tracking your belongings[0]. I assume AirTags must be substantially different from that, because saw zero mentions of the Beacons in articles and discussions about AirTags so far.
--
[0] - I even bought a bunch of these on Aliexpress to play with, but didn't want to install the vendor's sketchy app, so I ended up not using them (but I could make them beep and give me some telemetry by poking them over BLE directly). They worked off a CR2032, but there was no "tracking network" back then - you'd connect these tags to your phone, and they'd just start beeping when they disconnected from your phone. A pretty unreliable design, given BLE can be flaky when mixed with apps, battery saving modes, and thick walls in an apartment. Unfortunately, all the non-sketchy makers of BLE beacons seem to have focused entirely on the retailer market - i.e. using them to push spam to your phone as you walk through a mall. I lost all my interest in that technology then.
I think this reply is basically saying that if you’re worried about law enforcement tracking you via an airtag, yet you’re already using an Android - or indeed any other phone, then you’re worrying about the wrong thing.
I think they’re also suggesting that an iPhone is slightly better for privacy due to its MAC address randomisation - but I don’t know enough about this and Android equivalent or lack of it to comment.
No you're missing the point in that it doesn't matter. If you're on Android or iPhone, you're already being tracked. Airtags just piles on to this pile of privacy wasting garbage.
My partner and I had GPS trackers on our MTBs almost a decade ago, with cellular data just as you describe. Our doubled as rear lights, but the same company sold another model that could be hidden inside the frame, amd a thid model designed to be attached to cars, boats, motorcycles, &c.
Stalking via GPS tracker is not new. What is new is going to be the “crime of opportunity:” Somebody who doesn’t plan and think through how to stalk somebody else, but in the heat of the moment they decide to try it, and the AirTags or Tiles or whatever they already own is close at hand.
I suspect that’s the factor of concern with AirTags being likely to become ubiquitous.
Airtag can track a car, and switching car in Russia is far more difficult than leaving phone at home.
Also, given how openly criminal russian government is these days, airtags can give them plausible deniability. Like, anyone could have forgotten an airtag in your back seat. With great battery life and virtial anonymity, it is a godsend for covert and unsuspicious surveillance and all kinds of crime.
Met some rich guy? Easily find out where he lives and kidnap his kids for ransom. I can't stress enough how casual this will get.
Find the firmware file for the bluetooth radio and delete it. Android will make this hard since it's an "immutable OS" and the authors don't want it's "dumb users" breaking things.
What are you on about. This has nothing to do with Android other than the fact that android users are unable to get safety alerts. The problem is that someone can plant a tag on an android user and other passing ios users will report the location back.
AirTag or similar tool could be a great way to track important packages we mail. Courier services could use this by default & provide better tracking data for their customers. I recently mailed a document to India & I have no clue where it is.
I’m looking forward to a world where the iPhone mesh net lets me move any amount of data from place to place without needing any long-range wired or wireless network link, just apple phones moving around.
We largely go the same places every day, and apple could figure out how to send a message or request for a song/movie/file/update and it just appears a few hours or couple days later.
Like a transparent sneakernet that uses onion routing.
We have some satellite-internet fed remote areas in Canada, and how to get your phone updated without a local IX means everyone chews through data just for system updates. They do have daily or weekly flights however. Loading up an SD card for the trips back and forth could work, but complicated.
When MS released the Zune with wifi, I hoped I could sit in an airport and “borrow” songs from other users/hosters, but I don’t think it worked that way.
Worldwide, high-latency LAN. For basically free by doing what we already do.
It’s in one of the airport customs offices buried under piles of parcels from China they don’t want to process (new policies on imports from China keep changing but those packages keep arriving) and under lower priority than the Covid aid they are processing
I can’t imagine many of the staff there have iPhones nor would iPhone owners be super close to the building.
As an Android user I hate AirTags because it will reduce the power of Tile's cross-platform finding network making it less likely that my tiles will be found. This means that Google should fight back by integrating a finding network into Android OS. It's more anti-competitive platform lock-in.
I had Tile on some lost luggage recently. Even though Tile had the biggest network, it still wasn't enough. My luggage visited a few large international airports without a single ping. It really seems that OS integration is the only way to get enough scale.
Same experience - I also went all in on tile - it really does not have the density of reporting and I'm also pretty sure lacks privacy protections apple has.
Have you actually used the tile network to successfully recover something? I was big on tile a few years ago, but they didn't help me find two things that were lost. Just not enough of a network. I'm hopeful AirTags will work better.
Its a network effect. Its basically the dominant players become more dominant. It makes apples phone's more useful, and Apple is unlikely to let any competitors use they're phone for a similar service, especially not by default.
If you have an iOS device, you're tracking all these airtags around you physically for Apple. Apple's not paying you for that service. It probably uses a little battery life, but all these individual device make the network great. But if you bought an airtag that's a great thing.
I was under the impression that airtags used some kind of Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum so there was no chance to emulate one without some dedicated hardware but that link seems to say otherwise.
Now there's hope that with a little hacking the iBeacon emulator I coded up to run on my laptop can participate on the Find My network, sweet.
As seen in the glitter bomb experiment [0], many package thieves simply drive a few blocks, open the package and then toss whatever isn't valuable. Not that likely it will give you much useful to go on.
That's not an accurate statement of what happened at all. Here's an outtake from the description:
> To compensate [people whose houses I left the package at] for their time and willingness to risk putting a package on their porch I offered financial compensation for any successful recoveries of the package. [...] I've since confirmed in these two cases, the “thieves" were actually acquaintances of the person helping me. I have since removed those reactions from the original video.
All of the content in the video right now is legitimate and the video's author was not aware some of the original recordings were fake.
The police in the USA are not particularly incentivized to solve small crimes that aren't against large landowners or large employers. They exist to serve the ownership class, primarily, and to generate revenue for the local municipality.
They aren't even legally obligated to protect people or enforce laws.
Several years ago I lost my iPhone and tracked it using Find my Phone to a house.
I called the Sheriff's Department and they sent a deputy to the address reported by the device. My understanding was they actually went so far as to say something along the lines of "hand over the phone right now or we'll call for a warrant, search the house, and arrest you for grand theft".
About two hours after calling I drove down to the Sheriff's office and they gave me the phone.
Stunning. Apple has built a surveillance system that no government in the world could ever afford. Despots, dictators and duly elected presidents around the world are rejoicing at how cheap and easy it is to keep tabs on your political enemies, opposition leaders and those meddlesome human rights campaigners. Put a small tag on their cars, their briefcases, their kids' lunchboxes and just watch where the little tags go. Got a secret meeting with your fellow revolutionaries? Better hope nobody with an iPhone passed nearby on the trip to, from and during the meeting.
GPS trackers don't work well inside, they are large due to battery requirements, and are easily jammed. They are really only practical for tracking vehicles, where they can be wired in or use a large battery. It is significantly incriminatory if you are found to be using one.
If you live in a world where it's "easy to jam GPS", you shouldn't be worrying about BTLE trackers or cellphones either. You do know that GPS jamming is highly illegal pretty much everywhere?
If your threat model includes enabling a GPS jammer, I think it also includes other methods to prevent tracking too.
I don't know about days from a single battery, depends on logging frequency I guess. It is certainly a threat. Days of tracking isn't in the same realm as months of tracking though. With months of lifetime devices can be secreted at a time convenient to the attacker.
Jammers are illegal but widely available, and used frequently by people who don't want to be tracked. $50 for a good one. A low power jammer isn't going to get picked up very easily if it's moving. Jamming BTLE is also possible, and likely to be more common in the future.
The coming ubiquity of these trackers is the problem, they are going to be everywhere. Makes it hard to filter which ones are valid. Not just Apple, but their network is the most pervasive.
Jamming GPS or cell phones is a federal offense in the US...
If you're operating on a level where committing federal-level crimes is an every day occurrence, your threat model is not in the public median :)
It's not even hard to get days or months of use from simple GSM-GPS loggers. It's quite trivial to put them in deep sleep modes with different wake up triggers (external motion detector, clock, etc) to update their state. They can even operate over SMS so the amount of data transferred is minimal.
If you want to be extra paranoid, there are devices that only respond to "where are you/where have you been" SMS messages and stay offline most of the time (SMS messages are cached on the network side for a few days). Stuff like this won't be detected by equipment looking for active RF transmissions.
I really don't see how AirTags are supposed to be this super ubiquitous nefarious tracking device used by everyone from foreign governments to disgruntled exes.
Jamming may be a Federal offence (it is illegal in pretty much every country) but nevertheless jammers can be picked up for not much money, and are used widely by truckers, OCGs (avoiding surveillance, hijacking or warehouse theft, kidnapping, and especially stealing cars), even taxi drivers and couriers (and these guys are the ones using el cheapo jammers which cause lots of interference.)
People facing serious surveillance threats (like law enforcement or OCGs) will have to start scanning and mapping BTLE now, which is a serious pain.
The real advantage is ubiquity and deniability. I'd like to see Apple provide a way for police to identify the iCloud account owner, and other iCloud devices, for a suspect AirTag. This would significantly raise the bar for effort required for covert use. Still allows controlling boyfriends a great tracking technique though.
i get your point, but surely despots, dictators and presidents would already have access to GPS tracking technology? i thought those things were basically commodities by now
How big is a GPS tracker? Can I slip one into a dog collar/belt/shoe tread without anyone noticing? Will it still work where there's no cell signal but you still have WiFi?
Challenge accepted! I'll order one and post a pic of an airtag hidden in my dog's dog collar if you post one of a GPS tracker hidden in your dog's collar. We'll then compare which one is not even noticeable and which one is a giant block hanging off your dog's neck. Deal?
Well, not really. Apple has built in specific ways of monitoring un-wanted tracking. I have to assume the officials you mentioned have already had more flexible and purpose-built means of covertly tracking others for years if not decades now.
Such a lack of imagination... Official third-party requests require paperwork and official approvals and ??? 10 out of 10 political parties/espionage front companies/ex-boyfriends endorse this product because there is no paperwork (and it's cheap, too!). Hooray!
It doesn't require much paperwork in the United States. The mobile phone providers have built convenient portals for law enforcement, they just plug in your phone number and get your location history from the day you opened your account to right now.
I don't see how there could be much overlap in the Venn diagram of "people that are determined to stalk you" and "people that can't afford a $30 GPS tracker but can afford a $30 AirTag (even though they apparently own an iPhone)".
Lol, I thought they were sticking to "show legitimate non-illegal uses" until the last picture says "Easily mounts under car with included magnet" (not technically illegal if it's your own car but the use case for that is not universal).
It seems creepy to me, especially given how many legitimate reasons there are now to distrust Big Tech. It seems like an abusive husband can plant a tag on his wife (or her car, or purse, ...) and track her quite effectively. Also, even without that, doesn't it just give Apple even more insight as to how you live your life?
This seems like one of those 'features' where 20% of the benefit is for the end-user, but the gold mine 80% is in the long-tail that goes to the company.
The worrying part is this could be combined with countermeasures to prevent the anti stalking measure from working and even prevent it being discovered by a bug detector. Thankfully Apple has a lot of visibility of the system so presumably would be able to track down bad actors and aid law enforcement.
When moved, any AirTag separated for a period of time from the person who registered it will make a sound to alert those nearby. If you find an AirTag after hearing it make a sound, you can use any device that has NFC, such as an iPhone or Android phone, to see if its owner marked it as lost and help return it.
Back in the days, I used to watch Spiderman cartoons, and was amazed by the small trackers Spidey put on people he needed to track, and got the location in real time. I wanted to see something like that someday.
This AirTag does seem very nice in that respect. But then I realize what a gigantic privacy nightmare this can be for a large portion of our population.
Stalkers can put a tracker on you, and you'll never get notified if you don't have an iPhone? What if the user doesn't even have a smartphone?
How does Apple think they'll handle this scenario? Can it even be handled?
The tag will beep after 3 days, then you can tap it with any nfc enabled phone to get the owners contact information, or more probably, throw it in the trash.
One thing that is inconvenient about Apple’s AirTags is that you can’t share them with other people.
So for example, if a husband/wife share car keys, and the car keys have the wife’s AirTag, but then she misplaces her purse with both her phone and keys, the husband won’t be able to locate them.
Another scenario is if one of them wants to put an AirTag on their phone, so that when they can’t find it, the other person can help them locate it.
Anyway, I’m sure there are lots of situations in which it would be helpful for multiple people to be able to locate the same AirTag, yet this is not currently possible.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadThe firmware was recently dumped so maybe someone will figure out a way to build an alternative network to Find my.
But nothing interops with AirTags yet and I'm 100% sure they never will, since AirTags relies on Apple's backend to work. The actual devices are the simplest part - and you can get 3rd party AirTags already.
The alternative is being constantly bombarded with alerts because other residents of an apartment building also own AirTags, which is not going to be useful to anyone.
So if you're a jealous husband who wants to track your wife's whereabouts as she goes through the day before returning to your home every night, well Apple has the product for you!
Or if you're stalking Cindy, just walk by her place every few days... until she spends the night at Peter's, but hey, your iPhone will tell you that, and where to find them.
So what methods are you talking about?
The Nordic Semiconductor NRF52832 used in the airtag, unlike NRF52840, does not support this.
https://colinoflynn.com/2021/05/apple-airtag-teardown-test-p...
https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Low-power-short-range-wi...
Apple seems to have removed support for long range coded PHY from iOS as well, so other vendors can't make use of coded PHY either. It was present in iOS 13, seems to be absent from iOS 14.
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/665542
https://youtu.be/vjLbxywixro
(Unrelated, but kind of sad that I got more information on how airtags actually work from a bike components review channel than dedicated tech reviewers)
The Verge still has quality content as long as you keep in mind almost all of their reviewers live in the US, they are all in the Apple ecosystem, and they wouldn't be able to talk their family and friends if they switched to Android anyway.
They have no reason to be enthusiastic about anything that's not an iPhone or an iPhone accessory.
The industry has a very carrot-stick mentality. Gamers Nexus for example gets shit on by everyone especially when they call this shit out while the "real gaming" channels just go along with anything to get review copies.
If i have an Android i wouldn't even know that.
That's why the alert only pops up when you get to a known location (home/office).
As for Android, I wonder if an app could be made for phones equipped with UWB radios that alerts you if a tag is always in close proximity, just based on the tags radio activity.
The cat is well out of the bag now. I think Apple, Google and Samsung all need to get together and standardize safety alerts.
Keep in mind the idea of "other iPhones will help you find your tags" was not even a thing you could test for when the first reviews came in, since iOS 14.5 was not out yet. Testing Airtags, therefore, was extremely complex for some edge cases and the experience was not as serendipitous as it would be now.
It didn't help that Apple was not very open on how the anti-stalking features work exactly, for obvious reasons (you don't want people to figure out how to bypass them).
My understanding is that this is not actually true. AirTags using the existing "Find My" network of devices and iOS 14.5 is not required for Airtags to be tracked in the wild. iOS 14.5 is required, however, to pair to an AirTag as the owner or get the "this AirTag is stalking you" notification.
This is not a very good reason at all. People have already worked out basically every detail a week later as well as how to remove the speaker.
All this did was spam the internet with billions of questions confused about these features and if they will be left with a bunch of ringing tags if they go on a holiday or take a bus.
They took her to the dog park on 5/9, and got the notification that an AirTag was following them. So I was gone for a little over 24 hours, but they only got the notification after they took the leash with them for a couple hours and then went home.
https://imgur.com/a/RawzEP9
I believe the 3 days is for the audible beeping when it's moved, but they haven't seen that yet and they marked it as "pause safety alerts" so I'm not sure if it'll still beep.
Edit: Also, I have a bag at home with an AirTag and it's constantly updating location, so presumably one of my neighbors has an iPhone that's nearby. Kind of cool that it updates so frequently, and I'd say it was worth replacing my Tiles because of it.
I used to have a Tile and the AirTag is so much better with updating location just because the sheer number of iPhones.
If I do you the favor of watching your dog, I'm going to be pissed if you're spying on me during the process.
I'm sure they knew about it, so I don't think it's unethical, just sort of ugly.
It's more useful to know when someone is X minutes away when you're being picked up or whatever, so it's certainly not "ugly" to anyone that watches my dog either.
At least here in Germany I would imagine that the only answer to a question like that would be "do you want to resurrect the stasi?".
> It's more useful to know when someone is X minutes away
Usually a quick message is enough for something like this.
This isn't to say I'd allow this with anyone, or that everyone should do this—far from it—but it's a convenient tradeoff in this case, at least, for my friends.
I would guess that my father would have also said "who cares" if his best friend knew where he was at all times. Until he found out that his "best friend" did detailed reports on him to the stasi for Years. You never know with these kind of things.
Giving up your privacy for the tiny convenience of not needing to spend 5 seconds to write a message after you arrived home sounds insane to me.
> If I didn't want them to, I'd just disable the location.
Why is that the logic you apply here? It could easily be applied the other way around: If I want them to know, then I can enable it temporarily.
Doesn't that make much more sense than the opposite?
What would be the point of that?
Speaking as a fellow German, I would never share that info with friends, but using that feature with my SO or future kids, sure. Not to spy on them, but e.g. to know they're safe when I expected them to be home already.
There are much more dangers than just the government even if I chose to use the stasi as an example. I just thought that it makes for a good example where you can know a person for years and still get betrayed by them.
To your edit: Especially using this with kids (probably pressured to do so) is icky. You can claim that you are not spying on them, but you are. Maybe for their safety, but safety is often used to remove rights like this. You still spy on them.
I remember my cousin and I got lost in Disneyland once, because we both somehow forgot where the meeting spot was. We didn’t have phones, and we were, of course, fine—truth be told, Disneyland is probably among the safest places to get lost. But it would have been nice if we’d had a tracker that could just tell Dad where we were.
The negative I see here is that it teaches your child that giving up rights for the promise of more safety (or more likely just because an authority figure says so) is something good and normal.
Also teaching that the concept of constant surveillance is good and normal.
I don't understand why you would like to do this just in case or because "it would have been nice".
- Going on a date
- While out running
- Going to a bar
Plenty of other things too but those come to mind first
It also comes in handy if, for example, she goes to the store and I realized I forgot something and want to see if she's still there so she can pick it up. Or when she wants to know how soon I'll be home so she knows when to start dinner (my bike ride from work is around an hour)
My dog has a "Whistle" GPS tracker on her collar. Friends have no problem with it when they watch her even though they know what it is and that it can track them every time they take the dog out. They even keep it charged.
That is a little bit of a different context to what the comment above claimed.
"Curious, do you find an Airtag on your dog's leash to be effective?"
"It's just to see what they're doing with her"
"If I do you the favor of watching your dog, I'm going to be pissed if you're spying on me during the process."
"but how do you ask a friend if you can track them 24/7 without sounding like a giant creep?"
So it's not clear how a GPS tracker on the dog's collar is different than an air-tag on the leash?
> We're all on each others' Find My Friends, and have no problem knowing who is where. I even have non-blood-related friends on there, as do some of my other family members.
Along with a lot of replies that try to explain how constant surveillance of their friends is fine.
You tracking your dog and incidentally tracking a friend while they are walking said dog is completely different then tracking your friends 24/7 via their iPhone.
It does not make a difference if you track your dog with a GPS tracker or AirTag, but it is fundamentally different than what the comment was about.
I'd find that more invasive if I was worried about tracking. At least with an app in my control, I can turn off tracking when I want to, but if I watch my friend's dog while he's out of town and he sees me walking the dog to his girlfriend's house every night, he's going to ask questions.
Would you really prefer to be tracked by your friend every hour of every day instead of only when you are walking their dog?
I do not believe that.
Why do it then? In another comment I shared that even people you consider best friends for years could betray your trust and even if we take that possibility away there is still the question of how secure that data is in their hands.
Are they going to leak it inadvertently? Can someone else gain access to their systems and spy on you through them?
> many younger people don't think it's too too odd
Don't you think that is bad? People are just getting used to loosing their rights for minor "convenience". Not to mention that getting used to constant surveillance isn't great either.
So I've also been looking for a way to use an airtag unobtrusively. My cat isn't outdoors, but I have a big house and she's very old and likes to hide. I'm afraid someday she'll be sick or worse and I won't be able to find her, so something like this would make me feel a lot better.
Worst case if it falls off the caller is you just go find it (and come up with a better system).
https://www.elevationlab.com/products/tagvault
This is probably the one aspect where Tile has been superior (for my use case). I never noticed the bulk of the Tile tracker on my keyring.
I'm keeping an eye out for less bulky attachments online. Everything I've seen so far emulates Apple's bulky keyring design.
[1] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP840?viewlocale=en_US&locale=e...
[2] https://www.thetileapp.com/en-us/store/tiles/mate
But if you forget your bag on the train, it would start alerting people on the train after a while.
Phrasing clumsy, but essentially: If your iPhone doesn’t have a Home icon in Maps for your home, you might not get AirTags tracking protection. Someone should test, or ask Apple to clarify.
So, if some guy hides it in your bag at the airport, with the intention of finding where you live, and you get to your home within the same day, you wont be notified about it for many days, or possibly months, if you leave your bag stationary at home.
Doesn't sound like a very good design.
>because other residents of an apartment building also own AirTags
How about just showing you a single alert (or stationary info page you could check optionally) "Airtag that's not yours travels with you, still here"?
You could then ignore it at public transport (where you expect others with airtags to be travelling along), but you could start getting suspicious if you still get that a "foreign airtag that travelled with you is still nearby" when you're at your home.
because there has to be a trade-off between usability and privacy. Something following you for a few hours (max trip for airport to home) could be a stalker, or could just be an airtag on your uber driver. Excessive alerts is counterproductive because people eventually tune them out, which makes them useless.
>How about just showing you a single alert (or stationary info page you could check optionally) "Airtag that's not yours travels with you, still here"?
You'll get that every time you're on a subway/bus.
You don't need excessive alerts, you just a place in the UI that the user can check and see if there's an alert or not. To make it even fancier, add a red dot to the "Find My" icon.
I don't understand why "excessive alerts" and the image of a constantly ringing iPhone is presented as the only possible way to notify the user...
>You'll get that every time you're on a subway/bus.
Yeah, so? As stated above, it could just be an entry "foreign airtag travelling with you" in some UI screen that you open and broswe -- tagged with the date and duration it happened. You can then blisfully ignore it (especially since it can also show "it's not here with you anymore" when you go to your destination).
Isn't this just spamming but slightly more discreet? If there's a red dot next to the "find my" icon every day you go home you're going to tune that out as well.
The original concern was about "excessive alerts" annoying the user with new popups/sound etc. This is unobtrussive.
It's potentially useful information, that can just show the last 2-3 entries, and consumed at will. So not really like spam.
>If there's a red dot next to the "find my" icon every day you go home you're going to tune that out as well.
Most of the time, and it can auto-tone itself down, so it's only shown when you should actually pay attention.
I gave the example of when you're back home, and the same airtags that were potentially "following" you on the subway (e.g. some strangers' airtag) - no longer follow you, so it's ok for the red dot to go back to green.
But if a foreign airtag is close consistently (the same foreign one), it could show the red dot.
And in the next sentence I said the problem is that users eventually ignore them, not that they're annoyed by them (although annoyingness is also a problem).
>It's potentially useful information, that can just show the last 2-3 entries, and consumed at will. So not really like spam.
A red dot is distracting in and of itself. I myself went out of my way to hide app store notifications entirely because it had no way to hide update notifications.
>I gave the example of when you're back home, and the same airtags that were potentially "following" you on the subway (e.g. some strangers' airtag) - no longer follow you, so it's ok for the red dot to go back to green.
>But if a foreign airtag is close consistently (the same foreign one), it could show the red dot.
I feel like this is in the class of features that are theoretically useful, but nobody but the most paranoid actually use. You don't see google/android IMSI catcher or rogue hotspot detection for instance, even though it might theoretically be useful.
Isn't this iPhone only, too? So if you have an Android phone and live near people with iPhones, your location would be identified but you would never be notified.
Sounds like a lot of work. If I wanted to (which I don't!) probably easier to sneak a peek at the luggage tag. Which may be privacy shielded but probably not and would only take a few seconds in any case to lift a flap up.
IMO, this is just proof that the impossible is being asked of Apple here.
Totally legitimate use case: you put an AirTag in your bag while at the airport. The bag is stolen and you use the tag to track the bag to the thief's home. You're able to recover your bag.
Illegitimate use case: you put an AirTag in someone else's bag while at the airport. That person takes it home and you use the tag to find out where they live.
In the first case, any form of notification to the thief would be non-ideal and go against the point of having an AirTag (tracking missing / stolen objects). In the second case, nothing but immediate notification would be sufficient. So unless tracking products are not to exist at all, there will have to be uses of them that are illegal but not technologically preventable.
If I attach it to your car to find out where you're parking your car, according to your logic it also presumably wouldn't trigger. But it's still a problematic and unintended use of the technology.
What if I merely want to find out where you live, not where you are at any point in time. This creates lots of problems for people at increased risk here that to me aren't answered sufficiently.
As a real me, I'd hope that one could bring the tag to the police, and law enforcement would be able to get the details on the person who owns it? Assuming the answer is "yes", this should deter most malicious use, as even with a burner iPhone/Apple account, the owner of that tracker would be exposing a big trail of their activities.
Or to remove the risk, you can drain the battery til it's got just enough to go a few more miles. Then, it'll keep pinging you the location and die when it gets to their house. With 3 days of leeway, you don't have to be too exact.
It's even easier if you know they aren't going to using their car at the destination. Like if they're going camping or something.
Much more reliable and accurate, zero chance to be found if you hide the device well.
People are inventing the weirdest scenarios to make AirTags be some kind of super stalking tool. =)
The low cost, simplicity, network ubiquity, and availability of these devices is different. Nobody what-if's cell phones (after all they can be used to coordinate terrible actions) because they provide a useful service to most people, as do cars (which require license and registration btw). Misuse is mostly obvious and punishable by law.
Employing a massive, worldwide, distributed network which can run trackers just for lost trinkets, with the nefarious uses so easily in reach (and defenses not available to anybody not on your fancy ecosystem) is a scary thing.
As for other products that exist, I have no defense except that their purchase is either obvious, their presence notable "oops, somebody dropoed an airtag here" (relatively innocuous) vs "oops, somebody dropped a gps tracker here".
I don't know how e.g: tile deals with this, but at the very least it doesn't get to piggy back on my resources by default to trace me home.
These kind of devices have been available for years, including from Samsung who has just as many phones out there as Apple. Of course as soon as Apple makes one – taking extreme pains to address privacy concerns – everyone pops up to armchair quarterback.
> These kind of devices have been available for years
Devices like Tile do not have access to a global network of iPhones. SmartTag only works with Samsung Galaxy devices, and we've yet to see if it works beyond the current model. Apple will make this work for everything. My old iPad from 2014 still receives software updates!
If I wanted to track someone to the point that I’d disable an AirTag speaker, I’d not bother with an AirTag.
Okay, but is that really different than driving down a random street, choosing a random house with a car in the driveway, and thus learning that that car parks at that address?
Knowing that the car you chose to put a tag on at the store later parked at a certain address is hardly that useful, isn't much easier than just following the car from the store one time, and presumably wouldn't upset most people because most people's security models don't rely on their home address being private and thus no one ever following their car home from the store.
Sure if you already know the person's car then just follow them.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/21/airtags-play-sound-afte...
I just might help out. But the idea that by owning an iPhone I'm automatically opted into this and I can't (temporarily) disable it is concerning. Especially since the feature to alert users of the possible privacy invasion outlined here, seems to not yet be working as advertised.
It's unclear to me if the "Participate in 'Find My Network'" option is what I'm talking about. But I also don't remember being asked about this at any point.
AirTags have some protections against using them to track people, and the AirTag network doesn't appear to leak any private information. That last part could be completely wrong, for all we know: it relies on the software to be correct. The whole point of the gizmo is to "track", and I struggle to come up with an improvement to their solution to allowing users to track things but not stalk people.
This is being automatically enrolled in some kind of public good, where "public" is the Apple ecosystem. Is that bad? I mean, I don't mind, but offering an opt-out seems... polite, at least?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/GPS-Trackers/b?node=617650011
They even might? It's not unheard of for Apple to release software on other platforms, however uncommon it might be. It's certainly not the kind of thing they do right at the time of release.
I don't imagine you'd get much penetration relative to running it on every device at the OS level, though. Probably rough on the battery running in userspace?
It doesn't seem like it solves a problem most people are likely to have.
People are not going to use AirTags to more effectively stalk people than the existing GPS trackers on the market. GPS tracker would be much better in fact.
AirTag: Very economical (no monthly fee), 1 year battery life, no line-of-sight required, easily purchased without attracting attention or providing an address, unguaranteed data freshness, size of a coin.
GPS tracker: Monthly fees, 1 month battery life, line-of-sight required, slightly unusual thing to purchase & may be difficult to obtain without supplying an address, usually better data freshness, at least as big as a box of tic tacs.
It's not that AirTags would always be ideal for stalking, but considering the ease of availability & use, it's definitely going to happen. The most interesting part is that Apple decided to release this product. It's only a matter of time until AirTags are linked to a case of stalking (whether the best device for it or not) and when that article gets written, it's simply not going to be aligned with the brand image they typically aim for.
The latter isn't something under the stalker's control, it's just a really poor tool for that particular type of antisocial behavior.
Plus it's tied to your Apple account, so we're talking about getting a fresh iPhone and ginning up an account, or leaking exactly who is doing the stalking.
The number of people who will try it isn't zero, we don't live in that kind of world. I don't picture it going very well for them.
iPhones can be grabbed used for fairly low prices, same for Apple accounts.
Let the user block types of devices from using their "find network". And let them block individual devices from using the "find network" through their phone.
If everyone could see, every local device, there would be no private tracking.
Sibling comments point out that opting out of the AirTag network is a setting in a given iOS device, which I didn't know, but I don't think that's what you mean.
Apple asks you every, single time you upgrade your iOS/OSX device to confirm your privacy and telemetry settings.
And all of the features they implement are private by design. They use features such as differential privacy to make sure they aren't leaking private data: https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Differential_Privacy_Over...
The AirTag was not moving, hence the lack of notifications. Otherwise you'd get a ton of notification practically anywhere you approach an AirTag. It is working as intended.
And it is opt-in... you need to enable Find My iPhone at setup time in order for that to be enabled.
There’s nothing on any of the apple pages I could find about opting out.
If it took me that long to disable it, it won’t be obvious for most people.
I found it through Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services -> Share my Location -> Find my iPhone -> Find my Network.
They could have put it 2 steps above or found a better way.
The only jump that is not immediately obvious is that the Find My settings are under your Apple ID settings. Everything else is blindingly obvious and is not confusing at all. You being confused does not mean the average person will also be confused. You could just be a confused person.
From there though, it is a root level option when setting up your phone and enabling "Find My iPhone".
I'm actually disappointed that the disabling of the network is even an option.
Bit of a tragedy of the commons situation if we have too many selfish people like you who want the benefits of being able to find their own phone when it's lost but not participate in helping find other people's.
> tragedy of the commons situation if we have too many selfish people
I can’t think of how helping the Find My network would compromise my privacy in any significant way. But I am still glad there’s an option to disable, there may be people for whom it is a concern.
Eh, I find it a stretch to consider things that need to be typed "discoverable" unless there's a user manual provided telling you everything that can be typed. This same reasoning is why many would consider GUIs (or text mode menu-driven interfaces) to be more user-friendly than CLIs.
Voice assistants have a very similar issue, but nobody likes IVR systems either, so who knows.
What if you only want to turn off airtags? This false choice is caused by apple.
Furthermore, when you disable the find my network it disables it for you as well. You can't just do it one way so it's not selfish.
They have a search bar at the top where you can type "Find my" and it jumps you straight to those sections.
"Find My Network: Participating in the Find My network lets you locate this iPhone even if its offline"
So in fact there is no option (there at least) to opt out of finding other people's AirTags unless you also want to opt out of finding your own iPhone, at least as stated.
Or is it the airtag functionality specifically that’s bothering you?
A phone is bigger, more visible, and expensive if someone would want to use it to track you. Not practical at all.
Maybe they should have 2 options: Phone and Tags (or All). Enabling find my phone would not necessarily allow tags.
Yes. What does find my phone have to do with airtags?
Either you use the roads and pay for all the roads or you don't.
Everyone interested in finding their lost or stolen iPhone already turned it on. AirTags will bring up another small percentage of people. The sum of everything available to you, means you have this small price to pay to be part of it: contributing to finding stuff for others.
The specs are here: https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1902/en_US/app...
Page 139 onwards.
If you can find a security/privacy hole in the spec, I think Apple will compensate you pretty well.
Not something a regular dude off the street will be doing any time soon. =)
Yes.
2) You can just disable this stuff when you first get your phone it walks you through these prompts there. If you don't enable it - it is not enabled.
3) Spam should be opt-in - most people don't want it. But a lot of Apple stuff should be opt-out, because people do want it. Ie, turn on GPS / location features - folks really want weather, maps with turn by turn etc. Apple already over prompts on setup for my tastes.
To be surprised that Apple uses "their" network of devices to provide services to their users shouldn't be surprising.
If you wanted control over your device you shouldn't buy Apple, their stance on user's ownership of devices is widely known.
My iPad has the "Find My network" setting (toggled on) but I was a bit surprised to see my iPhone has what seems to be the same setting (also toggled on) but it's called "Enable Offline Finding".
Find My Network is described as "Participating in the Find My Network lets you locate this iPad even if it's offline."
Enable Offline Finding is described as "Offline finding enables this device to be found when not connected to Wi-Fi or cellular."
Which makes me wonder if "Find My Network" is just a repacking and rebranding of something Apple has been doing for a long time. Regardless, I'd prefer to have opted-in. I suppose it's possible at some point I opted in while setting up a new device with "Find My" but I'm not sure. I certainly had no idea there was a way to find my iPhone even when it wasn't connected to wi-fi or cellular signal.
E- It seems this feature was added ~2 years ago and it did indeed use bluetooth and "crowdsourced" Apple devices[1]:
> Offline Finding uses a background process called "Search Party" to broadcast and receive Bluetooth beacon signals at regular intervals, and it can even do its work when the device is in a sleep state. And it does this with limited battery impact for all devices involved, so you should see little to no difference in power consumption.
And whether it was turned on by default seems to depend:
> By default, if you had Find My iPhone, iPad, or Mac turned on before updating to iOS 13, iPadOS 13, or macOS 10.15 Catalina, Offline Finding should already be on. However, if only one of the device's had the Find My service enabled but not another device, it may not have turned on automatically. To make sure it's on, check the following.
[1]https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/track-your-lost-iphone-ip...
I did get a little pissed that the Find My Network isn't opt-out, even though I would likely choose yes.
Informed consent is the gold standard, except when it's not.
You're thinking of medical research and experimentation.
In the practice of medicine the Hippocratic oath takes precedence over everything else so of course informed consent gets thrown out when there is concrete evidence that it interferes with medicine's purpose: healing people.
When's the last time someone gave informed consent while unconscious and bleeding out after a car crash or shooting? That's why we have DNRs.
How can it get any more opt-in?
For example, your device hardware serial is sent to Apple every time you open the App Store, like a permanent supercookie. Analytics are sent whenever you stream a video or make a FaceTime call, even with analytics off. Location Services sends your location 24/7 to Apple over the network, et c.
Apple's approach to co-opting the Apple-branded hardware that you own to benefit Apple is a poor one.
It turned out the USPS took a very dim view of this kind of thing.
I can't find any of this research now, of course, because all the search engines want to sell me tracking devices and package tracking services.
https://hackaday.com/2013/04/10/hacker-sends-this-through-th...
https://web.archive.org/web/20130411184048/http://www.rubenv...
> Is it legal to put a GPS tracker in a package and send it to a fan mail P.O. Box in hopes that you could see where the celebrity lives after it’s picked up from the post office?
which is another 'fun' use of AirTags I hadn't considered :/.
Suddenly these things become a Huge Problem when Apple does it :)
Plus, the FindMy network is much larger in certain parts of the world, and some people might not even know they're helping track AirTags that are being used for malicious purposes. There's so much more potential for abuse now than there was before.
If they really want to do it, there are a bunch of better ways to achieve the same goal.
Also, Apple can adjust the amount of time before a lost tag starts beeping remotely.
The reason this works so well is the massive amount of IOS devices participating.
I have some Tile-trackers (which I think used to be the biggest player in this space - until Apple came along), and while they are OK, the number of devices tracking them is abysmal compared to the Airtags.
Someone had their rental car broken into, and their stuff stolen. He had a Tile on his keys, and noticed that he got a ping outside of SLU in Seattle, so he posted in the /r/seattle subreddit.
I happened to be working there at the time, so I messaged him and went for a walk. It took me about 30 min to find his keys (his bag was gone, they must have dumped it elsewhere) in a bush, which I was able to mail back to him.
So, I bought a couple Tiles since that was proof to me that it worked.
But, looking back, over the day or so it was there, he only got two pings to my recollection: one person that walked by (and caused him to post to Reddit), and me once I found it. AirTag's network is just so much bigger. I'm pretty convinced you would get at most a single ping if you mailed a Tile somewhere.
I also use a Tile in my snowboard bag. I was always able to confirm the bag made it on the plane because my phone would connect through the floor of the plane into the cargo hold, but I'd be very lucky if I got a ping when the bag was in the baggage belt system underneath the airport.
Tile was a great idea and worked well if you had other Tile users nearby. It's not really their fault the network is so small, it's a hard problem to solve to seed that network unless you happen to own a billion devices...
https://macdailynews.com/2021/05/07/tile-teams-with-amazon-i...
As I understand this feature monitors the signal strength of nearby airtags to identify ones that are travelling with you. In this case, if the person left it on a table at their house, they would constantly be moving in and out of range, so it's not moving with them.
"It’s also not clear how often AirTag locations update. I gave my partner an AirTag last week for her to take when she went on an errand, driving about 20 miles from home. Since she has an iPhone, I expected to see frequent updates in the Find My app, but that wasn’t the case."
Again, this is probably by design. If it worked as the author expected and gave you frequent updates, it could easily be used to track an unsuspecting person's location. This design seems much better. It still will give you enough information to locate your lost item, but it is not enough to track down the location of a single iPhone user.
This is almost certainly a product of iOS battery management. Presumably there was only one iPhone in range during the drive (GF’s). If the iPhone isn’t plugged in, then it generally doesn’t update its precise location unless it detect “substantial movement”, which is normally triggered by thing like switching cell tower.
Net result is the AirTags location only get updated when the nearby iPhone thinks it’s power efficient to do so.
Airtags, just another piece of e-waste to poison the planet.
[1] https://twitter.com/PicklePunchD/status/1217991463503446016
How long until Apple decides to discontinue the tags on their current generation of devices forcing you to upgrade?
And now your tagging your items just for apple to see besides no one has answered how does that justify the e-waste these tags produces?
Seeing as I've been rated-limited.
> Not sure what you mean there, but Apple doesn't get to know where anything is.
To say Apple doesn't get to see any information, pfft. I trust them as much as any thief. Can you prove this?
> Something something covid vaccines and 5G base stations
Not at all. I'm hoping to get my covid vaccine, have you?
I presume you do. You are already being tracked.
Why you want to submit to a heat map of your objects, and what you do with them, I don't know. Call me cynical. I pity the people who feel its a fantastic toy when normally it's the same people criticizing about X FANG company thing. Yet they go and buy the recent crud they release. Talk about hypocritical.
But still, a gimmick which those with will get bored within the next six months and will be left with a thing that will constantly tag it's position.
Not sure what you mean there, but Apple doesn't get to know where anything is.
I wonder how many more of these have sold than is “necessary” just because they are cheap and nifty, only for the purchaser to get bored with it after a while and forget about it?
Example: iPhone 6. Released 2014, last sold 2016, lost new OS support in 2019. It's the newest iPhone that isn't compatible with AirTags. And with AirPod Pro and Pro Max you can only use it with regular Bluetooth, not the enhanced Apple proprietary version.
AFAICT the 6 to 6S upgrade involved doubling the RAM from 1 to 2GB, and the CPU improvement was almost doubled (+70%). The pace of raw improvement has slowed a great deal since then.
hopefully they would be recycled in some responsible way but thats wishful thinking. future archeologists will have a interesting time figuring out why there is such a dense layer of coin cell batteries on top of a layer of fidget spinners
I’m confused: what would require an upgrade?
Unless iPhones stop supporting Bluetooth, which obviously won’t happen, or ultra wideband, which is not impossible but very unlikely, these devices will work with iPhones effectively forever.
Scenario: sinister stalker (government agent, for example) attaches an airtag to my car. All iPhone users in the area will be happily reporting tag location and helping stalker in his malicious designs.
How do I protect myself against this, if I am an Android user?
The problem is that this new service makes such snooping very casual.
I wouldn't be surprised if within a year we start seeing devices that can scan for nearby Airtags/Tiles/etc. so you can see if there's anything in your car before you head home.
Damn, that is a good point. It'll be very difficult to prove that anyone stalking using AirTags had malicious/illegal intent. Far harder than, say, a purpose-built GPS tracker.
So they are making the problem much worse? That's not really a defense.
Obviously, without GPS and without cellular they rely on being near someone with a smartphone in the crowdshared location system. I think Tile (prior to AirTag) was the biggest, they've got around 10 million sold, probably on the order of 1 million active users once you discount people who own multiple units, or replacements of previously sold Tiles, etc.
As a Tile user, this was sufficient for my needs. If I lost my Tile in a public place, something like 1 in 300 people had the app and I'd have decent odds of getting an update in a couple days. I inadvertently left my bag in a coworker's car once, they don't have a Tile but it pinged a couple times during their commute as they passed other cars with Tile owners. But neither they nor their neighbors had Tiles, so it didn't give their home address. Tile doesn't make a big deal out of mitigating car-tracking or stalking abuses of its products, because it's not really big enough to be a problem. Now, though, there are something like 120 million iPhone users. I don't know how many choose to opt out of the default "Find My" setting, I'd guess that both that population and the population of people who even know it exists are both negligible, so I assume something like 150 in every 300 people are in Apple's crowdsourced location service.
Speaking of populations that may or may not know something exists: lots of people who don't know about and wouldn't buy a GPS car tracker are likely to end up with an Airtag on their keychain. By introducing the product, Apple is inviting the idea "what if I dropped that in someone's bag" to come across a hundred million minds.
Scale matters. At Apple volumes, mitigations like this are smart and will likely prevent crimes from occurring. At Tile's volume, it doesn't matter that much. I'm sure Tile (or a niche manufacturer of GPS fleet trackers) would love to have that problem, but they simply don't.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/GPS-Trackers/b?node=617650011
Took all of 3 minutes. Super convenient.
But for a casual malicious user, airtags open up whole new worlds of abuse.
I think it's also important to consider that Apple getting into this market does a lot to normalize use of trackers and also make them commercially ubiquitous.
Any cellular device will report its location to the nearest cell tower. This data is sold to private parties and available to query nominally by law enforcement only but really to any bidder willing to pay Zumigo or Microbilt a fairly reasonable fee.
Further that location is in realtime and contains historical breadcrumbs.
The periodic pings from your device not masking it's MAC address by attempting to query nearby wifi points, your bluetooth sending out rotating EID's are useful for in store tracking of customers but worse than running footage through collected CCTV footage. Likewise the wifi/bluetooth breadcrumbs are worse data than the LTE pings we're already getting.
Ok. Another scenario. A serial rapist sees a girl he likes at the shopping mall, exiting her car. He attaches an AirTag to the car, and in a few short hours he knows where she lives.
Of course, he could do it with GPS tracker, but such tracker needs to transmit data, and cellular connection is rarely anonymous, creating risks for the perpetrator. So this wonderful technology makes all sorts of stalking much more accessible.
Or just tape a burner android phone to the car.
Or tape a GPS with cellular tracker using a burner SIM to the car.
Cellular connections are more than anonymous enough in most countries, and its not like a perpetrator in you scenario is gonna be leaving the device on the car for an extend period of time.
At the end of the day stalking someone who isn’t actively defending again being stalked is pretty trivial. AirTags don’t really change the status-quo that much. They’ve just shone a light on an existing issue.
He won't be participating in the network, but he's also unable to be warned of being tracked which does seem unfortunate.
(We have only so many iPhone users in Poland, and I currently live in a small town, so I can't just experimentally check it right now.)
If that's true, then one should be able to write an app that scans for AirTags in the background and warns you about their presence. I'd hope someone will do this. I'd also hope this would eventually be included in the Android OS itself, perhaps as a generalized facility to detect Tile/AirTag-like devices around you.
Long time ago, there were these things called "beacons", that IIRC started with Apple introducing iBeacon spec/protocol. They used BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) to announce themselves. Some of those were used for the purpose of tracking your belongings[0]. I assume AirTags must be substantially different from that, because saw zero mentions of the Beacons in articles and discussions about AirTags so far.
--
[0] - I even bought a bunch of these on Aliexpress to play with, but didn't want to install the vendor's sketchy app, so I ended up not using them (but I could make them beep and give me some telemetry by poking them over BLE directly). They worked off a CR2032, but there was no "tracking network" back then - you'd connect these tags to your phone, and they'd just start beeping when they disconnected from your phone. A pretty unreliable design, given BLE can be flaky when mixed with apps, battery saving modes, and thick walls in an apartment. Unfortunately, all the non-sketchy makers of BLE beacons seem to have focused entirely on the retailer market - i.e. using them to push spam to your phone as you walk through a mall. I lost all my interest in that technology then.
Airtags aren't some new possibility.
Stalking via GPS tracker is not new. What is new is going to be the “crime of opportunity:” Somebody who doesn’t plan and think through how to stalk somebody else, but in the heat of the moment they decide to try it, and the AirTags or Tiles or whatever they already own is close at hand.
I suspect that’s the factor of concern with AirTags being likely to become ubiquitous.
I can’t really think of a solution to this beyond Apple and Google working together.
Anyone that cares can already easily track/stalk you.
The AirTag is revolutionary: - Mesh network (no cellular reqd) - Very long battery life - Small - Deniable, unsuspicious - Great user interface
Hundreds of thousands of wives/girlfriends/etc will be tracked by these things within months.
This is not unreasonable to expect. They did it to build the contact tracing service.
When it comes to safety, profits and walled gardens need to come second.
these have existed for a long time at reasonable prices and none of the have the anti stalking measures airtags do.
Also, given how openly criminal russian government is these days, airtags can give them plausible deniability. Like, anyone could have forgotten an airtag in your back seat. With great battery life and virtial anonymity, it is a godsend for covert and unsuspicious surveillance and all kinds of crime.
Met some rich guy? Easily find out where he lives and kidnap his kids for ransom. I can't stress enough how casual this will get.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dylan.airt...
You won't be owning the device at any point.
We largely go the same places every day, and apple could figure out how to send a message or request for a song/movie/file/update and it just appears a few hours or couple days later.
Like a transparent sneakernet that uses onion routing.
We have some satellite-internet fed remote areas in Canada, and how to get your phone updated without a local IX means everyone chews through data just for system updates. They do have daily or weekly flights however. Loading up an SD card for the trips back and forth could work, but complicated.
When MS released the Zune with wifi, I hoped I could sit in an airport and “borrow” songs from other users/hosters, but I don’t think it worked that way.
Worldwide, high-latency LAN. For basically free by doing what we already do.
I can’t imagine many of the staff there have iPhones nor would iPhone owners be super close to the building.
If you have an iOS device, you're tracking all these airtags around you physically for Apple. Apple's not paying you for that service. It probably uses a little battery life, but all these individual device make the network great. But if you bought an airtag that's a great thing.
https://macdailynews.com/2021/05/07/tile-teams-with-amazon-i...
Now there's hope that with a little hacking the iBeacon emulator I coded up to run on my laptop can participate on the Find My network, sweet.
[0] https://youtu.be/xoxhDk-hwuo
> To compensate [people whose houses I left the package at] for their time and willingness to risk putting a package on their porch I offered financial compensation for any successful recoveries of the package. [...] I've since confirmed in these two cases, the “thieves" were actually acquaintances of the person helping me. I have since removed those reactions from the original video.
All of the content in the video right now is legitimate and the video's author was not aware some of the original recordings were fake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4T_LlK1VE4
They aren't even legally obligated to protect people or enforce laws.
I called the Sheriff's Department and they sent a deputy to the address reported by the device. My understanding was they actually went so far as to say something along the lines of "hand over the phone right now or we'll call for a warrant, search the house, and arrest you for grand theft".
About two hours after calling I drove down to the Sheriff's office and they gave me the phone.
I couldn't believe it.
Oh, unless the people they want to track also have an iPhone, because then they'll get alerted to the tracking. Damn!
Are you worried about someone putting a GPS device in your bag?
If you live in a world where it's "easy to jam GPS", you shouldn't be worrying about BTLE trackers or cellphones either. You do know that GPS jamming is highly illegal pretty much everywhere?
If your threat model includes enabling a GPS jammer, I think it also includes other methods to prevent tracking too.
Jammers are illegal but widely available, and used frequently by people who don't want to be tracked. $50 for a good one. A low power jammer isn't going to get picked up very easily if it's moving. Jamming BTLE is also possible, and likely to be more common in the future.
The coming ubiquity of these trackers is the problem, they are going to be everywhere. Makes it hard to filter which ones are valid. Not just Apple, but their network is the most pervasive.
If you're operating on a level where committing federal-level crimes is an every day occurrence, your threat model is not in the public median :)
It's not even hard to get days or months of use from simple GSM-GPS loggers. It's quite trivial to put them in deep sleep modes with different wake up triggers (external motion detector, clock, etc) to update their state. They can even operate over SMS so the amount of data transferred is minimal.
If you want to be extra paranoid, there are devices that only respond to "where are you/where have you been" SMS messages and stay offline most of the time (SMS messages are cached on the network side for a few days). Stuff like this won't be detected by equipment looking for active RF transmissions.
I really don't see how AirTags are supposed to be this super ubiquitous nefarious tracking device used by everyone from foreign governments to disgruntled exes.
People facing serious surveillance threats (like law enforcement or OCGs) will have to start scanning and mapping BTLE now, which is a serious pain.
The real advantage is ubiquity and deniability. I'd like to see Apple provide a way for police to identify the iCloud account owner, and other iCloud devices, for a suspect AirTag. This would significantly raise the bar for effort required for covert use. Still allows controlling boyfriends a great tracking technique though.
i know that AirTags are way more accessible, but i just mean these kinds of tools have been available to adversaries for a while.
(i also don't really know how well these trackers really work.)
The GSM networks location surveillance is both larger and more effective than this technology. Your first claim is false.
Sources:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/sprint_provid...
https://www.businessinsider.com/att-project-hemisphere-016-1...
Batman showed us the future and Apple delivered.[0] [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr7AONv3FSg
Ya'll honestly think an AirTag is the best way for a stalker to track you?
very easy and cheap; yes
https://www.amazon.ca/Real-time-Worldwide-Coverage-Portable-...
But the ease of use of AirTags is undeniable.
This seems like one of those 'features' where 20% of the benefit is for the end-user, but the gold mine 80% is in the long-tail that goes to the company.
The worrying part is this could be combined with countermeasures to prevent the anti stalking measure from working and even prevent it being discovered by a bug detector. Thankfully Apple has a lot of visibility of the system so presumably would be able to track down bad actors and aid law enforcement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...
That sounds exactly like extortion.
"Buy an iPhone, or we won't tell you whether people are tracking your every movement."
This is screaming for real regulation.
Yikes.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212227
This AirTag does seem very nice in that respect. But then I realize what a gigantic privacy nightmare this can be for a large portion of our population.
Stalkers can put a tracker on you, and you'll never get notified if you don't have an iPhone? What if the user doesn't even have a smartphone?
How does Apple think they'll handle this scenario? Can it even be handled?
How real is this concern anymore?
I don't get the "not advised" part from that page. It just sounds like they're just not advertising this articular use case.
So for example, if a husband/wife share car keys, and the car keys have the wife’s AirTag, but then she misplaces her purse with both her phone and keys, the husband won’t be able to locate them.
Another scenario is if one of them wants to put an AirTag on their phone, so that when they can’t find it, the other person can help them locate it.
Anyway, I’m sure there are lots of situations in which it would be helpful for multiple people to be able to locate the same AirTag, yet this is not currently possible.
Put it all on one map. Come on.