A whole lot of people are going to be doing experiments like this and all of them are going to find out just how little the police care about their stolen property.
iPhone users automatically receive a push notification if an unknown Airtag has been “following” them, without its owner, for a random time between 8 and 24 hours.
Wouldn't this be a pain in the ass if you took a long flight and happened to sit near an air tag in cargo while its owner was on the other end of the plane?
You can basically just wrap the tag in tape and the beep becomes almost silent. Any pressure stops it sounding. But its at least some effort which is more than tile and other competitors did. Ideally Google and Apple could work together to make safety alerts work for everyone.
Without the apple network, you need some way to geolocate and connect to a cellular network. This immediately makes your product bulky, expensive and and with a short battery life.
The airtags are by far the best tracking devices ever created and can let you locate your tag with tenth of a metre accuracy on a coin cell battery that lasts 1 year.
Seems to require the extended battery if you want 6 months life and that, as best I can tell, is another $60 and HUGE because it's also a waterproof box with magnet. Plus there's $20 a month cellular fees on top.
Yep. E.g. many celebrities have had to stop accepting fan gifts - a talent agency did an experiment with their own staff, most Apple users weren't alerted until they got home and the Android user never even noticed anything.
So the easiest and most robust way to protect yourself from somebody using the relatively cheap tracker Apple created is to buy a comparatively expensive Apple product? That really feels like a shakedown.
Nah, Cops are useless even for things that are a decade old like Find My iPhone, they simply won't help even if you can give them the exact lat/long or address.
I've dealt with cops when helping a friend who was being harassed (literal 100s of calls/texts a day from known burner apps) as well as physical damage to his car. The police did nothing at all, even with a step-by-step guide provided by said burner number apps for law enforcement (abuse@$burnerAppCompany.com). In the end we had to keep pressing the various app's support until they would blacklist my friends number completely from their app network. It was a huge PITA and made my friend's phone almost unusable (they would rotate numbers if he blocked them). Oh, and we knew exactly who was responsible, this wasn't even a "here is a lat/long" situation. The police are fucking worthless for things like this and from what I've heard from friends about their experience with stolen property they are useless on that front as well.
On the other end I have seen stories of cops showing up at someones house insisting they have someones macbook because find my said so when in reality it was the house next door.
I can understand why they would be hesitant when the find my data is not pin point accurate.
My dad has many high end game/trail cameras. One of his went missing, so he checked the others and found clear as day video of the neighbor trespassing and stealing it.
Took it to the cops, and they acted annoyed and told him to just sue. I was in disbelief.
Granted cops shouid be doing more than Revenue Collection. (In Marin County, we have zero crime in most twowns, but they are ticket happy, and it's irritating.)
That said, I'm glad the cop didn't arrest the neighbor. Unless you have footage of the heighbor removing the camera, it's not cut and dry.
I would take the neighbor to small chains court, but then you have to live next to guy with a grudge? A guy with a grudge can make your life miserable.
The "grudge with the neighbor" ship sailed the moment his neighbor stole his stuff. Enabling petty theft encourages it. If your neighbor stole one thing this time and got away with it, who knows what he'll be stealing next time.
Forget that, it’s a huge pain on a weekly basis when I go on a walk with my significant other and my iPhone reports that the one in her wallet is following me. It’s a horrible UX that in classic Apple fashion has no concept of family and also breaks one of the AirTag’s key features. You should basically only rely on AirTags to find your keys at home.
There is a button on that screen to ignore the airtag and it will never alert you again for that particular tag. Apple cant solve the fact you didn't read the small amount of text on the page.
It's been reported that this option is not presented to everyone. (I do however get the option to disable Safety Alerts for all AirTags though, which isn't really what I want). Next time I get it I'll try tapping again to see if anything got kicked into place with 14.7.1.
That's interesting. You shouldn't be getting those alerts, assuming she has an iPhone, Apple Watch or any other Apple device with her at the time. AirTags will not send that "following" notification if any of the owner's devices are nearby.
In any case there is an option to disable the alerts for that AirTag when you receive the notification.
I believe the reason this happens at the end of a walk is because it specifically fires off when you enter your own home (either geofence of detection of your home WiFi or something). So it's probably accumulating throughout the day, then we go out, come back, and it shows it.
Indeed, my girlfriend's motorbike was stolen, parked nearby to a police station, and the police station surveillance cameras even had the whole scene in their footage.
To this day she is waiting to get any news from it, case closed and archived.
You can also just sandwich it in anything and the sound is muffled 99%. The outer case is the speaker diaphragm and it becomes almost silent under the slightest pressure.
If the guys that are knowingly part of the scooter/ebike theft game threatened to kill this guy, you probably don't want to meet the automobile equivalent.
If you are insured enough, you probably also don’t want to find your car again. Better be reimbursed by your insurer than getting your car back in chunks.
I mean you can get insurance and take at least tires and other parts of your stolen former car :-) what are the thieves going to do, call police on you stealing from stolen car?
I have an AirTag hidden in my car, and it makes me feel a bit better — but it's mostly just to help me remember where I've parked.
My partner's car was stolen out of the parking garage on Grove St. in Hayes Valley (San Francisco). It was recovered three days later in the garage on 5th and Mission. Probably not the same person who had stolen it, but someone had essentially moved in. When we picked up the car at the impound lot, it was full of stuff — dozens of documents that personally identified who was living in the car. There was even a journal with lists of cars and locations for future theft! The garage also had security camera footage of the theft, and the 5th/Mission garage of the person who dropped it off.
SFPD was uninterested. I hung on to photos of everything though. It was just kind of mind-blowing to me at the time that despite very clear evidence that could likely lead to arrests, there was a lack of willingness to do anything about it.
Maybe it would be different in another city, but I'm not so sure. As much as I'd like to think that some folks on the police force are there to build cases and actively catch criminals, I don't think that happens too often outside of TV shows. Of course, it’s also likely a single car theft is too small potatoes for that kind of effort.
The SFPD could not possibly care less about thefts. When the central freeway still crossed market at octavia there was a big open-air chop shop where guys dismantled stolen bikes. Every hour all day long a guy in a white van would come and exchange whole bikes for stripped parts and cash. The cops used to sit right there in the It's Tops coffee shop, whiling away their shift and just watching it all go down.
People blame this stuff on the new district attorney but I've never seen SFPD lift a finger against crime, in 25 years of living here.
The problem is AirTag is only really viable because of the huge number of iPhone users. Anyone with a recent iPhone will pickup the AirTag signal and report the location to the owner.
Tile has somewhat similar functionality, but it doesn't really have the same ability to track the tile's location. And there are a comparatively tiny number of tile users.
Which is almost everywhere on the planet outside of north korea and the middle of a desert. I have tested the things and they get picked up constantly even in low density areas. If you had one in a house they would be getting picked up every 2 minutes from passing cars.
Apple products aren't that popular outside of Western countries ( and the US in particular).
Take India for an example - the iOS market share is a paltry 3.2% for 2019. Ukraine, 13%. Nigeria, 6%. I highly doubt those users are nicely spread to give you full coverage everywhere and not cluttered in the bigger cities and their more affluent parts.
Heck, even France is with 23%, that could easily leave significant gaps in coverage.
If you mean that uses the AirTag network, there's also the Chipolo which has the advantage that it has a hole for a key ring (although the silicone ring thing my wife bought me for the one she gave me isn't too bulky. I had zero interest in the gigantic leather things). It has the disadvantage that it can't do the AR thing that AirTags can for finding your lost item when it's fallen between the sofa cushions, although it's apparently plenty loud.
I'm not sure how technologically similar it is, but this product works well. It can notify you when, e.g., a motorcycle is moved.
https://findmyscout.com/
> I move outside while one cop retrieves the evidence, but the most aggressive employee followed me. He says, “All you’re doing is making enemies.” Gets closer to me, and pantomimes shooting me. He implies I’d get murdered if he sees me again.
Seriously. Anyone that worked up about the events is obviously running a fence operation out of the shop.
As I commented on the Twitter thread, we used to have tons of break-ins in our area. Miraculously, when they closed down all the pawn shops in the area with a "relaxed" attitude to the provenance of where stuff came from, we saw almost an order of magnitude reduction in b-and-e and theft from vehicle type events.
For this type of crime, you can have about as much of it as you're willing to tolerate. And closing down the operations that make it profitable to steal stuff is way simpler than chasing around perps as it's much more centralized.
You're assuming that the cops actually care about solving or preventing crimes. Look how much effort it took to get them to manage what should have been an open and shut case. There have been plenty of similar cases.
I have little doubt that one or more police officers are well aware of the nature of the shop and get their own cut of the profits.
> I have little doubt that one or more police officers are well aware of the nature of the shop and get their own cut of the profits.
I'd agree they're aware (and don't do anything for whatever reason) but I disagree your run of mill LEO is getting a cut of profits. If anyone is getting a cut, it's not your regular officers. It's whatever title you want to appoint to the person running the police force.
Off course they know, they work (and perhaps live) in the neighborhood. They know people that have had stuff stolen from them, they might have had stuff stolen from them them selfs. Now caring, that is another issue.
I've been shaken down by a cop for a bribe. I've had cops threaten me with arrest for photographing them in a 7-Eleven maskless in the middle of the pandemic. I have no trouble believing that there are plenty of cops directly involved in criminal operations. Real life cops aren't like the ones on TV.
I would imagine 'line' police officers are unused to the technological aspects of what's going on and are rewarded/punished for shallow productivity numbers ("arrests per day").
I don't think it's necessary to posit a 'dark movie thriller' thing where cops are on the take - from a freakin' e-bike chop shop ffs. Both Occam's Razor and Hanlon's Razor suggest that the effort involved here is a combination of laziness, unfamiliarity and institutional disincentives.
That said, a higher level commander may be judged by area crime stats and frankly those guys have rocks in their heads if they aren't cleaning up the fences. A lot of jurisdictions have pretty strict laws about this sort of place being meant to know where their stock is from. If you've got the will to deal with this stuff, you roll in every few days, ask the same questions and shut the doors when the staff don't have good answers.
So, not so long back in the US, there was a car bombing (RV trailer I believe) in... Nashville I think?
Was a pretty big explosion.
Partner of the person who made and detonated said bomb went to the police some days (weeks?) back and literally tried to tell them "my partner made a bomb and is about to go detonate it at this place"
The police, IIRC, brushed it off as a woman being crazy.
The police have a history of not arresting or investigating people/things they should be.
But they don't, haven't, and won't. At this point, you just have to sit back and laugh at how horribly they botch shit on a regular basis, otherwise you'll probably get quite depressed at the reality.
I would be fascinated to see the relative amount of crime that would be solved if police 1. didn't bother to start any independent investigations based on their own suspicions, but instead 2. dedicated 100% of their resources to investigating inbound leads like these.
If this comment bothers you then I would suggest not googling "cops ignoring serial killers" or similar. There are instances of them handing over victims of serial killers back to the killers themselves. Incompetence doesn't even begin to describe it.
It's wild that someone has the gall to threaten the poster infront of the police and show him signs that he'll get shot. That would've seriously messed him up. So glad this guy recovered his bike and hope they identify the thief and crack down on these stores.
yes, it shows the degree to which criminals are allowed to run free while the government focuses increasing resources on telling the non-criminals what to do
hmmm...the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Some of it for drugs (only 15% of state and 40% federal) but you have to compare to the rest of the world. I doubt the German or UK police would be bothered to care much either. At least in the US criminals eventually get caught and arrested if they persist. the system works, but it sometimes takes longer than it should. In this case ,it's hard to make an arrest when there is no evidence but some video footage which may or may not exist or even identity the thief.
I'm convinced that the solution to crime is not to increase punishments, but to make the speed and likelihood of being punished fast and almost certain.
If theft had a 100% detection rate and a punishment greater than the value of the item, you would never steal anything because it would be pointless. The problem is we let people get away with it multiple times and then eventually destroy their lives over it.
Airtags and other anti theft tech can help here. Make theft extremely difficult to get away with and people will not bother.
What you just described is far costlier on society (assuming these efforts would be covered with taxes) and likely requires severe invasions of privacy, especially considering theft can be both physical and digital/virtual.
All in all, I’d rather not aim for 100% detection + swift punishment as the improvement metrics for deterring theft.
Several technologies like the airtags and account locks on electronics have done much for stopping theft. The iphone can now act as an airtag while turned off.
The thing is, even if you spend more initially on stopping crime, it will eventually drop off as people work out you can no longer get away with it. Spend the extra cash collecting all the security video and know it will teach one person that they can not get away with theft and that person will likely communicate it with their peers.
I would personally rather spend $600 extra in tax for police over having the negative feelings of a $500 item being stolen.
I don't believe much in terms of privacy has to be lost as most of the time we already have the data, we just don't have the human resources to do anything with it.
I'm amazed that whenever there's mention of using data to solve crimes HN thinks it's invasion of privacy, yet majority work in tech companies that collect and sell massive amounts of personal data to sell ads.
> I'm convinced that the solution to crime is not to increase punishments, but to make the speed and likelihood of being punished fast and almost certain.
This is the orthodox view among experts in the subject, so yes
>I'm convinced that the solution to crime is not to increase punishments, but to make the speed and likelihood of being punished fast and almost certain.
You apply that to every Karen's favorite pet laws and suddenly we're all living in 1984.
Look at the opinions of HN for example. You've got a subset of people who think speeding should be a shoot on sight offense. And you've got a subset of people who think littering should be a shoot on sight offense. You've got a subset of people who think that anyone who uses power equipment before 10AM is Literally Hitler(TM). I'm being only slightly hyperbolic here. It all adds up. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Which is why a huge swath of laws need to be thrown out. The majority of our governments are tyrannically inhumane. If a law is not going to be enforced, remove it from the books.
People advocate for these "shoot on sight" punishments because they are sick of offenders getting away with things. Light but certain punishments would fix this. If there was a $50 fine for speeding but you have an almost 100% chance of getting caught, this would be more effective (I think) than a $400 fine which takes months of offending to be caught.
> I doubt the German or UK police would be bothered to care much either. At least in the US criminals eventually get caught and arrested if they persist.
Do US really has higher clearance rates and lower criminality as your comment implies or is that just a guess?
The US does not have a special high clearance rate. It's not better than typical for the OECD.
Its general crime rates are also roughly typical - median - for the OECD (including for most types of violent crime), except for murder of course as everyone knows.
> I doubt the German or UK police would be bothered to care much either.
I have as close as it gets to a perfect comparison. My now-wife was working on a summer school in the UK, shepherding American teenagers around. A few had their iPhones stolen, but with exact location information via “find my phone”. Police did nothing.
It’s a bit sad when mostly they just had to turn up.
Sure, but first you have to "sell" the person on the idea, otherwise it's just more "we enhanced the killer's IP address and downloaded their RAM using coding and algorithms"
That's a non-excuse when training the police on the existence of a location tracking feature for loss/theft prevention takes so little time.
Since Android and iPhone make up the vast majority of the smartphone market, and modern devices on both sides have "Find My" style features, it feels like something they aught to know about.
The police know to look for a serial number on a drone/bicycle/vehicle so why not the equivalent for phones?
Quite the contrary, at least with austrian police. My pedelec (e-bike, worth around 4.000 €) got stolen at 3am a while ago and it had a GPS tracker.
I called the equivalent of 911 and briefly explained. The said: "wait, we pick you up", and in the same moment I hear sirens a few streets later heading in my direction. What followed was out of a movie. We raced with emergency lights to the current location, constantly updading other units on the current position. We must have missed the thief only by seconds and found construction containers where the signal was coming from. The police said they would call the construction companys 24h contact and open the containers with them, but I could go home for now.
One hour later the GPS tracker said the bike was moving again. I called again and the operator of emergency services said "didn't you call before?" and they picked me up again. When we arrived at the - now outdoor - location of the bike, there were 5 police cars and 15 police around it, but no thief, it was locked to a regular bike stand. They called in the equivalent of SWAT to open the lock and I got my bike back. They took fingerprints of the lock and luckily the thief stopped at an residential address for a minute or two, so we figured that might be the home address. Investigation is ongoing.
I could more or less prove that I was the owner by having the dealers invoice, serial number and pictures on my phone btw.
I was really shocked by a friend in Los Angeles that was mugged at gun point from their car and the police did essentially nothing.
The audience here on Hacker News has a pretty realistic idea of how quickly you can track down the location of people using a set of credit cards that are known-- not to mention two phones which were also stolen and shockingly not powered down. I am not saying that the process is infallible, but there are companies I have worked for where you could have given the known information (phones, credit cards) and they could have tracked down the location in real time with a 70-80% certainty.
Catching car jackers with a 70% certainty (or 33% even) will shut down a car jacking ring pretty quick. This sort of crime is exploding in Los Angeles this year.
That the police don't try as hard to track a person down as a mobile ad server would, makes me wonder about the incentives to curb crime.
The only solution I have found for preventing thefts from my construction sites in St. Louis is to pay a stipend to local economically disadvantaged people to live at the site, and provide firearms for the purpose of discouraging thieves. At the request of the St. Louis city police, we stopped reporting incidents of attempted theft.
The DA in my area recently stopped attending murder trials. This is what the powers that be want. When the prosecutor does not show up in court, the case cannot proceed.
Yes, there is a substantial portion of the population that believes it is inhumane for the police to arrest a black man if he does not really feel like being arrested.
If "high incarceration rate in large part due to micromanagement of what people do to their bodies" doesn't support the point of the person you're replying to I don't know what does.
It is my understanding that the aggressive guy did not threaten him directly in front of the officers, but when they were both outside (and the cops still inside).
That is something I would definitely expect from brazen fencers, yes.
Be careful with this. Laws about recording people can be strict. And you can expect to be stopped and questioned by the police when they notice your rig. At least, that’s what happened to me.
Predators easily sense weakness. Why wouldnt he? There were no repercussions. Assertive person would walk back in and report to Police receiving a death threat - this immediately elevates potential theft misdemeanor to a straight up felony charges.
That ‘anti-stalker’ feature sounds like it’s a burden to recovering items that are stolen . …what’s a bigger issue theft or stalking ? Aren’t sure tags more about theft prevention than stalking prevention?
Maybe, but I'm not convinced that it's a poor decision in this case. AirTags were billed, from the start, as a "find your stuff" device, not an anti-theft device. In that vein, the potential for abuse as a stalking device was more important to resolve than the potential diminished utility as an anti-theft device (when it's not an explicit objective for them).
Think about it this way, before and after the airtag, theft was just as much of a problem. So no harm done. Without the anti stalking features, this would have become a problem which did not exist nearly to the same scale and ease.
The airtags would have been extremely good stalking tools without these safeties and even with them you can still get some anti theft protection as the airtags do not notify until the holder gets home and your app will hold the last known location (their house)
Apple have stated that air tags are for locating lost items only, not for stolen items. If the beeping makes it difficult to recover your stolen items, you’re holding it wrong.
Agreed. Besides I don’t think that any serious stalker would actually resort to something so standard as AirTag to stalk their victims. Sure it might deter some random would-be stalkers from having this idea, but feels more like a move for PR’s sake than for the stated reason.
Do e-scooters not have security features built-in? If you really want to steal it you can, but if you need to replace the main board to actually use it then it's going to put off a whole lot of people.
So long as the one chip locking you out of the main board + some labor to reflow the solder is much cheaper than an e-scooter, it's worth it to the criminal.
You could trivially make that chip the main controller. The device is then worthless without the same chip with firmware on it. With the read protection on modern chips it is feasible that you could make it close to impossible to find a replacement chip with firmware on it. Especially if its a no name brand and every brand has its own custom protection.
Did the cops give the scooter shop a citation for failing to record the source of the stolen article on https://www.leadsonline.com/? (This post from last month recounted how a laptop repair man in New York City got in trouble for this law https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27810019 specifically Administrative Code §20-273 https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYC... (electronics record required for each purchase AND sale of second-hand articles) and Rules Title 28 §21-07 https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYC... (electronics record must be at a designated website leadsonline.com)). The previous post was about the unintended consequence of the law on law-abiding shops, but here we should see the intended consequence that it should shut down shops that fence stolen goods.
It’s probably unlikely given that the cops pressed them at all, but it is a valid concern. It is quite clear that the e-bike shop owners know very very well that they’re trading in hot merchandise, and they’re probably facilitating it.
I would love to make “enemies” of these guys and see how far the dominos fall.
Unless as a society we push these criminals, we’ll end up back in the heyday of organized crime and mafia run cities. Corruption is a constant battle.
I live in LA and had a similar experience to the original poster. I had an employee who stole $19,000 for me and I called in and made a police report and got no help. Then I went to the precinct and asked for help and got nothing. Finally, I called the mayor and their office put pressure on the police to actually help. Absolutely ridiculous. I am convinced that anyone who puts in a minimum effort to get away with almost any crime in America at this point.
There is no sound hole. It uses the outer case as the speaker. You can either do anything that applies pressure to the case or crack it open and remove the magnet and the speaker is disabled.
> Are the AirTags tied to the owner's phone, or does everyone see the tags?
The first one, but as the thread notes there is an anti-stalking feature: after some time of being in near proximity with a lone airtag not paired to your phone you get warned about the tag… if you have an iphone i assume.
> I reiterated I didn’t want them to do anything illegal to help me, made a joke about it only costing $800 so it’s no felony, and insisted it would get solved within an hour. It worked!
You can see this is written by a white man, the middle-class status probably also helps. Not sure a non-middle-class person of color or a Latin American would have dared entering said precinct and using that tone ("made a joke") with the police officers.
Yes, exactly. It’s something you’re asked whether you want to enable when setting up a new iphone. The location is encryped with a key that only the host iphone can decrypt, so supposedly apple doesn’t see your location every time you walk by an airtag
> The location is encryped with a key that only the host iphone can decrypt, so supposedly apple doesn’t see your location every time you walk by an airtag
Does that matter re: Apple considering that the location originated on your phone to begin with...? If they wanted to, there isn't really a reason to wait until you walk by an airtag to grab your location.
> a. The owner wants to find stolen or lost things
If the item is simply lost, removal of the speaker is not desired, so that should go in (b).
If the item is stolen, how long do you need to track it before you report it to the police? For me it would be less than 3 days, when the alarm starts beeping. So removal isn't helpful there either.
> Additionally, what about Deaf people being stalked? They can't hear the Airtags.
I'm curious do you think strangers would notify you if an AirTag was beeping in your bag and you didn't notice, or would you have to rely on trusted people?
If I had to use Airtags I would ask my eight-year old son.
Random people usually hesitate to notify because first they think this is not my problem and second if they decide to do something but I don't understand immediately they give up communicating the situation to me.
Imagine you hearing an Airtag beeping and I ignoring it, and you don't know I am deaf. Even if you muster up the courage to broach the subject to me I might react not the way you expect and you think to yourself it's not worth it.
What's more, the person with the AirTag beeping may well know it's beeping an just be ignoring it. That's what I would assume is the case if I saw this. I see people with Bird scooters beeping at them for being moved without being unlocked (on the train for example).
However the thiefs still can identify airtags with an iPhone.
From the article mentioned in parent: «At the worst, if they have iPhone 11, 12, or newer iPhones, it will be easier for them to easily locate the AirTag using precision finding even if you did mute Apple AirTag.»
I like how if you look on google street view, the e-bike shop wasn't there last time the google street view car drove through. Pop up, sell some stolen bikes, and then drift to a new location when too many people complain?
Non-Apple solution: An ESP8266 which opens Wifi-station "STOLEN_BICYCLE_owner@hotmail". But only for few minutes everyday at 9:11 . Should last for years with small battery.
You can go hunting yourself or hope somebody else sees it. If you manage to connect to this network, you can connect to 192.168.1.11 and turn it permanently on/off and also turn audible beep on, for final pinpointin.
And now that the ESP wakes up everyday, it could also look for public Wifis and send and receive emails. From the Wifi-providers name you can get a rough idea of the location.
Takes about 10 minutes to design the program. Thereafter you can copy it to new devices in few seconds. Only difference between customers would be the time of day when it turns on. Time is short so that crook has no change to spot it herself. In most neighborhoods you already know where to look for stolen bikes.
I got my first ESP this year. Just getting the IDE set up, testing the first demo project and overally getting accustomed to it took me half a day, if not more.
Saying the design takes 10 min is only true if you already sunk tens of hours into the ecosystem. Sure, if you got the tools and spent time learning it (and dont count it towards the final cost) you can do it cheaply with ESP. For many people going with $50 board thats gonna trully 5 min setup out of the box can actually be cheaper
There is a button. The button turns it always on, so that you may contact the default server NOT_STOLEN and adjust the stealing parameters to your taste.
> And now that the ESP wakes up everyday, it could also look for public Wifis and send and receive emails. From the Wifi-providers name you can get a rough idea of the location.
Even better, use the Google Maps GeoLocaion API. You can send a list of nearby WiFi APs, with MAC addresses, signal strengths, and channels, and the API will return lat/long.
This idea could scale if you also had a network of people on the lookout for stolen stuff. E g an app on their phone that constantly scans for wifi networks matching your STOLEN pattern (not sure if actually possible on Android/apple).
The searchers could get a bounty of they helped find a stolen object.
Their app could also connect to the device (using a single well known password) and could switch it into fast mode where it transmits constantly instead of once/day. Making it even easier for someone else in the network to find it.
If I were a thief, I'd sign up for the service, find the item that's snitching on me, and search it until I found all the devices on it that were broadcasting its location.
The guys described in the article weren't exactly rocket scientists. And the cops only intervened because the tag's alarm was going off right in front of them while the writer showed them the device info on their screen. It's easy to imagine that, if the thief--who may not even be the store owner--had immediately destroyed the tag, the cops would never have intervened and the guy would never have found their scooter.
As it happens I already have similar Burglar Alarm running on Android Termux. So easy it is. This warns when one ESP wakes up and appears on local Wifi.
import os,json,time
os.system("termux-wake-lock")
os.system("termux-wifi-enable true")
while True:
r=os.system("ping -c 1 192.168.1.59")
if r==0:
os.system("termux-volume music 15")
os.system("termux-tts-speak -l en YOUR GARAGE DOOR IS OPEN!")
time.sleep(60)
this recent trend of stories about people taking things into their own hands with the help of AirTags to go on a vigilante search for their stolen bikes, cars etc, is concerning not to mention dangerous. This guy took cops along, good call. Another one I read last week where somebody went to find their stolen car I thought was nuts to go to a random place and try to 'steal your car back'.
I mean even in this e-bike story the store employees were threating guy with gun fingers etc.
I know it's hard to get help from law enforcement and it feels necessary to do it yourself but there's more than a small chance this doesn't end well in many circumstances.
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iPhone users automatically receive a push notification if an unknown Airtag has been “following” them, without its owner, for a random time between 8 and 24 hours.
Wouldn't this be a pain in the ass if you took a long flight and happened to sit near an air tag in cargo while its owner was on the other end of the plane?
> An AirTag will beep at a random time between eight and 24 hours if it is away from its owner's iPhone.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57351554
The airtags are by far the best tracking devices ever created and can let you locate your tag with tenth of a metre accuracy on a coin cell battery that lasts 1 year.
They get smaller and better the more you pay. Gps cell trackers are cheap and prolific
Seems to require the extended battery if you want 6 months life and that, as best I can tell, is another $60 and HUGE because it's also a waterproof box with magnet. Plus there's $20 a month cellular fees on top.
I've dealt with cops when helping a friend who was being harassed (literal 100s of calls/texts a day from known burner apps) as well as physical damage to his car. The police did nothing at all, even with a step-by-step guide provided by said burner number apps for law enforcement (abuse@$burnerAppCompany.com). In the end we had to keep pressing the various app's support until they would blacklist my friends number completely from their app network. It was a huge PITA and made my friend's phone almost unusable (they would rotate numbers if he blocked them). Oh, and we knew exactly who was responsible, this wasn't even a "here is a lat/long" situation. The police are fucking worthless for things like this and from what I've heard from friends about their experience with stolen property they are useless on that front as well.
I can understand why they would be hesitant when the find my data is not pin point accurate.
My dad has many high end game/trail cameras. One of his went missing, so he checked the others and found clear as day video of the neighbor trespassing and stealing it.
Took it to the cops, and they acted annoyed and told him to just sue. I was in disbelief.
That said, I'm glad the cop didn't arrest the neighbor. Unless you have footage of the heighbor removing the camera, it's not cut and dry.
I would take the neighbor to small chains court, but then you have to live next to guy with a grudge? A guy with a grudge can make your life miserable.
>> One of his went missing, so he checked the others and found clear as day video of the neighbor trespassing and stealing it.
That's exactly what the OP said they had.
Very Apple of Apple. Terrible design.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212227
To disable the AirTag and stop sharing your location, tap Instructions to Disable AirTag and follow the onscreen steps.
In any case there is an option to disable the alerts for that AirTag when you receive the notification.
I believe the reason this happens at the end of a walk is because it specifically fires off when you enter your own home (either geofence of detection of your home WiFi or something). So it's probably accumulating throughout the day, then we go out, come back, and it shows it.
To this day she is waiting to get any news from it, case closed and archived.
But for the ordinary car theft, it does sound like a nice idea.
Though you'd have to buy into the Apple ecosystem and the anti-follow feature could be triggered when you don't want it to.
You just need to pry open the case and remove the magnet from the coil and snap it all back together...
My partner's car was stolen out of the parking garage on Grove St. in Hayes Valley (San Francisco). It was recovered three days later in the garage on 5th and Mission. Probably not the same person who had stolen it, but someone had essentially moved in. When we picked up the car at the impound lot, it was full of stuff — dozens of documents that personally identified who was living in the car. There was even a journal with lists of cars and locations for future theft! The garage also had security camera footage of the theft, and the 5th/Mission garage of the person who dropped it off.
SFPD was uninterested. I hung on to photos of everything though. It was just kind of mind-blowing to me at the time that despite very clear evidence that could likely lead to arrests, there was a lack of willingness to do anything about it.
Maybe it would be different in another city, but I'm not so sure. As much as I'd like to think that some folks on the police force are there to build cases and actively catch criminals, I don't think that happens too often outside of TV shows. Of course, it’s also likely a single car theft is too small potatoes for that kind of effort.
People blame this stuff on the new district attorney but I've never seen SFPD lift a finger against crime, in 25 years of living here.
Tile has somewhat similar functionality, but it doesn't really have the same ability to track the tile's location. And there are a comparatively tiny number of tile users.
Apple products aren't that popular outside of Western countries ( and the US in particular).
Take India for an example - the iOS market share is a paltry 3.2% for 2019. Ukraine, 13%. Nigeria, 6%. I highly doubt those users are nicely spread to give you full coverage everywhere and not cluttered in the bigger cities and their more affluent parts.
Heck, even France is with 23%, that could easily leave significant gaps in coverage.
Furthermore India is 3.3 million square kilometers, airtags have a range of about 10m.
Which is not 100%. OP literally took 3.2% of 1.3 billions and asserted that was the number of iphones in india (compatible with airtag too).
0: https://chipolo.net/en/products/chipolo-one-spot
Police should have arrested this man.
As I commented on the Twitter thread, we used to have tons of break-ins in our area. Miraculously, when they closed down all the pawn shops in the area with a "relaxed" attitude to the provenance of where stuff came from, we saw almost an order of magnitude reduction in b-and-e and theft from vehicle type events.
For this type of crime, you can have about as much of it as you're willing to tolerate. And closing down the operations that make it profitable to steal stuff is way simpler than chasing around perps as it's much more centralized.
I have little doubt that one or more police officers are well aware of the nature of the shop and get their own cut of the profits.
I'd agree they're aware (and don't do anything for whatever reason) but I disagree your run of mill LEO is getting a cut of profits. If anyone is getting a cut, it's not your regular officers. It's whatever title you want to appoint to the person running the police force.
1. The police don't know and don't care. No surprise there.
2. The police do know (holy shit!) and also are directly involved in a criminal operation (holy double shit!).
I don't think it's necessary to posit a 'dark movie thriller' thing where cops are on the take - from a freakin' e-bike chop shop ffs. Both Occam's Razor and Hanlon's Razor suggest that the effort involved here is a combination of laziness, unfamiliarity and institutional disincentives.
That said, a higher level commander may be judged by area crime stats and frankly those guys have rocks in their heads if they aren't cleaning up the fences. A lot of jurisdictions have pretty strict laws about this sort of place being meant to know where their stock is from. If you've got the will to deal with this stuff, you roll in every few days, ask the same questions and shut the doors when the staff don't have good answers.
So, not so long back in the US, there was a car bombing (RV trailer I believe) in... Nashville I think?
Was a pretty big explosion.
Partner of the person who made and detonated said bomb went to the police some days (weeks?) back and literally tried to tell them "my partner made a bomb and is about to go detonate it at this place"
The police, IIRC, brushed it off as a woman being crazy.
The police have a history of not arresting or investigating people/things they should be.
But they don't, haven't, and won't. At this point, you just have to sit back and laugh at how horribly they botch shit on a regular basis, otherwise you'll probably get quite depressed at the reality.
I'm convinced that the solution to crime is not to increase punishments, but to make the speed and likelihood of being punished fast and almost certain.
If theft had a 100% detection rate and a punishment greater than the value of the item, you would never steal anything because it would be pointless. The problem is we let people get away with it multiple times and then eventually destroy their lives over it.
Airtags and other anti theft tech can help here. Make theft extremely difficult to get away with and people will not bother.
All in all, I’d rather not aim for 100% detection + swift punishment as the improvement metrics for deterring theft.
The thing is, even if you spend more initially on stopping crime, it will eventually drop off as people work out you can no longer get away with it. Spend the extra cash collecting all the security video and know it will teach one person that they can not get away with theft and that person will likely communicate it with their peers.
I would personally rather spend $600 extra in tax for police over having the negative feelings of a $500 item being stolen.
I don't believe much in terms of privacy has to be lost as most of the time we already have the data, we just don't have the human resources to do anything with it.
This is the orthodox view among experts in the subject, so yes
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180514-do-long-prison-s...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jan/27/prison-exper...
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/business-law/do-harsher-pu...
You apply that to every Karen's favorite pet laws and suddenly we're all living in 1984.
Look at the opinions of HN for example. You've got a subset of people who think speeding should be a shoot on sight offense. And you've got a subset of people who think littering should be a shoot on sight offense. You've got a subset of people who think that anyone who uses power equipment before 10AM is Literally Hitler(TM). I'm being only slightly hyperbolic here. It all adds up. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Fast feedback loops are the key here.
Do US really has higher clearance rates and lower criminality as your comment implies or is that just a guess?
Its general crime rates are also roughly typical - median - for the OECD (including for most types of violent crime), except for murder of course as everyone knows.
I have as close as it gets to a perfect comparison. My now-wife was working on a summer school in the UK, shepherding American teenagers around. A few had their iPhones stolen, but with exact location information via “find my phone”. Police did nothing.
It’s a bit sad when mostly they just had to turn up.
Since Android and iPhone make up the vast majority of the smartphone market, and modern devices on both sides have "Find My" style features, it feels like something they aught to know about.
The police know to look for a serial number on a drone/bicycle/vehicle so why not the equivalent for phones?
I called the equivalent of 911 and briefly explained. The said: "wait, we pick you up", and in the same moment I hear sirens a few streets later heading in my direction. What followed was out of a movie. We raced with emergency lights to the current location, constantly updading other units on the current position. We must have missed the thief only by seconds and found construction containers where the signal was coming from. The police said they would call the construction companys 24h contact and open the containers with them, but I could go home for now.
One hour later the GPS tracker said the bike was moving again. I called again and the operator of emergency services said "didn't you call before?" and they picked me up again. When we arrived at the - now outdoor - location of the bike, there were 5 police cars and 15 police around it, but no thief, it was locked to a regular bike stand. They called in the equivalent of SWAT to open the lock and I got my bike back. They took fingerprints of the lock and luckily the thief stopped at an residential address for a minute or two, so we figured that might be the home address. Investigation is ongoing.
I could more or less prove that I was the owner by having the dealers invoice, serial number and pictures on my phone btw.
The audience here on Hacker News has a pretty realistic idea of how quickly you can track down the location of people using a set of credit cards that are known-- not to mention two phones which were also stolen and shockingly not powered down. I am not saying that the process is infallible, but there are companies I have worked for where you could have given the known information (phones, credit cards) and they could have tracked down the location in real time with a 70-80% certainty.
Catching car jackers with a 70% certainty (or 33% even) will shut down a car jacking ring pretty quick. This sort of crime is exploding in Los Angeles this year.
That the police don't try as hard to track a person down as a mobile ad server would, makes me wonder about the incentives to curb crime.
The only solution I have found for preventing thefts from my construction sites in St. Louis is to pay a stipend to local economically disadvantaged people to live at the site, and provide firearms for the purpose of discouraging thieves. At the request of the St. Louis city police, we stopped reporting incidents of attempted theft.
The DA in my area recently stopped attending murder trials. This is what the powers that be want. When the prosecutor does not show up in court, the case cannot proceed.
But it's still an exciting story of vigilance and good life lessons. Who doesn't like that?
That is something I would definitely expect from brazen fencers, yes.
Not sure I could do it with a GoPro. Something small and hidden with a 128gb SD card would be best.
It should be allowed in ALL public places, especially if it’s visible.
The airtags would have been extremely good stalking tools without these safeties and even with them you can still get some anti theft protection as the airtags do not notify until the holder gets home and your app will hold the last known location (their house)
I would love to make “enemies” of these guys and see how far the dominos fall.
Unless as a society we push these criminals, we’ll end up back in the heyday of organized crime and mafia run cities. Corruption is a constant battle.
… this is New York.
Probably would get faster police attention, but not the kind you want.
Are the AirTags tied to the owner's phone, or does everyone see the tags?
If a thief had an iphone could he identify other peoples AirTags while creeping around?
The first one, but as the thread notes there is an anti-stalking feature: after some time of being in near proximity with a lone airtag not paired to your phone you get warned about the tag… if you have an iphone i assume.
You can see this is written by a white man, the middle-class status probably also helps. Not sure a non-middle-class person of color or a Latin American would have dared entering said precinct and using that tone ("made a joke") with the police officers.
Does that matter re: Apple considering that the location originated on your phone to begin with...? If they wanted to, there isn't really a reason to wait until you walk by an airtag to grab your location.
https://mashtips.com/remove-airtag-speaker/
a. The owner wants to find stolen or lost things
b. Nobody wants to be tagged (privacy, being stalked, &c)
If people being stalked are allowed to discover Airtags, thiefs also can discover them. A conundrum.
Additionally, what about Deaf people being stalked? They can't hear the Airtags. This is an example where they are discriminated by technology.
If the item is simply lost, removal of the speaker is not desired, so that should go in (b).
If the item is stolen, how long do you need to track it before you report it to the police? For me it would be less than 3 days, when the alarm starts beeping. So removal isn't helpful there either.
Apple should make it nonremovable.
Stimmt! You are right. When someone lost the thing there's no conflict of interest.
> Apple should make it nonremovable.
If Apple was my own company I also would make it nonremovable because I wouldn't want to be held responsible for enabling stalking.
Edit: I misunderstood parent first.
I'm curious do you think strangers would notify you if an AirTag was beeping in your bag and you didn't notice, or would you have to rely on trusted people?
Random people usually hesitate to notify because first they think this is not my problem and second if they decide to do something but I don't understand immediately they give up communicating the situation to me.
Imagine you hearing an Airtag beeping and I ignoring it, and you don't know I am deaf. Even if you muster up the courage to broach the subject to me I might react not the way you expect and you think to yourself it's not worth it.
From the article mentioned in parent: «At the worst, if they have iPhone 11, 12, or newer iPhones, it will be easier for them to easily locate the AirTag using precision finding even if you did mute Apple AirTag.»
Person was going to go to some apartment building and planning to...knock on doors?
But not?
But then they saw a scooter shop nextdoor?
Whut?
You can go hunting yourself or hope somebody else sees it. If you manage to connect to this network, you can connect to 192.168.1.11 and turn it permanently on/off and also turn audible beep on, for final pinpointin.
And now that the ESP wakes up everyday, it could also look for public Wifis and send and receive emails. From the Wifi-providers name you can get a rough idea of the location.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28051005
A $50 board with ten years free connectivity in 150 countries.
Perhaps a better candidate than an esp32.
Saying the design takes 10 min is only true if you already sunk tens of hours into the ecosystem. Sure, if you got the tools and spent time learning it (and dont count it towards the final cost) you can do it cheaply with ESP. For many people going with $50 board thats gonna trully 5 min setup out of the box can actually be cheaper
you don't want it to broadcast STOLEN_BICYCLE while you ride it?
setting up such a system properly probably costs way more (in valuable time) than the Apple solution
Even better, use the Google Maps GeoLocaion API. You can send a list of nearby WiFi APs, with MAC addresses, signal strengths, and channels, and the API will return lat/long.
The searchers could get a bounty of they helped find a stolen object.
Their app could also connect to the device (using a single well known password) and could switch it into fast mode where it transmits constantly instead of once/day. Making it even easier for someone else in the network to find it.
You might get away with it once or twice but as a habitual thief this creates quite a trail of evidence about you.
As it happens I already have similar Burglar Alarm running on Android Termux. So easy it is. This warns when one ESP wakes up and appears on local Wifi.
I know it's hard to get help from law enforcement and it feels necessary to do it yourself but there's more than a small chance this doesn't end well in many circumstances.