Does having more airtags around cause the battery to drain faster? It would be absolutely hilarious to walk around with a pocket full of airtags and be a legit iphone energy vampire.
There could be a DoS attack vector - presumably a BLE-enabled microcontroller could technically emulate an infinite number of AirTags and drain the battery even more if not cause more serious problems. I wonder how quickly this would be fixed if someone were to sprinkle a few such microcontrollers around Apple Stores or offices.
Someone already reversed the exact protocol and proof of concepted a arduino (or pi?) device that could happily use the network and would roll the keys regardless of whether it was in the owners vicinity, defeating the anti-tracking stuff.
Of course at that point you’ve probably spent more than regular gps stalkerware
You are possibly at risk of Apple detecting this and locking your account. But at some point, if the attacker is determined enough to build custom hardware like this, there is not a lot you can do. None of the competitors managed any better or even got close to the protections Apple provided.
At some point we need to put the burden on law enforcement. It's impossible to make abuse of technology impossible but we can criminalize misuse.
However, do most wireless protocols cause listening devices to start using significantly more CPU and thus battery power? I'd expect DoS in most authenticated protocols to be impossible and essentially rejected at the hardware level (just like interference would be) with very minimal power impact.
An annoyance that is driving me away from the Apple ecosystem is the lack of choice when it comes to these new features - they are forced onto you with no way to disable them and sometimes radically modify the behavior of the device you purchased and may make it unsuitable for the original purpose you bought it for. I'm still using an iPhone and plan to get the new SE (and only because of Touch ID is back - Face ID was a dealbreaker) but for work I got myself a Thinkpad. Some things are worse, but at the very least I can be confident that once I do get a setup that works it'll likely stay working for years without breaking overnight because someone at Apple wanted to earn a promotion with a feature that's completely useless to me.
In my case, the audio devices menu on Mac/iOS displays nearby AirPlay targets, including those not on the LAN. My neighbors got their misconfigured so it always pollutes my menus with no way to disable this even though I never use AirPlay and don't have any compatible hardware (nor intend to get any). Every time there's a risk of misclicking and accidentally broadcasting a meeting's audio or (if they have auth enabled) annoying the neighbor by waking up their Apple TV (or taking over whatever they've been watching), and yet I have to faff around with that menu constantly because of the next point:
The AirPods auto-switching/roaming introduced in Big Sur made mine completely unusable due to some edge-case bug (even disabling the auto-switching doesn't make them as reliable as they used to be back when they were released, and it takes me 30 seconds of connecting/disconnecting/switching between audio sources upon joining a meeting to actually get it working) forcing me to buy a USB headset. My AirPods are still OK for music on iPhone but became completely useless for meetings even though I bought a second pair just for that reason. - I just can't afford to waste 30 seconds of every meeting gesturing like an idiot while screwing with my audio settings just to get people to finally hear me.
The new "hide my email" feature in Safari now pollutes every email form field with a dropdown that I'll never use, and yet again no way to disable this.
The Find My network can be opted out of in the settings [1]. And if I remember correctly, it asks you to opt in (but I might be remembering wrong)
I have somewhat the opposite opinion though that there are way too many settings in iOS now and it does get difficult to dive through all the menus. Best thing I can recommend is to use the search in the settings.
Seems kind of ridiculous that in order to opt out of Apple's airtag network you essentially have to give up the ability to find your phone if it gets lost.
No this will just turn off the ability to find your phone by using other people's phone. You will still have the phone report its location and be able to locate it in "Find My" but lose features such as being able to find the phone if its out of battery/turned off/not in cell reception range.
Find My iPhone primarily uses the phone to self-report its position when requested over the Internet.
This new "Find My" network (what a stupid name, btw) also allows to use other devices to report positions of nearby devices for those that don't have a data connection (AirTags or iPhones that were powered off).
The problem seems to be that a single toggle controls both features, while the first feature doesn't rely the community network and should remain available even if you opted out.
As others are mentioning, I see two toggles, and the second toggle is "Find My network" which is the one that works by other people's iPhones detecting your iPhone even when it's offline, in power reserve mode, or powered off.
As I understand it, Airtags are low-power Bluetooth devices with no GPS capability.
If your Bluetooth transceiver is disabled, your iOS device will not see nor report the locations of any Airtags that are otherwise in range.
If you do enable Bluetooth on an iOS device, any Airtags detected will be reported to Apple over any available data connection, and this cannot be disabled in iOS as far as I know.
Disabling Bluetooth will likely save any device's battery. This is separate from GPS and mobile data.
> If you do enable Bluetooth on an iOS device, any Airtags detected will be reported to Apple over any available data connection, and this cannot be disabled in iOS as far as I know.
That certainly seems to contradict Apple's own documentation on the Find My network. At least according to my interpretation, it seems very clear that disabling the "Find My network" toggle will disable your device's participation in the network.
It seems pretty clear to me that the setting is symmetrical, and disabling it prevents your device from being discovered by other devices and from sending messages about other devices it discovers:
> Find My can use the Find My network to help find devices even if they are not connected to the internet and, for supported devices, even if they are turned off or erased. Devices in the Find My network use Bluetooth wireless technology to detect missing devices or compatible items nearby, including AirTags and compatible third-party products registered to your Apple ID, and report their approximate location back to the owner. If a device is turned off or erased, that location is also visible to members of the owner’s Family Sharing group with whom they have chosen to share the location. The interaction is end-to-end encrypted, and Apple cannot see the location of any offline device or reporting device. When your device participates in the Find My network, it can both be located by the network and anonymously help locate other missing devices. You can choose to have your iOS or iPadOS device not participate in the Find My network by going to Settings > [your name] > Find My > Find My [device] and tapping to disable Find My network.
This is not how it works. There are two different toggles, one for the Find My system, and one for just having your iPhone report its last condition. If you dont care about being able to find your phone/devices when theyre off, then you can simply opt out of the Find My network and rely on the basic position reporting.
Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions > Content Restrictions is an example of a nested settings labyrinth that is somewhat hard to navigate for parents just trying to keep their kids from seeing bad stuff, esp. as it interacts with individual app behaviors. Ex: set TV restrictions to 9+ and the Netflix app entirely vanishes, instead of just filtering its content. Scalable trustworthy content filtering delegation for families seems unsolved.
On the apps, yes a ton of wildly popular services will vanish below 13yo.
I understand the calculation on the companies side, and there’s also a widespread “children shouldn’t be using/doing/viewing anything mildly risky” kind of mentality spreading around that makes it a no-risk move to just ban kids from a platform.
I recently wanted to move a youtube account inside the family management umbrella, and setting it’s age at 11 meant the account couldn’t see nor write comments on any video anymore. And there’s no authorization the parent can give to lift the restriction. Of course to move the age back you need an official ID as proof, so it was a one way move…
Yes and no. COPPA has a direct role in the 13 yo cut-off, but it’s not the whole story.
For instance I’m directly mentioning Youtube, but outside of comments it’s still somewhat usable for a 13- yo kid.
Twitter could have set a mode for 13yo (idk, have parents pre-vet the tweets if they are really into controlling ?) but it looks like it was simpler for them to just ban pre-teen accounts.
I’m not sure facebook can deal with pre-13 yo either.
Basically the shittier the company, the less it will be able to handle the pre 13yo case, and I wouldn’t put the blame on COPPA.
A prompt of "these apps will now be hidden" sounds like a start.
Getting more specific and explaining *why* certain apps are being hidden for a given age setting would be even better. Each app would probably provide its own explanatory string to be displayed (so the liability and complaints can be shifted to the apps, and the whole idea could actually get off the ground ;) ).
I'm honestly curious why Netflix is being hidden in particular. I immediately thought of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COPPA, but then realized that law is around data collection and privacy. Is Netflix just checking out completely because of that, or is there some more nuanced media-specific thing they're avoiding falling afoul of by disappearing for 9+?
> In my case, the audio devices menu on Mac/iOS displays nearby AirPlay targets, including those not on the LAN. My neighbors got their misconfigured so it always pollutes my menus with no way to disable this even though I never use AirPlay and don't have any compatible hardware (nor intend to get any).
I believe there is a billboard which even ranks the most annoying tracks every year. I remember Frozen's "Let it go" & James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" were on it too.
Not recommending GP should do it - just found it an interesting fact to add here.
It is polarizing though. There are a lot of people who will get positively offended at the notion that their wireless earbuds are not perfect.
One of the things that biases is that they hear the others OK, so assume the earbuds are fine. What needs digging is to understand that when somebody has open mike like that, most meeting software engages heavy noise reduction or even half-duplex conversation; so there's a lot of interruptions and "what did you say" and garbled voices for other people, that is hard to trace to root cause of that open busy mike.
Oh man, the half-duplex conversation is terrible. If people start cutting off whenever someone else speaks, I tell them to wear headphones, but I really don't understand how headphones + push-to-talk isn't standard for everyone by now.
2. Cheerful regular person who thinks everything is great (*and doesn't really want to bother)
As well, it reminds me of how everybody believes themselves to be a great driver. Try getting advanced driving school gift certificate to a friend, family or special someone - they almost universally find it insulting and offensive. "I've been driving for 20 years!". (sure, what new skill have you learned or worked on in last 19.8 years?)
Similarly, no matter how kindly I suggest headset, I invariably hear some variation of angry "I do this for a living, trust me" or a strangely patronizing "No, this works great".
Hmm, the "oh you're cutting out, you aren't using headphones, right?" works great for me, because the accurate prediction of non-headphoneness is enough to make them believe that that's the problem.
re: AirPlay speakers, if you really never want to use AirPlay you can apply a configuration profile that disables it entirely. These are the profiles that allow IT departments to enforce all sorts of policies on employee computers. You could use ProfileCreator to make one: https://github.com/ProfileCreator/ProfileCreator
Increasingly it feels like powerful configuration settings are only available via IT management profiles like these. I use one to enabling full system logging since that’s the only way.
Oh thanks, I'll definitely do that. I use profiles on iOS and am fairly familiar with them but didn't bother checking as I assumed macOS not being so locked down wouldn't have "profile-only" settings.
I'll also use the opportunity to disable Apple News, TV+, widgets and similar bloat I'm not using.
Wow I’m glad to meet someone else that does this as well! Next iOS device I get I’m going to set it up as “managed” from the start so I’ll have access to the more powerful security configuration profile settings.
It’s telling that these days corporate IT departments have more powerful configuration options available to them than us mere users.
Vendor lock in means vendor upgrades. The last time I used google maps (maybe 6 years ago?) you couldn't have any history of your recent destinations if you also turned of google search history...
Now I run CalyxOS, haven't used google maps in a long time, and maybe i'm worse for not knowing about speed traps or the fastest route, but... I feel fine.
> In my case, the audio devices menu on Mac/iOS displays nearby AirPlay targets, including those not on the LAN. My neighbors got their misconfigured so it always pollutes my menus with no way to disable this even though I never use AirPlay and don't have any compatible hardware (nor intend to get any). Every time there's a risk of misclicking and accidentally broadcasting a meeting's audio or (if they have auth enabled) annoying the neighbor by waking up their Apple TV (or taking over whatever they've been watching)
"Accidentally" broadcasting a few times is probably all you need to do to get them to fix their stuff... They probably don't even know.
> I can be confident that once I do get a setup that works it'll likely stay working for years without breaking overnight
I feel the opposite. I switched to Pop!_OS a year ago, and had a fairly standard setup. A recent update broke my dock and my launcher and made the whole machine unusable for days. I eventually fixed it, but the dock kept crashing and the launcher was acting wonky, so I've switched back to Mac. I don't like everything about Mac philosophically, but at least It Just Works!
May I ask you why Pop OS! I think there are much more stable distros out there. But sure, you do have to tinker with linux the first time to make sure every hardware is properly supported, but afterwards I have to say it may be the most stable out of all three. I have really nasty software bugs on Mac as well, random process going 99% CPU, slow downs, etc.
Pop!_OS is presently based on gnome a broken mish mash of c and JavaScript and extensions which rather than being written to an actual extension API merely monkey patches the JavaScript.
When the underlying JavaScript to be patched created by gnome changes extensions can silently break.
Outside of gnome land this really isn't at all normal. One could for example have used i3wm without issue for the last 12 years, awesomewm for 14, compiz for 16, KDE for 25 years and if you really hate change there is a fork of KDE 3 so you could have pretended its still 2002 for the last 20 years if you like while still actually making use of current versions of everything from the kernel to your web browser.
> sometimes radically modify the behavior of the device you purchased and may make it unsuitable for the original purpose you bought it for.
This is one of the reasons (along with price) that I try to stick to Apple products that are too old for them to care about. I'd like to see them try to remove functionality from my iBook G4! (Granted, it didn't have as much functionality to begin with, but what it does it's stuck with for now.)
I tend to research purchases extensively before I buy, and it's incredibly frustrating when the manufacturer decides that actually, the product I bought wasn't finished yet, let's have an update to add/change new and exciting features. I chose to buy a specific device with specific features, and if I decide I want new features I'll trade it in for next year's model.
(Incidentally, is it possible to get security updates for Apple devices without getting feature updates? Not for the G4 of course, but my iPad mini keeps asking me to upgrade iOS and I don't want functionality to change.)
> (Incidentally, is it possible to get security updates for Apple devices without getting feature updates? Not for the G4 of course, but my iPad mini keeps asking me to upgrade iOS and I don't want functionality to change.)
> Some things are worse, but at the very least I can be confident that once I do get a setup that works it'll likely stay working for years without breaking overnight because someone at
Microsoft are working on fixing this soon
Leave now before turning off secure boot is disabled
You can still find your device but only if it's turned on. So turning off the Find My network doesn't stop you from finding devices that aren't at home but it does stop you from finding ones that are turned off or run out of battery.
don't air tags use the same tech as Find My phone? Whether or not you have an air tag or are near one, I'd expect the same reduction if that feature is on.
There are some battery draining tricks you can do with Bluetooth apps on a phone to drain the device batteries.
Essentially if you did a ton of device queries to every BLE device visible, you could drain the batteries of every device in range. Transmission is probably a heavier battery drain so just making them talk to your phone creates drain.
It’s a single device example, but in a bar once I was showing a co-worker once how you could see and interrogate a lot of BLE devices. I pinged someone’s Fitbit, and read that it only had 3% battery left. Then it vanished. I’m pretty sure in the process of asking it to give me the info, it drained the battery.
For the Arduino route I'd heavily recommend the Adafruit Bluefruit boards over the official Arduino BLE boards. Some of the Bluefruit boards are based on the nRF52 and therefore support OTA. The BLE implementation on the official Arduino boards (for example Nano 33 BLE) is okay but IMO Adafruit is doing a better job there.
I just used nRFConnect and found a device name that was strange to me. Got curious and asked Google.
A personal pleasure toy (aka sex toy) that is visible on Bluetooth. Just for fun I walked a bit around in the garden and found the direction where the signal got stronger.
I can now deduce with reasonable certainty which of my neighbors home has a remote controlled sex toy in it. As I know the family living there and how conservative they are with their cultural background I would not have expected that.
Imagine how I now just could now wait for the parents to make their big yearly holiday. From the website of the tool I know the specs on how long the battery holds when not in use. So if before the end of the holiday the tool is visible in Bluetooth I could reason with a very high degree of certainty that it was the daughter's tool. If it were so this tool would five her away. It would be a liability for her (if it is her tool). If their community knew, they would be appalled. So it is a liability for the whole family as well.
They are nowhere near the technical ability to identify this liability I just stumbled upon by chance.
Another thing that's basically a real security hole/opportunity with BLE sniffing is to record the unique IDs of all the BLE devices you can see, along with geo-location data.
Do this enough places and over time, and you get a map of what devices are where and at what time, with the assumption that the devices are probably linked to people.
Expand that to a government placing little innocuous BLE sniffers all over the place collecting data has some pretty evil big brother vibes. Or on everyone's phone so we are all sniffers.
But it kind of goes both ways. You could sniff outside a police station and just skim all the BLE devices you can find, and assume with enough data over time the frequent ones are mostly owned by police officers. Then have an app that alerts you any time one of those LEO BLE devices is in range of you. Basically an undercover LEO's Fitbit could give them up.
I'm pretty sure this has been done for years and is one of the reasons why the truly paranoid always keep bluetooth turned off.
Creating a BLE based cop detector would be a neat way to sign up for harassment and surprice traffic stops.
Unfortunately it would likely also work for identifying other groups.
The government does put Bluetooth trackers all over the place. Cities like to use them for monitoring traffic flows and patterns. But I would not be surprised to find out they do more than just that with the data. Or I would not be surprised if the vendor who makes the hardware also collects and sells that data on top of the tax money they get.
There's no reason to believe these are a bad idea beyond lowering entry cost to GPS trackers.
It seems like there's a bug going on here - otherwise everyone would have the same issue. This is something that can be fixed and isn't really related to these existing overall.
> There's no reason to believe these are a bad idea beyond lowering entry cost to GPS trackers.
That's not something to be glossed over. Lowering the price of abusable technology makes that abuse a lot more prevalent. Take for instance guns, there is a strong inverse relationship between the price of a gun and the likelihood that it will be used for murder. The guns most often used for crimes are the cheapest handguns that you could get for a hundred dollars or so. More expensive guns, like rifles or higher quality handguns, still get used in crimes but a lot less often. And the most expensive guns, machine guns with collector value, are virtually never used for crime.
In making GPS trackers extremely cheap, it will be abused far more often. It's no longer esoteric technology that most people except cops or PIs wouldn't even think to use; it's dirt cheap and prevalent. Prevalence is a big part of it; it used to be that most people were unfamiliar with the specifics of GPS tracking. Maybe they heard about it in the news or in movies, but they wouldn't know where to start looking to buy one for themselves and certainly didn't have one laying around in their home already. But now that every other person seems to have a dozen of them laying around their home, the risk of impulsive use has become very real. Planting GPS trackers on people has become something the general population can do on a whim. It wasn't like this before.
I think if you include the cost of an iphone then it's probably more expensive then the alternatives (unless you connect it to your own iphone/account in which case Apple will happily give your details to the police if the Airtag is found). I think the bigger problem is that if you're being tracked and you don't have some iDevice plus someone has tampered with the airtag speaker you're not going to be notified of its presence unless you install and use the airtag scanner app, which is a poor solution in my opinion. I'd like to see them open up the mesh protocol at least enough so that Android or other devices could see tags near them/be notified if they're being followed without having to opt-in
This seems like a very out of touch question. Bluetooth is ubiquitous. Flagship smartphones can't even listen to headphones without bluetooth. Smartwatches use bluetooth. Hell, my herbal vaporizer has a BLE connection for setting the temperature and checking battery.
The reason I ask is because I find Bluetooth to be a detractor from every product you mentioned. I would consider not using them because they use Bluetooth.
Depends on your threat model. Generally probably not, but there's always a risk, and network stacks are not becoming simpler. There are disclosure risks - bluetooth trackers are common in retail stores.
I disable Bluetooth on almost everything, not so much for "security" as because I don't need it, so there's no reason for it. I don't like things in my ears, so it is of no benefit to me on my phone, and I don't feel a burning desire to provide real-world unique identifiers to in-store surveillance, so I don't.
I also don't use a wireless keyboard or other toys like that, so my other machines don't need it either.
Last use I had for Bluetooth was getting data from a battery charger. That lasted long enough for me to discover I didn't care about the data.
Apple along has sold over well over 100 million AirPods, and there's a large market of other Bluetooth accessories. So, yes, Bluetooth is a very widely used popular wireless technology.
I'm typing this on a Bluetooth keyboard, while wearing an Bluetooth-connected Watch. Apple's Handoff and Continuity features across devices are of great benefit to me every day.
Apple makes an effort to keep bluetooth and wifi always-on by requiring the user to go into settings to turn the settings off. The control center (quick setting toggles) does not fully turn off wifi nor bluetooth. If either is toggled off, the phone turns both on automatically back around midnight. The iphone also can connect to devices like airpods via bluetooth while being in the 'pretend off' state.
At about $3000 (tax included) per 100 you could probably do more interesting things with say $10,000. Like giving stacks of 100 $1 bills to everyone around you except the people you want to piss off.
Right- I feel a Raspberry Pi and a bluetooth module (or a handful of them) would be a lot cheaper. Set it up to repeatedly ping everything in range, stick it to a battery pack, and just go about your business. It would certainly illustrate some of the many shortcomings of Bluetooth, and always-listening services.
I'm not advocating that you should, keep in mind. It certainly seems to be in poor taste, but there may be a platform for using it educationally, I.e. hacker cons.
There appears to be no proof that this is the case. It might be, but the action by which it would be draining the battery isn’t described (or even hinted at).
Maybe an update would help? I haven't had any problem with Find My on my iPad draining the battery, and we have a half dozen AirTags. But, I also have auto update turned on for iOS.
I must spend time near hundreds of AirTags each day, yet my battery doesn't seem to be affected. Is it possible somebody is exaggerating? Or omitting relevant info?
Maybe the author is talking about devices that are asleep/off? They mention "weeks" at one point, making me think that the AirTags wake the devices from sleep often, which you'll notice in an iPad that dies after one week instead of a month while sleeping, but not in a phone that you charge every day.
I've actually had exactly this problem with a really old iPad recently. It would last 2-3 months if I never touched it, now it's always dead when I go to reach for it, which is maybe every 2 weeks-ish.
Just assumed the battery hit some sort of cliff but now this article has me wondering if my neighbors got an airtag.
Airtags are based off of Apple's existing BLE Find My network, so it might not necessarily have to be an airtag. Off the top of my head, I know that airpods had a similar functionality enabled a while back.
And we still wonder why misinformation moves so much faster than truth. It has to be some kind of emotional thing. How many people just saw the headline, immediately decided it must be true, and will now be sure to mention it any time someone mentions AirTags in the future.
I doubt this is exactly a new phenomenon, but it sure seems surprising the human race has made it as far as we have successfully.
To be fair, you've fallen into the same trap. One person says they don't have a problem, you believe them and start saying the first statement must be misinformation.
It's possible that both people are correct and the circumstances that cause the battery to drain require being connected to a AirTag, not just near any old AirTag. Or there are other circumstances that cause the battery to drain.
I don't think I have. I also have an iPad, and I have AirTags, and it does not have a battery drain problem, which is one additional data point for me. Plus, this is the default, expected behavior, and the post that started this discussion is disputing that. Without adequate evidence to back it up. The onus is on them to put forth convincing evidence, or it is nothing but another conspiracy theory. Presuming the status quo is not falling into any trap, it's what everyone should do when presented with a claim that deviates.
My experience dealing with customer support is that there is almost always an actual problem when a customer complains.
They often don't know the right words to use, and have no idea why an issue is happening, or they might come up with a completely wrong explanation. So it's easy to dismiss their concerns by saying things like "this doesn't make sense" or "it works on my machine".
It's only when you start digging deeper, investigating what exactly the customer could mean, that you eventually discover the root of the issue.
Of course, these investigations are time consuming an expensive, often the customer stops following up with you, or you might not understand the behaviour well enough on your own. So very often you don't find the underlying cause.
But calling someone a liar just because you can't reproduce their problem is short-sighted and stupid.
Anecdatum: There's two iPhones and an iPad in this flat along with 3 AirTags - there's been no change in battery life since the AirTags arrived a few months ago.
Maybe it's only when you're in local contact with not-your AirTags?
I've had some broadcast-happy wifi light bulbs drain iOS devices because they are on the same SSID and vlan. I'm pretty sure running Home Assistant with some random open source plugin the actual issue. Turning off the light bulbs fixed the battery drain. Eventually I just moved the iOS devices to another SSID and vlan, which was a better fix.
My iPhone barely registers any battery usage by Find My but it hammers my iPad drawing the battery anywhere from 20 to 50% overnight. It’s a very real and very annoying problem.
I've seen this issue in a slightly different context. A few years ago, my Android phone began dying much more quickly than before. Looking at the built-in battery stats, nothing was amiss and there were no apps causing excessive wakeups. It was only when I used Android Battery Historian that I saw there was a ton of bluetooth wakeups caused by Google Play Services.
But why would it be waking up so much? Usually the wake requests originate from some other app, but I didn't see any associated wakeups in the stats dump. After a while I remembered that I installed GasBuddy recently, and a Google search revealed that other people had Bluetooth battery drain issues after installing it. Apparently GasBuddy had an ads SDK that aggressively scanned for Bluetooth beacons. Removing the app stopped the drain.
I was shocked that no battery stats screen showed GasBuddy was the culprit. Even the Battery Historian tool (which requires the user to run a Docker image and dump a bugreport) only hinted that there was some Bluetooth wakeups, but didn't show which app they originated from.
This AirTag seems to be a similar issue, especially if a less experienced user doesn't realized all the "Find My" wakeups are caused by nearby AirTags.
I think Apple needs to make the "deep sleep" states of their devices more strict so they can minimize drain when sitting (both when sitting overnight on a nightstand, or for a week in a living room). Notifications (besides calls) can usually afford to be batched since users are asleep or not nearby. As for AirTags, if one is being carried through an area, there's probably other iDevices that are being actively used nearby. They're already awake and using RF, so they can handle the AirTag ping with virtually no additional power consumption.
That could also just be a bug. I remember installing an energy sucking application in 2014 on my Android; I think it was Expensify. I had noticed my battery was draining pretty fast, but then I noticed it took forever to even charge the phone. Upon closer examination, the app was consuming like 65% of all the energy being used. It must have been a bug, as there's no way they would make an app drain the battery that fast on purpose.
LOL a long time ago I had a similar problem with Words With Friends. The app somehow never seemed to sleep. Even when plugged into a 2A charger, my phone would slowly drain.
I used to work with the Google Play services team at Google. I believe they did eventually fix the battery attribution issue to attribute the usage to the app which used the service, not the service itself.
These AirTags keep looking like a really bad idea. Wasn't there a story recently where someone managed to use one of these as a tracking device for a person and their car, because any nearby iphone and ipad would respond to the tag or something?
Given that they announce their presence, perhaps it is a net positive. Real stalkers will be using old phones, GPS trackers, or some other solution that doesn't tell the victim what's happening.
You can pretty easily buy AirTags on eBay etc., with the speaker drilled out. Apple only very recently added a notification that an "AirTag may be traveling with you that is not yours", which definitely helps... IF you have an Apple device yourself.
As far as I know that notification has been there since day one, Apple has just adjusted the amount of time until it is shown. They are also adjusting the frequency and/or volume of the beeping to make it easier to hear.
So you, as a stalker, have to decide whether to roll the dice and send an AirTag along with someone you want to stalk, hoping they don't have an iPhone, hoping they don't have someone with them who has an iPhone, and also banking on them not handing it over to the police who will just send the serial number to Apple to get your address.
Or, you know, you could just get any one of a number of inexpensive GPS trackers that don't have these risks. Why again would you choose an AirTag?
Without more detail, I find the author's observation hard to accept at face value.
The iPad battery usage being shown doesn't account for just the normal "asleep" battery drain, which, if it's not broken out specifically, could be just misleadingly assigning the Find My usage as the main part of it. (as the only thing that had active functions)
It would be better to show what the battery usage/drain is without any airtags nearby and make sure he/she isn't just measuring the normal sleeping usage and inaccurately saying that Airtags caused it.
Things broadcasting on WiFi can drain an iPad. I have some WiFi light bulbs and they are pretty noisy. I had to put my iPads on a separate vlan to keep them from draining in a few days of standby.
My Mac laptops don’t have this issue. I think it’s because they are configured to not awake up on standby unless plugged in.
Now that's an interesting one. I'm glad I haven't run into that. I've got ~50 noisy little wifi switches in my house, but it hasn't affected my iPad battery life. -knock on wood-
I'm 90% sure Home Assistant is waking up the bulbs more than necessary. (Yay random open source plugins!) It's not a problem for anything else on the network.
I've had this issue too. My iPad pro is generally within 4 foot of an airtag which is attached to my keys. During the day I don't see any real battery drain however during the night it seems to be draining the battery at an accelerated rate.
I'd wake up and check it within the battery info section to see Find My using 90%+ of the battery over the last 24hrs.
I now have a shortcut setup to disable bluetooth on the iPad from midnight > 7am. Find my usage drops all the way down to <2% and battery drain is very minimal - if I leave bluetooth on overnight it jumps all the way back up and drains approx 40-60% of the battery overnight.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 338 ms ] threadOTOH you could use it to detect stealthy fake AirTags? :D
Of course at that point you’ve probably spent more than regular gps stalkerware
At some point we need to put the burden on law enforcement. It's impossible to make abuse of technology impossible but we can criminalize misuse.
It's found under your iCloud Settings > Find My
The only major caveat to disabling it on your devices is it removes the ability for those devices to be located when they're turned off.
In my case, the audio devices menu on Mac/iOS displays nearby AirPlay targets, including those not on the LAN. My neighbors got their misconfigured so it always pollutes my menus with no way to disable this even though I never use AirPlay and don't have any compatible hardware (nor intend to get any). Every time there's a risk of misclicking and accidentally broadcasting a meeting's audio or (if they have auth enabled) annoying the neighbor by waking up their Apple TV (or taking over whatever they've been watching), and yet I have to faff around with that menu constantly because of the next point:
The AirPods auto-switching/roaming introduced in Big Sur made mine completely unusable due to some edge-case bug (even disabling the auto-switching doesn't make them as reliable as they used to be back when they were released, and it takes me 30 seconds of connecting/disconnecting/switching between audio sources upon joining a meeting to actually get it working) forcing me to buy a USB headset. My AirPods are still OK for music on iPhone but became completely useless for meetings even though I bought a second pair just for that reason. - I just can't afford to waste 30 seconds of every meeting gesturing like an idiot while screwing with my audio settings just to get people to finally hear me.
The new "hide my email" feature in Safari now pollutes every email form field with a dropdown that I'll never use, and yet again no way to disable this.
I have somewhat the opposite opinion though that there are way too many settings in iOS now and it does get difficult to dive through all the menus. Best thing I can recommend is to use the search in the settings.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/725664/how-to-opt-out-of-apples-fi...
There are currently two independent systems for finding your phone that work in different but complementary fashions.
Well arguably 3 systems, an iPhone can also be set to report it’s location when the battery is low.
Image of the current settings and explanation: https://imgur.com/a/TepOqb2
This new "Find My" network (what a stupid name, btw) also allows to use other devices to report positions of nearby devices for those that don't have a data connection (AirTags or iPhones that were powered off).
The problem seems to be that a single toggle controls both features, while the first feature doesn't rely the community network and should remain available even if you opted out.
Current settings screen: https://imgur.com/a/TepOqb2
If your Bluetooth transceiver is disabled, your iOS device will not see nor report the locations of any Airtags that are otherwise in range.
If you do enable Bluetooth on an iOS device, any Airtags detected will be reported to Apple over any available data connection, and this cannot be disabled in iOS as far as I know.
Disabling Bluetooth will likely save any device's battery. This is separate from GPS and mobile data.
That certainly seems to contradict Apple's own documentation on the Find My network. At least according to my interpretation, it seems very clear that disabling the "Find My network" toggle will disable your device's participation in the network.
It doesn't particularly imply that your device isn't still acting as a 'base' for other devices in the network.
> Find My can use the Find My network to help find devices even if they are not connected to the internet and, for supported devices, even if they are turned off or erased. Devices in the Find My network use Bluetooth wireless technology to detect missing devices or compatible items nearby, including AirTags and compatible third-party products registered to your Apple ID, and report their approximate location back to the owner. If a device is turned off or erased, that location is also visible to members of the owner’s Family Sharing group with whom they have chosen to share the location. The interaction is end-to-end encrypted, and Apple cannot see the location of any offline device or reporting device. When your device participates in the Find My network, it can both be located by the network and anonymously help locate other missing devices. You can choose to have your iOS or iPadOS device not participate in the Find My network by going to Settings > [your name] > Find My > Find My [device] and tapping to disable Find My network.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/managedsettings/re...
I understand the calculation on the companies side, and there’s also a widespread “children shouldn’t be using/doing/viewing anything mildly risky” kind of mentality spreading around that makes it a no-risk move to just ban kids from a platform.
I recently wanted to move a youtube account inside the family management umbrella, and setting it’s age at 11 meant the account couldn’t see nor write comments on any video anymore. And there’s no authorization the parent can give to lift the restriction. Of course to move the age back you need an official ID as proof, so it was a one way move…
For instance I’m directly mentioning Youtube, but outside of comments it’s still somewhat usable for a 13- yo kid.
Twitter could have set a mode for 13yo (idk, have parents pre-vet the tweets if they are really into controlling ?) but it looks like it was simpler for them to just ban pre-teen accounts.
I’m not sure facebook can deal with pre-13 yo either.
Basically the shittier the company, the less it will be able to handle the pre 13yo case, and I wouldn’t put the blame on COPPA.
Getting more specific and explaining *why* certain apps are being hidden for a given age setting would be even better. Each app would probably provide its own explanatory string to be displayed (so the liability and complaints can be shifted to the apps, and the whole idea could actually get off the ground ;) ).
I'm honestly curious why Netflix is being hidden in particular. I immediately thought of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COPPA, but then realized that law is around data collection and privacy. Is Netflix just checking out completely because of that, or is there some more nuanced media-specific thing they're avoiding falling afoul of by disappearing for 9+?
Make it play Rick Astley until they fix it.
Could be a fun wardriving project to do.
2. "forcing me to buy a USB headset." --> If it has a boom, everybody on the meeting, unknowingly, thanks you :)
The only thing better is an actual VoIP phone (eg Polycom).
One of the things that biases is that they hear the others OK, so assume the earbuds are fine. What needs digging is to understand that when somebody has open mike like that, most meeting software engages heavy noise reduction or even half-duplex conversation; so there's a lot of interruptions and "what did you say" and garbled voices for other people, that is hard to trace to root cause of that open busy mike.
1. Grouchy geek who wants to optimize
2. Cheerful regular person who thinks everything is great (*and doesn't really want to bother)
As well, it reminds me of how everybody believes themselves to be a great driver. Try getting advanced driving school gift certificate to a friend, family or special someone - they almost universally find it insulting and offensive. "I've been driving for 20 years!". (sure, what new skill have you learned or worked on in last 19.8 years?)
Similarly, no matter how kindly I suggest headset, I invariably hear some variation of angry "I do this for a living, trust me" or a strangely patronizing "No, this works great".
Increasingly it feels like powerful configuration settings are only available via IT management profiles like these. I use one to enabling full system logging since that’s the only way.
I'll also use the opportunity to disable Apple News, TV+, widgets and similar bloat I'm not using.
It’s telling that these days corporate IT departments have more powerful configuration options available to them than us mere users.
If it was purely up to Apple they'd rather not give anyone these options at all, however that won't fly in the enterprise so they have to compromise.
Now I run CalyxOS, haven't used google maps in a long time, and maybe i'm worse for not knowing about speed traps or the fastest route, but... I feel fine.
"Accidentally" broadcasting a few times is probably all you need to do to get them to fix their stuff... They probably don't even know.
I feel the opposite. I switched to Pop!_OS a year ago, and had a fairly standard setup. A recent update broke my dock and my launcher and made the whole machine unusable for days. I eventually fixed it, but the dock kept crashing and the launcher was acting wonky, so I've switched back to Mac. I don't like everything about Mac philosophically, but at least It Just Works!
When the underlying JavaScript to be patched created by gnome changes extensions can silently break.
Outside of gnome land this really isn't at all normal. One could for example have used i3wm without issue for the last 12 years, awesomewm for 14, compiz for 16, KDE for 25 years and if you really hate change there is a fork of KDE 3 so you could have pretended its still 2002 for the last 20 years if you like while still actually making use of current versions of everything from the kernel to your web browser.
I tend to research purchases extensively before I buy, and it's incredibly frustrating when the manufacturer decides that actually, the product I bought wasn't finished yet, let's have an update to add/change new and exciting features. I chose to buy a specific device with specific features, and if I decide I want new features I'll trade it in for next year's model.
(Incidentally, is it possible to get security updates for Apple devices without getting feature updates? Not for the G4 of course, but my iPad mini keeps asking me to upgrade iOS and I don't want functionality to change.)
No, and then yes, and then no again:
No, if it's older than iOS 14.
And then yes, if it is:
https://9to5mac.com/2021/06/07/apple-will-let-users-stay-on-...
And then no again :-(
https://www.techspot.com/news/93052-apple-stops-issuing-ios-...
Microsoft are working on fixing this soon
Leave now before turning off secure boot is disabled
You get less and less control over what you can do with Apple. They run a good PR game but they really like to micro manage so much.
Why do my car keys have to start beeping every couple of hours?
I even have some very rarely used devices where “find my” doesn't show that much usage.
Is this tied to a setting or bug?
iPhones >=11 have UWB, iPads don't afaict.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec1e6108efd/...
Essentially if you did a ton of device queries to every BLE device visible, you could drain the batteries of every device in range. Transmission is probably a heavier battery drain so just making them talk to your phone creates drain.
It’s a single device example, but in a bar once I was showing a co-worker once how you could see and interrogate a lot of BLE devices. I pinged someone’s Fitbit, and read that it only had 3% battery left. Then it vanished. I’m pretty sure in the process of asking it to give me the info, it drained the battery.
Lightblue
nRFConnect
BLE Scanner
It's crazy how many devices you can find with those apps.
The nRF51 and nRF52 OTA firmware upgrades also look usefull, has anybody done something arduino like with this?
A personal pleasure toy (aka sex toy) that is visible on Bluetooth. Just for fun I walked a bit around in the garden and found the direction where the signal got stronger.
I can now deduce with reasonable certainty which of my neighbors home has a remote controlled sex toy in it. As I know the family living there and how conservative they are with their cultural background I would not have expected that.
Imagine how I now just could now wait for the parents to make their big yearly holiday. From the website of the tool I know the specs on how long the battery holds when not in use. So if before the end of the holiday the tool is visible in Bluetooth I could reason with a very high degree of certainty that it was the daughter's tool. If it were so this tool would five her away. It would be a liability for her (if it is her tool). If their community knew, they would be appalled. So it is a liability for the whole family as well.
They are nowhere near the technical ability to identify this liability I just stumbled upon by chance.
Update: now I know exactly which model macbook and iphone my neighbor has, whom I have never met. That doesn't feel right somehow.
Do this enough places and over time, and you get a map of what devices are where and at what time, with the assumption that the devices are probably linked to people.
Expand that to a government placing little innocuous BLE sniffers all over the place collecting data has some pretty evil big brother vibes. Or on everyone's phone so we are all sniffers.
But it kind of goes both ways. You could sniff outside a police station and just skim all the BLE devices you can find, and assume with enough data over time the frequent ones are mostly owned by police officers. Then have an app that alerts you any time one of those LEO BLE devices is in range of you. Basically an undercover LEO's Fitbit could give them up.
Creating a BLE based cop detector would be a neat way to sign up for harassment and surprice traffic stops. Unfortunately it would likely also work for identifying other groups.
It seems like there's a bug going on here - otherwise everyone would have the same issue. This is something that can be fixed and isn't really related to these existing overall.
The use of it as a stalking device should be widely known already.
Please don't be so ignorant. It's been a topic several times over.
Do you think there should be a price limit?
Seriously, my comment consists of two sentences. Can't be that hard.
That's not something to be glossed over. Lowering the price of abusable technology makes that abuse a lot more prevalent. Take for instance guns, there is a strong inverse relationship between the price of a gun and the likelihood that it will be used for murder. The guns most often used for crimes are the cheapest handguns that you could get for a hundred dollars or so. More expensive guns, like rifles or higher quality handguns, still get used in crimes but a lot less often. And the most expensive guns, machine guns with collector value, are virtually never used for crime.
In making GPS trackers extremely cheap, it will be abused far more often. It's no longer esoteric technology that most people except cops or PIs wouldn't even think to use; it's dirt cheap and prevalent. Prevalence is a big part of it; it used to be that most people were unfamiliar with the specifics of GPS tracking. Maybe they heard about it in the news or in movies, but they wouldn't know where to start looking to buy one for themselves and certainly didn't have one laying around in their home already. But now that every other person seems to have a dozen of them laying around their home, the risk of impulsive use has become very real. Planting GPS trackers on people has become something the general population can do on a whim. It wasn't like this before.
I disable Bluetooth on almost everything, not so much for "security" as because I don't need it, so there's no reason for it. I don't like things in my ears, so it is of no benefit to me on my phone, and I don't feel a burning desire to provide real-world unique identifiers to in-store surveillance, so I don't.
I also don't use a wireless keyboard or other toys like that, so my other machines don't need it either.
Last use I had for Bluetooth was getting data from a battery charger. That lasted long enough for me to discover I didn't care about the data.
I'm typing this on a Bluetooth keyboard, while wearing an Bluetooth-connected Watch. Apple's Handoff and Continuity features across devices are of great benefit to me every day.
Cables are more reliable, dont disconnect, dont have delays or hiccups and require no battery.
https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack#how-to-track-othe...
I'm not advocating that you should, keep in mind. It certainly seems to be in poor taste, but there may be a platform for using it educationally, I.e. hacker cons.
It's the foundation of how the system works.
The drain can be either slow or aggressive but it doesn’t go away.
Just assumed the battery hit some sort of cliff but now this article has me wondering if my neighbors got an airtag.
I doubt this is exactly a new phenomenon, but it sure seems surprising the human race has made it as far as we have successfully.
It's possible that both people are correct and the circumstances that cause the battery to drain require being connected to a AirTag, not just near any old AirTag. Or there are other circumstances that cause the battery to drain.
They often don't know the right words to use, and have no idea why an issue is happening, or they might come up with a completely wrong explanation. So it's easy to dismiss their concerns by saying things like "this doesn't make sense" or "it works on my machine".
It's only when you start digging deeper, investigating what exactly the customer could mean, that you eventually discover the root of the issue.
Of course, these investigations are time consuming an expensive, often the customer stops following up with you, or you might not understand the behaviour well enough on your own. So very often you don't find the underlying cause.
But calling someone a liar just because you can't reproduce their problem is short-sighted and stupid.
Being someone who likes to solve these problems, I'm aware that cost sometimes require you to walk away from solving a problem.
Maybe it's only when you're in local contact with not-your AirTags?
But why would it be waking up so much? Usually the wake requests originate from some other app, but I didn't see any associated wakeups in the stats dump. After a while I remembered that I installed GasBuddy recently, and a Google search revealed that other people had Bluetooth battery drain issues after installing it. Apparently GasBuddy had an ads SDK that aggressively scanned for Bluetooth beacons. Removing the app stopped the drain.
I was shocked that no battery stats screen showed GasBuddy was the culprit. Even the Battery Historian tool (which requires the user to run a Docker image and dump a bugreport) only hinted that there was some Bluetooth wakeups, but didn't show which app they originated from.
This AirTag seems to be a similar issue, especially if a less experienced user doesn't realized all the "Find My" wakeups are caused by nearby AirTags.
I think Apple needs to make the "deep sleep" states of their devices more strict so they can minimize drain when sitting (both when sitting overnight on a nightstand, or for a week in a living room). Notifications (besides calls) can usually afford to be batched since users are asleep or not nearby. As for AirTags, if one is being carried through an area, there's probably other iDevices that are being actively used nearby. They're already awake and using RF, so they can handle the AirTag ping with virtually no additional power consumption.
From the beginning, actually.
So you, as a stalker, have to decide whether to roll the dice and send an AirTag along with someone you want to stalk, hoping they don't have an iPhone, hoping they don't have someone with them who has an iPhone, and also banking on them not handing it over to the police who will just send the serial number to Apple to get your address.
Or, you know, you could just get any one of a number of inexpensive GPS trackers that don't have these risks. Why again would you choose an AirTag?
The iPad battery usage being shown doesn't account for just the normal "asleep" battery drain, which, if it's not broken out specifically, could be just misleadingly assigning the Find My usage as the main part of it. (as the only thing that had active functions)
It would be better to show what the battery usage/drain is without any airtags nearby and make sure he/she isn't just measuring the normal sleeping usage and inaccurately saying that Airtags caused it.
My Mac laptops don’t have this issue. I think it’s because they are configured to not awake up on standby unless plugged in.
I'd wake up and check it within the battery info section to see Find My using 90%+ of the battery over the last 24hrs.
I now have a shortcut setup to disable bluetooth on the iPad from midnight > 7am. Find my usage drops all the way down to <2% and battery drain is very minimal - if I leave bluetooth on overnight it jumps all the way back up and drains approx 40-60% of the battery overnight.