Or you can load your own firmware to any other embedded device with Bluetooth and also make it totally undetectable from iPhones by changing keys frequently and making it appear like multiple different AirTags.
True! I believe the unique paring here with the Apple tags is that the device is very small and piggybacks off of iPhones, and has a year+ battery. I don't believe GPS + cell devices can get there on the battery department, but I might be wrong.
Putting something in someone's car once is a lot easier than putting something in someone's car and then recharging it once every couple of days.
You can write firmware that puts it in a low power state (like the airtags) when it isn't broadcasting. My custom door-unlocker uses bluetooth and wifi, it has a single 18650 battery and lasts about a year (with locking/unlocking daily) before needing to be recharged. I assume if you didn't have a giant servo, you could wire up a modem and it'd easily last years on a single charge, checking in every 10-15 minutes. It wouldn't be as small and inconspicuous as an airtag though.
Other companies sold trackers which could already use every single iphone/ipad in existence to track their whereabouts???? That's complete news to me. Can you name any of them??
Tile and Chipolo added that functionality only after Apple released the AirTag and allowed 3rd parties to use their network(again, that's a concious choice, that's something they allowed and that they can be blamed for).
Samsung Trackers work only with some of their phones - there is absolutely no chance in hell that Samsung sold more of those than Apple has sold iphones globally. I'll eat my own hat if they did.
The tech is simple enough that many others have released it already and it provides a lot of benefit to the world. I'm glad they put consideration in to how it could be abused and think the world is net better off with airtags.
The problematic tech is not AirTags. It is that every iPhone unwittingly participates in a global network to help “stalk” the AirTag. The ubiquitous distribution of iPhones is the part that makes this successful and scary.
Tile or samsung for example wouldn’t be as accurate
So much this.
AirTags are superior to alternatives due to the massive network of devices.
No other similar solution out there does it.
None has the same reach.
It was very much a choise made by Apple to build and release it.
Technology is not neutral.
The tech existed already and it was cheaper. Airtags just ripped off existing technology without substantially improving it, while causing a privacy/security nightmare that none of the other devices ever caused.
But hey if you want to spend 80$ for something that was already available 2 years ago for 40$ you go ahead.
Without improving it?
The findmy-network is the improvement that makes these devices actually worth something, compared to the small number of devices in the tile network.
How is this a privacy/security nightmare, when you literally get audible notifications and notifications on your phone when you are being tracked.
And how do you come up with these random price estimates, AirTags are available for under 40 and not for 80 usd.
My god you’re full of yourself.
The price I found was for a 4 pack (100€), my bad.
> How is this a privacy/security nightmare, when you literally get
Did you even read the article?
I may be full of myself, but you seem to take personal offense over an apple product. That's basically shilling and frankly pathetic, unless you get paid for it.
No need to get all defensive for the poor airtag, just explain why you think I'm wrong. Like the fruit company needs your protection anyway.
Apple massively restricted Tile by requiring the user to accept multiple scary GPS warnings. By requiring users to opt in (multiple times) they made sure that users are aware of what the app + trackers do, at the cost of making Tiles network less useful.
Of course, now that they have their own trackers, all Apple users are not only automatically opted into the Airtag network, they also made it almost impossible to opt out!
Taping them together tightly silences it. Airtags have to be the most nerfed product I've bought. Day one, they were fantastic. Then they lowered the beeping and rogue alerts to a threshold my wife gets them from my keys or wallet all the time. Then they just beep randomly. I regret buying them to be honest. Tile never really got harped on for stalking. The samsung trackers work just as well as Apple and don't have anti-stalking features.
I haven't experienced the same issues you describe in terms of random beeping or the like. But I do think one of the most curious and irritating missing pieces from AirTags is no sort of tie-in with Family Sharing or some sort of contacts whitelist. I saw one thing saying that was about privacy but that makes zero sense because Apple doesn't do the same thing elsewhere in "Find My" for people or devices. While it's correctly opt-in, once everyone has done so we can see device locations for all of the family's stuff, which is very helpful when somebody is missing their phone or the like (anyone else can help with it) as well as checking in disasters. I don't see why that would be fine but keys wouldn't. In terms of privacy, someone is more likely to have their watch, phone or airpods on them then an Apple Tag frankly. Indeed that's the core logic of Apple Tags, we put down and misplace other random stuff but still have our phones/wearables. It can't be that rare for a family to have multiple vehicles where a certain amount of sharing happens, particularly if it's a pattern like us where the SO and I each have a car but then there is a single old truck that we both use. Family names are on the insurance, legally it's multidriver property. And even good friends/room mates probably share some kinds of property. Whomever has it is responsible for not losing it and thus has an interest in tracking it.
Yeah it's a v1.0, but even so when Apple already has all this infrastructure up strikes me as an odd omission that significantly detracts from the utility for no good end. Even a basic "ignore this tag for a day/week/year/permanently" would at least help sand down a bit of the most irritating notification spam. And worth noting that this sort of thing is a genuine security/privacy issue too: in real security systems, the human factor matters a lot. If people get spammed with noise, they will inevitably end up ignoring it when an actual signal turns up. We've known this forever.
Apple still has some weird atomization issues for a company which is going all-in on family stuff.
This is the company which ran out a credit card and payments infrastructure with serious fanfare— and, incredibly, no provisions for married people having joint accounts.
None, they added it later when dhh and Steve Wozniak made a stink about it.
Using a shared iPad with a family is a bad experience with all kinds of Apple account issues. Other apps Netflix/Amazon/etc. thankfully provide quick user switching which makes it tolerable.
A common, shallow, cynical take…no, wait, never mind: it’s correct!
OS X has always supported multiple user accounts and I can’t see that ever changing.
The I-devices on the other hand are explicitly positioned as personal devices. And I don’t really see that changing either.
Nowadays the price of macs has dropped to the point where some of the iPads and phones (!) are more expensive than the cheapest (and perfectly capable) macs (I do my development on a baseline MacBook Air because it’s so conveniently light). So they are still selling (relatively) low cost, multiuser machines.
So, crystal-ball-gazing time: I don't think this part is true for iPadOS, but it's going to take them a couple more years to really get it right.
Here's where I think they're skating: watches and phones are personal devices, Macs remain what they are (personal computers, I could define this but it doesn't seem necessary on HN), and iPads (and HomePods) are family devices.
"Modes" and Family Sharing are both brand-new, and I can see effort to merge the two concepts so that you can put the family iPad in "Alice mode" or "Bob mode". Instead of separate user accounts (in MacOS each user sees a personal set of applications, that will never happen on i-anything), iCloud just manages all the login stuff in the background so that each user sees the subset of the system they're allowed, with their personal data and user accounts swapped out transparently.
This is a bad fit for how apps and logins work... right now. But Apple is clearly trying to fix that, like I said, I think this will take a couple years at minimum before we actually see it.
- iGadgets (phones, tablets, headsets, watches): will remain per-person
- "shared" devices (appletv, homepod, carplay, home iot devices) will take their settings from the per-person devices and will allow multiple per-person devices simultaneously. So the speaker will play songs / respond to requests from people whose phones are on the LAN; the car will take its default settings from the driver (how will it know?) but the passenger can control the map etc.
I actually assumed this is how it would work. Had absolutely no reason to believe otherwise until my son lost his coat and we needed to get his phone before anyone could find it. I could have just added his coat to my account, but then he'd get stalking alerts all day long. Arg.
Even if you could pair the same airtag on two accounts, that would be useful! I don't care if I can directly share things from Find My, but if my wife could add my cat's airtag to her phone also, that would be nice. Seems like a very important feature to have, people have been complaining for almost a year about it, too!
I bought some Tiles and Trackrs and gave them to friends who agreed to help me test their usefulness, pretending that they had "stolen" these items from me. I would see if I could locate them a few days later when I "noticed them missing".
I got one ping from a Tile once when the friend had apparently stopped for gas, but none from their house. And zero at all from the Trackr. Apparently there just aren't enough users in my area for the networks to accomplish much?
By stealing battery from every iphone user and data from their cellular plan, Apple has built a find-me network that actually works. Therefore it also works for stalking. Therefore Apple is getting the criticism.
Same here, I tried bringing a 'lost' tile with me on the Barcelona subway. It took a month for one ping (it was paired with a smartphone I left at home with the Bluetooth off)
Also tiles don't rotate their BT address so they're an ideal method for shops to track you.
Apple's method actually works because it doesn't need an app installed and they have mitigated the third party tracking problem.
> Apple has built a find-me network that actually works. Therefore it also works for stalking. Therefore Apple is getting the criticism.
Isn’t this criticism a bit like arguing that binoculars/telescopes are bad because they allow people to peep into other peoples windows or cars deserve criticism because they allow you to tail someone(or run from authorities)?
I love my AirTags because they actually have a functional tracking network. I've lost items outside the house with a Tile tracker attached and it proved to be entirely worthless for actually finding my stuff. They simply don't have a good network.
...but didn't open the protocol to third parties. In other words, it's as "open" as the lightning connector is: "pay us $x for every product you ship, and we won't sue you for using it"
Apple's marketing must train in the Matrix for how good they are at dodging bullets...
at the same time, you are using the Apple network/infrastructure of iDevices that track that item for you. Every Apple device that passes your lost product helps find your product. Should they be doing that for free? Serious question.
You have a point about the infrastructure. But the devices themselves aren't Apple's devices, they are owned by Apple customers. I'd bet most of these Apple customers would be fine with you "using" their devices for free to locate your stuff, as long as you don't charge them either when they use your devices to locate their stuff.
Apple is free to charge whatever they want for the use of their servers and infrastructure, and while it's not a good look, they're also welcome to charge again for the use of their intellectual property. However, that's not a reason that third-parties shouldn't be able to access that data. If I've got a Google Pixel in my pocket, the cost is marginal for me to send an API request to Apple's servers and use Find My elsewhere. Hell, Apple could force third-party devices to enable Bluetooth pinging in exchange for their use of the Find My network. It's apparently been lucrative enough on iPhone, I see no reasons besides "muh walled garden" that they shouldn't extend the functionality to other users.
Sounds like you're thinking about how the first pill costs $7 million to make, but pills 2-inf only cost $0.02. Sure, it doesn't cost anything to wiggle some electrons, but it took effort to build out the infrastructure to do something when those electrons move. It takes effort to maintain it as well.
I'm able to see both sides. We all like free things, but free things cost some body some thing some where. If the vendor/maker of a thing needs to pay a license to make it look free to the consumer, that doesn't seem egregious to me. After all, they'll just roll that into the price of the product.
Ultimately, I agree with you. My overall point though is that opening the Find My network to other vendors isn't the same as opening the protocol. What Apple does in B2B sales is none of my concern.
I was really just playing devil's advocate. It just seems like everyone expects things to be given away as charity. Apple is not a 501(c), so if they come up with something, it's because they think there's a revenue stream in it.
The entire thing works so well precisely because there are so many Apple devices in the wild, and Apple is looking to capitalize on that.
They're welcome to do whatever they please. Doesn't change the fact that they're the largest company in the world though, nor does it exempt them from a bit of criticism for being one of the most ruthless forces in capitalism today. I don't think it's wrong to expect them to set a good example for the thousands of organizations that choose to follow their path.
“Setting a good example” is completely and utterly subjective, and should not be left to a company to manage.
If society deems something is in the best interests of society, it should be regulated by law. Asking companies to mind themselves in regards to what is best for society at large, while also mandating they maximize value for shareholders, is confusing at best.
The question as asked seems pretty clear to me. If Company A builds a product/service, why should Company B be expected to utilize Company A's work without compensation?
The hard part is convincing anyone to use your open protocol, when the people who are in the best position to implement it are also the ones who would most benefit from a closed-protocol.
Bitcoin used to do this: low value and/or infrequent transfers used to be free.
Only charged money for big transfers and the high frequency traders.
Dunno why it stopped. Seemed sensible to reward hodlers and incentivize use for microtransactions. Ultimately, liquidity comes from being able to trade a big thing easily for lots of small things.
> Bitcoin used to do this: low value and/or infrequent transfers used to be free.
Miners used to include zero-fee transactions in blocks when there was space available. Nowadays, most blocks are full or nearly so, so miners have a financial interest in mining transactions with the highest fee-per-byte first and ignoring anything which has a low or zero fee attached.
There was never any special handling for "infrequent" transfers.
Maybe I got it wrong: I thought it meant how long the coins have been sitting around, but maybe it means how long the transaction has been sitting unmined to make sure no transaction is left behind?
But it seems I'm on the right track, in that input_age was a measure of how many confirmations, which suggests it's about how long it's been since the last time they were moved:
Would anyone be interested in actually building this? I would love to work on something along these lines.
An open protocol would mean trackers could be built right into things, like a keychain flashlight with a tracker.
You also wouldn't need a phone to pick them up, an ESP32 could handle the relaying to WiFi, so something like a school's lost and found could have a fixed base station for $5.
Even better, devices could relay microscopic amounts of data through nearby nodes. It would be like the Things Network, but at a quarter of the cost and with zero new hardware to get started.
Making it blockchain-based would guarantee all parties will have equal access to the application indefinitely. It's ideal for a situation where you want infrastructure to be shared by mutually distrusting parties.
The problem with blockchain-based applications right now is that the blockchain is not scalable in its write-access, so the extent to which such applications can be updated is quite limited.
I wouldn’t monetize directly, instead the cost could be subsidized by services built on top of it. For example, naming & discovery, durable log aggregation etc.
At the moment, if someone attaches a Airtag on my car and I have an iPhone it will notify me someone is tracking me. If I have an another phone however I don't receive that warning. Apple's put a product out there that benefits them while decreasing the safety of people who don't use their products. An open protocol at least would prevent this.
USB is a (closed!) protocol that's mandated by regulation. Don't like what the USB-IF has done with their data profiles/power profiles/etc? Prefer a lower-cost connector that doesn't require cables to be hand-assembled? Tough shit.
The mandates are often things you don't see as a citizen, but often on government contractors (a huge part of the US economy).
The number of RFCs that are required for basic things like email, storage, security etc are essential standards primarily because USG required contractors and vendors to adhere to those standards.
Apple gets a lot of focus on it that other companies do not.
Ex. Headlines often focus on Apple when revealing some of Foxconn's worst labor practices. But stories about Foxconn using child labor to build Alexa devices, and the person who blew the whistle on that being tortured and put in jail for revealing it, went fairly under the radar in comparison. It's definitely a good thin that unethical labor practices being used to build our stuff is discussed, just the headlines and initial focus might lead laymen to believe one American hardware company is causing this, rather than most.
Previously, it didn't help random creeps to find home address of a girl he saw in a grocery store. Now, with AirTags it is rather trivial. Thanks, Apple.
To be fair to Apple, products like [1] - a battery-powered GPS tracker with mobile data connection - have been available for 10+ years.
A 5-day battery life is useless for keeping track of your bicycle, but more than enough for a stalker to find someone's home.
Of course, they were much less widely reported on by the press - so perhaps less known by stalkers? And only available via ebay, not off-the-shelf in reputable retailers.
It was all over the tech news space back in November that a woman was alerted to one that was moving with her. Someone attached it to her car. And again in January.
You'll note that there's never ever a culprit in a single one of these stories, and nobody ever successfully carries out the crime by actually showing up to an apartment or cornering someone in their car. It's classic urban legend stuff.
Would you expect people to sometimes get away with committing a crime like stalking? Yes. Would you expect every single person who commits stalking in this way to always, without exception, get away with it? Of course not. The parsimonious explanation is that the vast majority of these stories are simple misunderstandings, like someone accidentally dropping one somewhere.
How many stalking victims never found out they are tracked because they used Android phones? How many perpetrators just covertly removed the AirTag after the attack? This device allows very clandestine surveillance by anyone.
Did you read those articles? Neither of them actually shows someone showing up in a location as a result of using AirTags to track someone. They show someone finding an AirTag that wasn't theirs.
I'm willing to grant that the number of people caught would be lower than the number of people who were actually successful -- we don't catch every murderer, for example. But isn't there one, just one, example of someone actually showing up? Nobody ever gets caught? Like I said, this is classic urban legend material.
> But stories about Foxconn using child labor to build Alexa devices ... went fairly under the radar in comparison
This specific instance might be true, I don't know. But it seems incorrect to base an argument off Apple getting less/more coverage than a company like Amazon.
For sure. I meant to add that sort of sentiment but spaced. There is definitely a level of "poor Apple, lets break out the tiniest violin for them". It's hard to cry over the world's largest public corporation getting more scrutiny than some others.
Apple has over a hundred million iPhones all across the US and opted them into helping track Airtags without asking for permission (I'm sure it was buried in the middle of pages of terms of service). The only way to opt your iDevice out of tracking is to turn off Find My, so you can't find your phone if you lose it. Nice bit of artificial tying there. Tile and Samsung devices are more for personal use and won't really work outside your own location.
You can opt out of the "Find My network" part separately from the overall Find My system. This does mean that you'd not be able to find your phone if it's fully powered off, of course, but that seems to be a fair trade-off if you don't want to track or be tracked as part of this.
Reminds me of Comcast, ooh sorry, XFINITY (rebranded to try to drop their reputation as the #1 anti-consumer company) enabling public wifi on your modem / AP without your consent, then burying the opt-out.
Not on the same level, but Netflix auto-playing videos and previews is also annoying, and the option to disable it is purposely hidden on their website, not accessible through the app. Ugh.
I could swear that Samsung's find my phone service works exactly the same way. Your phone is automatically used to track every other phone around you. It might not work for whatever their air tag equivalent is though
Samsung trackers do not work nearly as well imo. Or tile for that matter. I’ve tried most of them and AirTags are clearly on another level for better or worse
I do think AirTags should have a button like the Samsung ones, tho.
Android phones don't intrinsically track tags, they need software specifically installed for this. So almost none of those Android phones can be used to track anything. On the other hand all newer iPhones can track any AirTag out of the box, in what's probably the single biggest tracking network in the world.
Don’t know why they’re being downvoted when your point is irrelevant - the Samsung tracker only uses Samsung Galaxy devices specifically for the network
They work great, it’s just the network effects are smaller for Samsung.
For people at risk, it is meaningless. Your crazy stalker will just drive around locations and confirm where you are remotely.
The whole controversy is both real and bullshit. It is very trivial for people to get tracking devices for modest amounts of money in high threat scenarios.
I think the issue with AirTags is the less malevolent, but creepy scenarios. And to be honest, the issue has existed for years with “Find My Friends”, which I’m sure is widely abused by family members and others to follow people around.
Maybe this a dumb question, but is the AirTag configured to Notify When Left Behind except when left at your home? I've never heard an AirTag beep before.
For me personally, I had to stop using my airtag (a singular one), because I notice that my phone has started draining battery much quicker than it was supposed to, for weeks on end. I checked the battery management page, and it turns out that the airtag functionality was draining most of it (despite my airtag being always near me, pretty much). Neither software updates nor disconnecting and re-pairing the airtag from scratch helped. Once I completely disconnected the airtag, the battery issue went completely away.
I realize that this might not be a common experience and that it could be just some particular quirk about how it works with my phone specifically. But I gave up after that.
I have also not experienced beeping. I do get the occasional alert from family member tag crosstalk but it feels like this is improving.
But the lack of explicit Family cross-view when other devices automagically have it is nigh unto unforgivably bad. I have heard arguments made about privacy but they are not that coherent. Expose an "opt this device out of Family sharing" during config option or whatever.
That friends have attached two different tags to their kid's backpack so both spouses can track is total fail. :|
Tile still isn't getting harped for stalking. I used a Tile to track down a backpack thief 5 years ago, could have easily been a person I was stalking.
Apple's getting a lot of flack because they're enormous, consumers are more aware, and they have a better network... but the fact that they did any stalker alerting is beyond anything the existing products in the market have done. I'd guess the product designers at Apple are probably constantly frustrated with this reality.
Tile also isn't nearly as sensitive because it needs people to install their app to opt-in to their tracking network.
Apple coopted every single phone into a tracker essentially creating a biggest people following and tracking network in the world - plus they use UWB which massively more accurate than what Tile uses.
What Apple created would be Facebooks, NSAs and pretty much every spying entities wet dream to get fingers on.
I had once been standing in a queue of a few hundred people and one of them (maybe several) had an AirTag. I could not silence the warning so I had to endure the huge warning message that doesn’t tell me where the AirTag is nor allows me to disable it.
It’s impressively pointless. Maybe I should buy one and annoy people with it.
Not hard for a non-technical person to remove the speaker. Housing pops right open with a small flathead screwdriver. Then you just remove the speaker's magnet, no desoldering or anything like that required. Took 5 minutes.
I did it to one of mine to use it to track my bicycle if it ever gets stolen.
If the thief has an iPhone, they'll still be alerted that the tracker is following them. If they move their phone around on your bike, they'll be able to find it, within several inches, with the NFC identification feature that gives the last four digits of the owners phone number.
I don't even have that expensive of a bike, but I have two on mine
There's a 3D-printed housing for one that sits between the frame and the water bottle holder. If someone does ever steal my bike, and checks for AirTags, I expect them to find this one
I have a second wedged inside the seat cavity. You have to take the seat off the seatpost rails to remove it
It's pretty common for thieves to have a lot of stolen stuff together, so if there is a second stalker notification I'm hoping they assume it's from another stolen item in their possession (having already removed the water bottle AirTag)
Absolutely. With all the air tags in my family, I think I'm completely desensitized to the beeping and notifications. I really doubt I would notice if I was being stalked.
There’s not really any way to make something that can reliably find your own stuff without also enabling stalking. Either you support the use case and the downsides or not
It doesn't matter if you support the use case or not. The hardware exists, has existed for years, and much of it is better suited for stalking purposes.
I've got a tag on my bike and it's pretty dumb that it starts beeping at the thief if it ever gets stolen. Why do we have to gimp everything to make it difficult to use them to break the law? Isn't enforcement of laws how we're supposed to make people not break the law?
>Isn't enforcement of laws how we're supposed to make people not break the law?
It is the method of last resort, really. Ideally, people have enough success in their life that they do not have to resort to crime. If that fails we have some other protections: we lock our doors, etc. Lastly, if people still commit crime we try to prosecute them
The problem is that without the beep, these devices are no different than your standard GPS tracker that you could use to track someone without their consent. So it beeps so indemnify Apple from that use case.
And for good reason. These devices are already getting popular with abusive spouses. It's worth planning for the worst case scenarios for these things, because they are real.
Apple already sells a silent gps tracker: the iPhone. Realistically a piece of duct tape is all you need to put an iPhone under a car, then you can track it with Find My. This way would be better than using an airtag, since it wouldn't beep and I think it also wouldn't send a notification, but it gives you the same resolution (albeit shorter battery life).
Realistically you have to be much more determined to buy an additional phone and another sim card + pay for the data vs simply using an airtag. If you're already that determined just buy a proper gps tracker.
You'd also have to find a way to recharge the iphone constantly, problem that you wouldn't have with an airtag. An airtag is much easier to hide too (bags, clothes, ...)
The fact that you can already track someone relatively easily doesn't mean that introducing a new small/cheap/easy to use tracking device is a good thing
It’s like normies have discovered small radio transmitters for the very first time or something. This isn’t new tech, it’s just more accessible and the monitoring network is better. ISM 433/900mhz transmitters with small microcontrollers have been around for quite a number of years, but I guess the reduced burden from “watch a few YouTube videos and spend some time tinkering with a soldering iron and batteries” to “buy this and hide it somewhere on a car you’d like to steal” + the anonymity (even though they’re registered to an iCloud account…) and ready availability of these now is a game-changer for criminals.
I guess I don't get it. For the price of an AirTag, you can buy a more capable tracker with GPS and mobile data. And it won't be notifying the trackee that it's there. The AirTag seems like a downgrade.
Can you name some alternatives with a decent network?
If the item has its own mobile network, i'm expecting an extra $20/mo for a phone plan (at which point, comparing to a fixed cost of an AirTag isnt valid.)
If it doesnt have a mobile network and relies on the mesh, then, is there any mesh available? Apple's mesh is global and pervasive.
And if it provides neither mobile support nor mesh, it isnt useful for anything except lost keys in a house.
Yeah, looking on Amazon now, the ones referenced that are $29.99 or lower all seem to require an additional subscription. Obviously, AirTags require an Apple device, but still function with phones as old as the 6s, which can be had for under $100. So even assuming you want an AirTag and need to acquire a phone, the AirTags come out considerably cheaper after just a few months.
Well, i'm not counting the phone (pretty much ANY tracker requires a phone/computer to view results) which I assume is a given. I'm specifically speaking about the phone PLAN which is where the real money goes. A phone service plan will cost $20/mo in the US easily, so thats $250/yr forever. At this point, tracking luggage/bicycles isnt cost effective...the tracker starts to become more expensive than the tracked.
The AirTags are awesome because ANY phone creates a mesh for them to broadcast.
> If the item has its own mobile network, i'm expecting an extra $20/mo for a phone plan (at which point, comparing to a fixed cost of an AirTag isn't valid.)
Some phone plans will give you additional data only sim card and only charge you the cost of the bandwidth (Google Fi does this). You can also get data only plans that are intended to used with Vending Machines and IoT devices (I guess a tracking device on the Internet is a IoT device).
I would. I own a Tile, and it's limited by the relatively smallish network, at least out in the burbs where I live. Having every iPhone in the vicinity conscripted into the network would be good for me... even though I don't particularly want an iPhone.
Mind you, I only ever use it to locate my wayward cat, so perhaps my use case isn't the most common. I don't seem to find any other need for it, though perhaps I should attach one to my keys.
Except that many uses don't need a phone at all, and android hardware could give you an acceptable experience for most of the remaining uses, on par with many iphone models.
Maybe. But if I buy a third party GPS thing for $50 that also works with my Android, PC etc. then it is cheaper than getting the apple devices plus airtag.
A quick search on Amazon for 'gps tracker' will yield at least one option on the first page for $29.99. GSM for communications. Not as small as an AirTag, but 1.5 inches by 0.9 by 0.6 inches isn't exactly huge either.
A legitimate point is that the battery life isn't great. But that's not too hard to solve, if you tolerate a little more space for a bigger battery.
I'm sure there are even better options out there, that's just what I could come up with in under a minute. For anybody with more than idle curiosity, I imagine there are some pretty clever solutions available.
> A legitimate point is that the battery life isn't great.
A big difference is that these GPS trackers broadcast their position continuously, wherever there is cell coverage. The AirTags only update their position when an Apple device (made after 2015) is within the relatively short bluetooth range of the tag.
>> The AirTags only update their position when an Apple device (made after 2015) is within the relatively short bluetooth range of the tag, with an internet connection.
Luckily the "only" is pretty good. There are Apple devices almost everywhere i'd need to track a lost bike/car/schoolbag.
The last time this came up on HN someone suggested this: https://lightbug.io/. I've gotta say it looks amazing, the smaller unit has a battery life measured in months, the big one in years.
I'm surprised they really break down the pricing on their custom tracking devices. Most companies would just have a "contact us" button and then dump out some arbitrary pricing after a few email exchanges.
No Monthly fees if you don't want them with Lightbug. We introduced pay per location last week. Swings and roundabouts.. we know it's still money .. but think we've found a way to keep the business running, offer a globally easy to use product AND not rip people off with monthly fees..
And there aren't any AirTags with the ability to track without notifying the target they are there. Trade-offs.
The point is valid, though. AirTags do not enable something which wasn't already trivial to accomplish. At best it just makes it more visible to the general public, but stalkers have known how to use inexpensive GPS trackers for many years.
What's dishonest is the media pretending that this is some new capability that didn't already exist.
Tile does not have nearly the network that Apple does. I attached an AirTag to an electric scooter, which I ended up returning. I forgot to remove the AirTag; I've been able to track the scooter over hundreds of miles with quick updates (even driving down a freeway). I've been having a fun time checking in on the scooter for months now.
I have a Tile attached to a generator at my house. Since I've disabled Tile on my phone in favor of AirTag, my generator hasn't been detected in over 31 days. Even with neighbors walking past my house constantly.
> I attached an AirTag to an electric scooter, which I ended up returning. I forgot to remove the AirTag; I've been able to track the scooter over hundreds of miles with quick updates (even driving down a freeway). I've been having a fun time checking in on the scooter for months now.
This describes how 99% of these "AirTags Used In Stalking Incident" stories come about.
Honestly I was worried I would have a knock at my door from this. The AirTag will make it quite clear who owns it.
But I expect someone familiar with returned items will say "Oh, someone forgot to remove their AirTag again. Throw it in the garbage." So hopefully no knocks at my door.
For government and law enforcement information requests, Apple complies with the laws pertaining to
global entities that control our data and we provide details as legally required.
L. AirTag and Find My Network Accessory Program
To add AirTag or supported third-party products to the Items tab in the Find My app, customers must
have an Apple ID, be signed into their iCloud account with Find My enabled, and register their AirTag
or supported third-party products to their Apple ID.
With a serial number, Apple may be able to provide the paired account details in response to a
subpoena or greater legal process.
> I attached an AirTag to an electric scooter, which I ended up returning. I forgot to remove the AirTag; I've been able to track the scooter over hundreds of miles with quick updates (even driving down a freeway). I've been having a fun time checking in on the scooter for months now.
That story alone is horrifying and a reason by itself this thing should be illegal. Also, what you are doing is not ok.
Should I drive over a thousand miles to pull it off? What do you expect me to do? I'm not sure what will happen if I disown it, it will probably attempt to be owned by whoever walks by? Can I disown an AirTag without being near it? And if someone who works for Fedex suddenly owns the AirTag, has the situation improved?
I really don't know what you expect me to do. I did this by accident. I thought it was funny.
Rather than ban the device, punish the behavior. Apple has made it quite easy for anyone with an Apple device to notice if they are being tracked. Why punish someone tracking their scooter as if they were tracking some "daughter"?
GPS tracking of cars is legal in many place. Those devices don't report their existence to the owner. Perhaps we should start there?
The technology of guns has been very well stopped for common use in France. Just just have to have a licence to own one, with a training, etc.
Most people don't own a gun.
I never heard, unlike in the valley where colleagues told me exactly that, that you have to be careful to not road rage because you don't know if the other guy is not an idiot packing.
You are being gross. You should disassociate the AirTag from your account.
You seem to insist that you forgot to take the AirTag off, and that leaving it on was an accident. Well, you now know that you didn't and, since you don't plan to retrieve it, shouldn't surveil it for your idle whimsey. If you sold your home and forgot to remove a few of your indoor cameras, is it okay for you to continue to monitoring the home? The answer is obviously no. What you're doing is not different.
Just because feds aren't knocking at your door doesn't mean what you're doing is not gross. I definitely wouldn't call it funny.
To be clear, it’s sitting at a FedEx facility. I’m not watching some new owner ride around on the thing. But since people are so offended, I’ll disown it.
The parent comment is talking about using mobile data and gps - not sure why you even brought up the tile.
Tile is inferior to an AirTag if you seriously want to stalk someone. The network is orders of magnitude smaller. Don’t know why anyone who owns an Apple device would bother with it at this point
GPS trackers anywhere near the size and cost of the AirTag are going to have a battery life of a few days at best. You can get into multi-year battery lives on cellular GPS trackers but you're going to need large batteries and aggressive use of deep-sleep mode, e.g. check-in only once per day.
I recently replaced my dog's collar -- which had GPS with LTE-M -- with an AirTag simply because it saves me money, I get about a ~year battery life and I find it's just as reliable.
I had an AirTag on my AirPod Pro's case that was stolen. I immediately notified Austin's police (APD) as I could see where it was going. Unfortunately, due to understaffing of 100-200 police officers and detectives, most calls unrelated to imminent threats of injury or death aren't being handle for days or ever. So, it's open-season on packages and property because APD can't or won't do its job, even if you tell them where stolen property is located. As long as a crime is nonviolent or the threat of violence has passed (with the exception of rape), ATX has the security measures of a third-world country. I met a UT campus police officer who refuses to live in or bring his family to ATX because of the risks and de facto lawlessness.
Lot of assertions without citations in this thread. HN can do better.
If you’ve never had something stolen before, let me flesh out your data point. The police almost never investigate theft of private property—if they do, it’s when there’s serial theft in an area. That’s anywhere in the US, in any year. They’re only there as a notary of sorts for your claim to the insurance company.
It’d be cool if police used the surveillance tech built into our products for our benefit, but that’s not how the world works. They’re not standing by for hot pursuit of your earbuds.
Yup, can confirm. Had $20K++ worth of stuff stolen from my shop. Police were there only to take notes, file a report, and send me the report # for the insurance claim. the officer didn't even ask any interesting questions, and offered no hope when I suggested maybe they could check around come likely locations where it might be. He was just acting as a stenographer with a badge. I totally get that they are overwhelmed and have to prioritize.
20k is grand theft which is a felony. I am surprised they did not take it more seriously.
I had 2000ish dollar bicycle stolen, the police where I live took it very serious because the value. They ended up arresting the guy. They also find dozens of other bicycles that were stolen and in various levels of being parted out from what I was told.
Also note a tracker in a bike can definitely lead to it being recovered.
As one anecdotal point (and I’ve referenced it here before) but my iPhone was once stolen. I tracked it with Find My and, once located, called the sheriffs department of the jurisdiction.
Based on what they told me they sent two deputies to the house and politely (yet firmly) “requested” the phone back. It actually went exactly the way you would expect - we have probable cause to search the entire house for grand theft. Just give it back.
I went to the Sherrifs department an hour later and picked it up.
Good use of resources? Probably not. Faith in public servants for me? Absolutely. Hopefully a scary lesson learned for an offender or two on a path of criminality? I hope so.
Once you take the emotional factor out of theft, it's basically solved by the concept of insurance. Just replace your things, and you should be mostly whole again.
Solved by insurance? We should normalize the idea of theft because some large entity will replace our goods whenever they are stolen? This seems like it sets up an incentive to steal, since "don't worry, it will be replaced for them by insurance anyways".
Not to mention the emotional factor isn't the only factor by far. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to have my car available to me on demand, rather than have to wait to make a claim with insurance and finding a replacement. Has nothing to do with my emotions.
Yes, we should normalize not reacting violently to theft because items can be replaced by insurance.
Theft is not a problem at the volume you're suggesting it is a problem. Most people don't have most of their things stolen most of the time, and AirTags have absolutely nothing to do with addressing the threat of theft.
And yes, it absolutely has to do with your emotions; everything has to do with emotions, the entire concept of reacting unemotionally is literally not possible for a human being to successfully execute unless you have a severe mental disorder (you don't, I gather).
Violent reactions are really the only deterrent left to keep thieves at bay. If everyone was so laissez faire about it, well, I'd eventually expect my house to be emptied daily, and my insurance to cost about $30k a month.
I get your point that theft isn't currently -that bad-, but realize that using that info to justify thievery just keeps compounding the problem.
You think the reason that every house in the world isn't emptied out daily is because of the threat of violent reactions by others?
You do realize there are loads of places in the world where people don't even lock their doors? And it's not cuz police are all over the place in those areas.
Perhaps material conditions are driving crime in many places...
> You do realize there are loads of places in the world where people don't even lock their doors
In a place with no daily crime, EVERY crime is investigated thoroughly, and the perpetrator brought to justice with all the resources of the (very bored) local police.
Think of the small town where no crime of note ever happens, and suddenly someone's house is robbed. Do you think the residents just shrug it off? Of course not — it's the only thing the town will talk about for weeks!
Of course every crime isn't investigated thoroughly in tiny towns, the unit economics don't magically work just cuz the town is smaller.
There are different dynamics in small communities on account of everyone knowing each other, etc. But it's not because there are expert detectives looking through all the clues to recover your stolen Macbook or some smashed window.
Hell, loads of times small town dynamics mean people "know" who it is, and still nothing happens! Because crime and punishment isn't some sort of kanban board with a list of crimes and tickets not going closed until a perpetrator is in front of a judge.
There are a million things that can and often do go wrong already with our criminal justice system, but it does function, more or less, as a way of arriving at a just conclusion; your suggestion that we throw all of that out is, literally, barbaric.
I can't believe I have to say this, but society is worse off without laws and a just mechanism by which to enforce them.
your suggestion that we throw all of that out is, literally, barbaric.
Sounds like you're arguing with someone who doesn't actually exist. If this happens frequently, it might be a good idea to talk about it with someone who is there for you.
Killing someone because they kind of resemble someone else who had been doing burglaries in the area is a far cry from defending your own property while a theft occurs. If someone attempts to rob or burglarize me while I'm present, I can and will use force up to and including lethal force to stop them. This is legal in some circumstances, not extrajudicial. In the cases where it is extrajudicial, it can often be moral. Police are a great feature of society, but a citizen has personal responsibility over his own life and property foremost. The police aren't always with you; you are.
It is in no way different, and that's the whole problem. If you condone extrajudicial killings/violence, you condone all of them, because your position is that people should be able to take the law into their own hand, using their own judgement, even if it's flawed judgement (how can you know your own judgement is flawed)?
You can't both agree that violence without due process is acceptable, and then disagree with how someone applied their own set of morality to a situation that resulted in them using violence.
It's either/or, because the alternative is for you to have a say in their violence, at which point you're just re-creating a criminal justice system.
> Your position is that people should be able to take the law into their own hand, using their own judgement, even if it's flawed judgement
Yes, and if the judgment turns out to be flawed, then punish them accordingly. There are many instances of laws where the legality depends on circumstances bounded by reasonable judgment, such as self defense. I am legally allowed to kill someone if I fear for my life in some circumstances. The judicial system then determines if my fear was justified. Likewise, defending your own property with violence is legal, depending on circumstances and judgments which are validated in court. The case you referenced was obviously poor judgment.
Your original point is that property cannot be morally defended through violence. This is neither the actual law, nor does it make sense from any real world perspective.
My original point was not that property cannot be morally defended through violence, my original point was that you cannot defend property morally through violence, which is the law (not a single state allows the use of lethal force to protect property, only life), and it makes perfect sense when you value human life over property (as the vast majority of human society does).
And considering the stakes, it does not make sense to enforce post-hoc a punishment for incorrectly applying this imaginary "defense of property" law you've invented. People's lives are not something you can un-end.
There are many more checks in place to deal with law enforcement abuse of power. It's far from perfect, but vastly superior to individual vigilante behavior.
If you ask a lifeguard what they fear, they'll say drowning.
Cops are not objective sources of reality, neither is anyone else. More than a few grains of salt need to be taken when cops say stuff because they're steeped in a very different life than the average citizen.
Near as I can tell, there are good statistics available from the BLS about fatal on-job accidents, but not so good for definitions of "dangerous" that also include non-fatal injuries.
If we're talking pure fatalities, policing is dangerous (it's on that list), but it's much less dangerous than a bunch of other professions... such that you're about 2.3x more likely to die on-job as a delivery driver than as a police officer.
By this token, it's also worth noting that the people who are blaring the alarm horns over AirTags are also people who are steeped in a very different life than the average citizen. Notably, Eva Galperin of EFF who works on investigating stalking-related issues. So, more than a few grains of salt need to be taken when hearing what they say.
Yeah, likewise. Lived close enough to downtown (by Pease Park). Quiet and pleasant. Every time I went into the rest of the city it was nice. I have my problems with the town, but this is not it.
Spoiler: it’s that I can’t get psychedelics easily.
Capturing and punishing thieves has a deterring effect on other thieves. Police spending resources to get "your $200 headphones back" saves more than just the $200 headphones, since usually thieves are repeat offenders and it discourages would-be thieves from becoming thieves. If you think about it, if a police officer makes $100/h you could conceivably make the case that catching a single thief could potentially save local taxpayers who had stuff stolen the officer's full time salary for an entire week. I'd say that's worth it.
Having a working law enforcement system that people can trust also means people can rely on the law to be enforced to protect them, instead of taking the law into their own hands.
Believe it or not, these thresholds have effectively existed in the US forever. It's why we have small claims courts, misdemeanors vs felonies, traffic violations, etc.
> What's the threshold over which you believe crime is no longer okay?
You completely missed the parent's point. It's not that they don't think crime should be "no longer be okay", it was addressing the the grandparent's point of "we're living in a third world country because my $200 AirPods got stolen" is simply out of touch with reality.
> Does someone have to burn my house down for it to be worthwhile for the police?
In third world countries this is pretty much how it works. As an American, going to Brazil or South Africa (for example), you're basically told "don't wear/carry anything of value". It's not that there is a chance that you'll get mugged, it's that it's likely it'll happen. I live in Austin and carry my AirPods on me all of the time. The likelihood that I experience what the OP experienced is so unlikely that it rarely crosses my mind. The grandparent's comment is hyperbolic drivel.
> It's not that there is a chance that you'll get mugged, it's that it's likely it'll happen.
Fake news: there's actually very few places where this would be true. You are being told that because in these countries most people are poor and afraid of losing their hard earned money/stuff more than in America generally. Doesn't mean it's likely to happen at all. Most of the times directly violent crimes don't pay as well as drug dealing, and the criminals sure know it: there's favelas in Sao Paulo and Rio where if there's a thief on the territory, drug gangs will hunt him down: they know drug clients need to feel secure to go in there and spend money.
Once I had my car stolen near the uni I was attending, and also near a favela. One of my colleagues lived there, and I told him the fact: next day he told me drug gangs assured him, and he was assuring me, that they would investigate and if the thief was found to be a local resident they would find him and return my car. The car was found 2 days after the fact, in very bad condition with a hole underneath the motor (they were probably using it to go into ramps/offroad), by the police, in another favela a few miles away - by the looks of it, the thiefs didn't want to gain money on this: they took the car only to have drinks and fun and trash it, then abandon it.
There are thresholds at which it becomes a felony, so that might be an answer to your question. Otherwise we have to ask it the other way as well -- should the police send out a detective if your 99 cent fidget spinner goes missing?
Most people who get in trouble for misdemeanors are observed by a police officer directly (drunk driving, speeding, vandalism etc). They usually aren't "investigated"..
There is a separate category for theft called grand theft, which is typically more heavily pursued. The opposite is petty theft.
However, the big problem with spending resources to investigate a theft is that the vast majority of the time there will be no leads, and no way to pursue them.
My laptop was stolen out of my truck, window smashed and backpack gone. Unless I had video evidence or witness testimony to go off of.
There are only so many detectives and forensics experts and only so much time and they typically have multiple cases going on at a time.
I never said it was okay to steal anything. It's just not obviously a good use of taxpayer resources to hunt down something with such a low value. I don't claim to know where that threshold is, but it's probably above $200.
Conversely, let's say I accuse an Uber driver of stealing a $1 bill I left in his car, is that a good use of police time? Where do you draw the line?
At least in most major city in Germany its the same.
MY GF filed a public assault (very minor) case like a year ago and there is still no success yet all persons identities are known. Police is horrible understaffed.
Do you believe it's worse than 10 years ago? than 20 years ago?
Pay for officers in the US has only gone in one direction, and it's up. They have more resources than ever, more staff than ever. They are perhaps hit with Covid-related issues like everywhere, but "meh pay"? They're not teachers.
Or maybe you think everything has been terrible for the past 20 years. Maybe you think there's always been a police shortage.
And let me guess, all teachers do is hand out worksheets for 6 hours a day and why do you always see 3 constructions workers standing around a hole? But you- you cleared 1.5 story points today tying two Javascript libraries together, that's where the real value is.
I think that speaks more about being a bicyclist on the roads of New Jersey than the dangers a cop faces.
It's funny when people complain about HN being too US-centric, when in reality it's CA,NY/NJ, and MA centric. NJ is awash in money flowing from Wall St, so I don't feel bad that their cops make a decent wage.
The biggest danger most cops face is being hit while standing by a car they've pulled over. That totals to ~60mins if you spend a full day issuing traffic citations. There are much more significant risks the general public faces in their daily lives.
The entire world is not New Jersey- I'm sorry your posh township doesn't have more going on, but my guess is the garbagemen, plumbers, carpenters, etc make similar amounts. Move to Camden, they don't even have a police department anymore so I'm sure you'll love it.
Well, San Francisco cut their police budget by $6m... From $668 million. And they increased funding to other parts of the justice apparatus. Like and increase to juvenile programs and the district attorney's office. You'll be hard pressed to find even the most liberal cities in America have actually cut police funding in any significant way.
Same, I had $4K of camera equipment stolen in the Bay Area and police just closed the case.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next 10 car smashings were the same crooks because the police department won't do its job. They keep letting the crooks go, and we wonder why there are so many thefts in SF these days. Well maybe don't let the crooks go!
That said though I wonder if AirPods are having success in other countries with more competent police.
For the US I really wish we could commercialize some kind of tracker that releases fart spray, honey, flour, ink, glue, and other annoying substances if stolen. If the police won't do their job we need to do it ourselves.
I once wired a cheap 120db siren to a 9v battery and a pressure switch with the default "on" position. Packed it in a plastic pint sized ice cream container with a hole drilled in the bottom for the switch. Packed that full of rocks for weight, with the switch pointed down towards the floor. Packed it all inside an Amazon box with a hole cutout for the switch.
Lift the box, and immediate piercing sound blast. For < $10 in parts off AliExpress. Unit price could be a couple bucks max at volume.
> For the US I really wish we could commercialize some kind of tracker that releases fart spray, honey, flour, ink, glue, and other annoying substances if stolen.
I assume you've seen this already, but just in case you haven't.
Mark Rober's videos are always entertaining, but I wonder the legality of audio/video recording in supposedly an unaware person's house. I assume he has this figured out, but it also makes me wonder whether the "thieves" are actually plants.
> CA Codes (pen:12355) (c) For purposes of this section, "boobytrap" means any concealed or camouflaged device designed to cause great bodily injury when triggered by an action of any unsuspecting person coming across the device.
I don't think any of the substances I listed would match this description.
The unfortunate truth is that police have better things to spend their time on. Heck, I had a nighttime home invasion/$4k+ of goods stolen in Boston 9 months ago and as far as I can tell the police couldn’t even be bothered to get their hands on the security camera footage from a neighboring convenience store after I told them there were cameras outside.
> The unfortunate truth is that police have better things to spend their time on.
From what I can "better things" is mostly pulling people over (legitimately or otherwise) in order to hand out tickets to raise revenue. Catching criminals is what we're told they do, stealing from the public, making money, and protecting only the most wealthy seems to be their real job.
That's definitely over the line. Theft of a laptop or bicycle is one thing, but home invasion is a violent crime, and should justify a far more significant amount of attention.
There was an initial flurry of officers and detectives right off the bat but it felt like theater and there hasn’t been any follow up that I haven’t initiated myself.
> I immediately notified Austin's police (APD) as I could see where it was going.
Was the tracking good enough to reasonably narrow it down to a single person?
I think people expect too much of the police with a lot of these tracking devices/services. I don't have any experience with AirTags, but I know Apple's Find My can narrow down the location of e.g. a lost phone to a street corner. But if you're in a city there's a decent chance that there's more than one person on that street corner. The police can't/shouldn't stop everyone there and search them. Tracking a stolen item to a house is even harder (need a warrant). And an apartment is probably impossible because I doubt the tracking is good enough to narrow it down to a particular unit.
Hopefully, this time, we won't overcorrect. We need to clamp down on crime without crushing the underprivileged under the fist of heavy handed policing.
Policies like stop and frisk really do work at reducing crime. But they also increase the abuse of civil liberties. Especially in those who don't have the resources to fight back in court.
And who pays when people do fight back and get huge settlements for trampling on their rights? No, it's not the cops that perpetrated the abuse. It's the tax payers.
Countries like China and Singapore have very low crime rates. But I don't think we should emulate all their practices. In Singapore, you can get lashed with a cane for grafitti. So, they don't have much graffiti.
We need smarter policing, not necessarily more police. Even in my area, I keep hearing about a shortage of police, and yet, I keep seeing police here just sitting in their same little speed trap hiding places waiting to catch someone and write a ticket.
We do need to overcorrect, it's the underprivileged that are the main victim of this soaring crime. The people in power (DAs/media/politicians) now have more sympathy for criminals than their actual victims of crime.
We can pass laws against giving huge settlements to those that choose to illegally fight against law enforcement.
Yeah, and notice how a good chunk of the people asking to defund the police are from already very safe neighborhoods or very young and never had to live through lots of crime. I'm all for police reforms (eg; body-cam requirements, more training) but the whole defund the police movement is downright dangerous.
I agree, "defunding" (at least when it actually means more than reform) is more of an emotional outburst than a solution to anything. People have a right to be emotional over what policing has become, but kicking and screaming alone is counterproductive. If we really want to reform the police we're going to have to be prepared to invest more money into it than ever since we'll need massive amounts of training, data collection, firings following by new hires, and oversight. None of that is going to be cheap.
You do realize "defund the police" means diverting funds that would usually be spent on tons of military grade gear they don't need, and using those funds on community improvement programs, right?
> You do realize "defund the police" means diverting funds that would usually be spent on tons of military grade gear they don't need, and using those funds on community improvement programs, right?
That's not what it means at all. In policing, as in most organizations, the overwhelming majority of expense comes from paying salaries and benefits. Equipment makes up a relatively small portion of the pie. The only way to defund the police, or anything else for that matter, is to cut the headcount.
Why I don't agree with AOC on much, she was considerably more honest than other politicians when she said, "Defund the police means defund the police".
As others have already pointed out, meaningful improvements to policing in the U.S. would require spending more money, not less.
My friend is a cop, and he loves his body cam. He has had dozens of complaints against him refuted trivially with body-cam footage (and prior to that at least one serious complaint refuted by the camera in his patrol car).
I think most of the anti-police complaints are due to selective releasing of body-cam footage. We are approaching the point where the court of public opinion swings against officers when potentially exculpatory body-cam footage is conspicuously missing; perhaps that will help assuage those concerns.
If I was a crooked cop, sure, why not have a body cam. I get to control when to turn it on and off anyway. If I want to do something bad, whoops, I forgot to turn it on. What are you going to do?
From what I've read, they are against body cams that police officers can selectively turn on and off, because they can surveil everyone but still hide their misconduct.
> Roughly 18 months ago folks were demanding that cities "defund the police", and that's what we got.
It's literally not. Every major city in the country increased total funding for policing. Minneapolis was the only city that voted to defund the police, but ultimately even that was reversed before it ever went into effect.
I wonder if this modification could at least be made harder by having some kind of heartbeat. Build in a microphone whose sole purpose is to receive inaudible, high frequency impulses (maybe a hash signal?) from the speaker every once in a while. If the signal does not arrive in time, the AirTag shuts off.
Of course, no measure can beat physical access to the device but you could at least make the tampering about as expensive as building your own device from scratch.
It wouldn't be hard to make a silent container for an airtag that'd let the audible signal reach the mic but not the alarm. Personally I think they'll eventually have to link every Airtag to a real identity so anyone detecting one knows who it really belongs to.
> Why even involve the cops - if you have an airtag, you should be able to scan it's code and it reveals the account holder's name.
That's easy. If you find my house keys, I'd rather you couldn't just look up my address.
I don't know if Apple makes it easy or not, but I'd certainly like to be able to push a notification to the AirTag owner if I have found one of their things. At least so I can send them a message "I dropped this off at the local police station so you can pick it up" etc, or something along those lines.
> To make it harder for stalkers to abuse them, Apple included (and has since upgraded) several safety features that will alert someone to the presence of a nearby AirTag that’s not their own, including an audible beep.
Is this saying that Apple is relying on the unknown tag to announce itself by emitting a beep, and is that true?
I think you want your management device (e.g. phone) to alert you to the presence of such a thing, not that thing itself.
Apple's Airtag's are a solution looking for a problem. You can't use them to "track lost items" while alerting thieves to their presence. Conversely you can't allow thieves to scan for their presence when they steal something. Their intended use case is pretty useless "find your stuff you've lost" I think, as it covers a small market segment compared to "LoJack, but cheap and fancy like Apple".
The solution requires a lot more governance, and puts Apple in charge of a "court system" with a lot of support cases.
* Every Airtag must have a registered owner. People are limited to the number of tags they're allowed to purchase and use.
* If an Airtag is lost by its owner, they can request it be located. If the Airtag is a significant distance from the owner, Apple must intervene.
* Apple must ask the user if they suspect the article is stolen. If Yes, the user can provide a police report and will be provided the location.
* If they suspect they misplaced the item, but not stolen, things get complicated.
* If the location is mobile since the owner departed the tag, and is tailing other Android/Apple iPhones, Apple will probably need to tell the owner too bad so sad, get a police report first.
* If its location is static since it departed contact with the owner's phone, Apple makes a judgement call as to if they believe it's a stalking situation. If the tag is tailing another Android/iPhone user, Apple should allow that person to have a setting on their phone to passively allow this case, allowing users to consent to being tracked.
There are other obvious edge cases, but I think this at least a start to how this useful technology could avoid stalking but provide for a wider variety of use cases.
And of course this breaks the e2e promise that Apple made, which _prevents_ them from getting NSLs when the government wants to track somebody... so, I don't see a good way out of this.
For me the airtags are really useful for keys/wallet. They aren't stolen but are just lost. I somewhat agree that the rest of the solution needs to come from government since Apple has done their best to prevent abuse but it isn't possible.
It should be a serious crime to track someone without their knowledge. Something that police take seriously.
AirTags are so irritating. If you ever travel with a group its like daily notifications about someone's stalking you with their airpods and there isn't a way to permanently ignore a device.
Have certainly seen it happen with airpods. It's meant to not trigger if the owner is nearby but it seems this fails often with airpods while the airtags are good at not alerting you.
I removed the speaker myself and hid one on my bike, I am super happy with it in Paris. Every minute its precise location is shared through Find My network and I get an alert when the bike is far from me when it is not at home.
I can buy a lot of things and modify it to do bad things.
AirTag is an interesting choice as if you want to REALLY track someone I think an AirTag is a wonky choice. Very much a cheap-o 'best effort' kind of tracking.
I think AirTags are only the right choice for casual stalkers who haven't really thought their plan all the way through. Anybody who is properly motivated will easily find better options.
Right about now I wish I had pasted one to my son's iPad. Of course, I wish the iPad just had that function built in so it wouldn't need a booger attached to the outside.
Well you can have the iPad share its location ... that's a thing.
How you do it depends on if your iPad is setup under a different apple ID or not (still can do it either way).
My father in law who is older and prone to wandering off, I put an airtag on him while on vacation temporarily when we were out and about, and set his phone to share his location to the whole family all the time just to be save. It's very handy that way.
> Well you can have the iPad share its location ... that's a thing.
As a member of my family account, his iPad does share its location. But only for 24 hours after the battery dies, at which point Apple will no longer show you were it was last found. And since it's only a WiFi iPad, it'll only report when attached to a network it knows about.
And even in perfect circumstances, it doesn't work worth a crap. My daughter 'lost' her iPad last night and asked me to beep it. So I did. "Find My" said "playing sound" for maybe 10 seconds and then just stopped, without any further notice. It told me it last saw the iPad two hours previously, so I told my daughter it may have run out of battery. She found it a couple minutes later in my wife's office. 80% battery. In our house, attached to our WiFi. She came up and played with it a while sitting behind me in my office. "Find My" still couldn't see it. This morning, about 10AM, while my daughter was in school and her iPad was sitting on the charger, it started beeping to be found. LMAO. Thanks Apple, for nothing.
They should put a rechargeable AirTag in the iPad somewhere. With all the usual features. Then I could tell you where my son's iPad is right now, and I could make it noisy, even though the battery died a few days ago and he doesn't know where it is. We think it might have gotten swiped by the neighbor kid, but we'll probably never find out since it's a game of eliminating possibilities, not positively finding the device. Since he didn't mention that it was missing until more than 24 hours after it was last seen, I can't even say for sure he lost it in our house somewhere. Such a misfeature.
Found the iPad. My daughter hid it and turned it off so it could not be located. A couple days ago I had asked her if she knew where it was. We have a thing where if I really need to know 100% the answer to a question, we'll lock pinkies and she can tell me anything and I agree there will be no consequences for what she confesses. A momentary free pass in return for a hard truth. She lied to me when I asked her point blank if she had done anything with the iPad or knew where it was. That hurts. She has a casual relationship with the truth (she is 11 years old, FWIW), and I had been trying to give her a way to get back into a more trustworthy relationship. To lie during a pinky promise... ugh. I've failed as a parent, LOL. There's no real reason to punish her, I guess, she's lost more than she realizes yet, I think.
Rant over. Parenting is occasionally such a PITA. I love my daughter but she causes me ongoing anxiety as a parent. My son (9 years old) is so compliant, by comparison he's a breeze.
My daughters’ iPads both have LTE and Location Sharing enabled to our family profile set up through my iCloud account.
My eldest is 13, and we don’t really see a reason for her to have a cellphone yet; it’s coming fairly soon, sure, but for now the 11” iPad Pro that I passed down to her is a much more functional device for her and carries less drama risk as she’s excluded from her peers’ SMS group chat where it seems like the majority of that sort of thing emanates.
When she does have a need for a cellphone, it’ll likely be one of the relatively inexpensive iPhone SEs or an older used iPhone that’s mostly useful for calls and texts.
If I wanted to make sure I knew about an AirTag attached to my vehicle, for example, is there something I can do or something I can put in the vehicle to detect it?
An iPhone will eventually notify you about a tag that is following you. You can get a "Tracker Detect" Android app that will do a similar thing. There's also plenty of apps that'll just tell you all the NFC devices in your vicinity.
Apple's "Tracker Detect" app for Android will not automatically notify you about a tag that is following you as an iPhone will. Tracker Detect only supports manual scans for tags.
someone will get stalked and murdered by someone using one of these devices before they're withdrawn. a completely foreseeable result of bringing such a stupid device to market.
I assume Apple only cares enough about the anti-stalking feature to avoid significant negative press.
As others have pointed out, you can buy small GPS trackers without anti-stalking features already, and those will only get smaller / better battery life over time.
Or, perhaps Apple only cares about the anti-stalking feature up to the point where it makes the product impossible to implement, because both have the same use case (finding). There are many AirTags in my family, and I'm constantly hearing beeping and getting notifications that I'm being followed, because my wife is sitting next to me, with her purse on her lap, and her keys, and her wallet. And guess what, you can't "trust" someone else's AirTag. I can't permanently turn off the notifications, because stalkers would do that too. The amount of anti-stalking that's present is so annoying as is that I'm probably not going to be buying any more.
In your opinion, what else could Apple do here, assuming you're familiar with the product?
So this is a failed product then. Too good for tracking because it can be abused. While the new version alerts the thieves in the intended use case. Should have been given a 10x-50x price tag right from the start, to make it less available and affordable for malicious activities.
https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack/