It's interesting to see that Google takes this so seriously they're backporting it to Android 6. I guess they probably have metrics on what Android versions are still in active use, but I'm a little surprised that Android 6.0 would still be used heavily enough to warrant the backport. Regardless, it's good to see this sort of industry cooperation from companies who would normally be at each other's throats.
Google made a deliberate decision long ago to detach library and feature support from the operating system due to manufacturer fragmentation. So most of their new stuff automatically works with old versions of android
FWIW, WhatsApp claims support back to Android 5.0, and if they haven't changed their support decisions since I left, that means there's a significant amount of users in the wild on Android 5.0. I'm not surprised Google only goes back to Android 6, they were always dropping versions from support before WA did; their threshold must be higher.
I just recently pulled out an old phone that originally ran Android 6 for a project, hardware wise it still runs perfectly. The only thing wrong with it is that I can't upgrade it to a newer Android version.
From what I understand, backporting won't make a difference, unless vendors integrate it into their custom OS installs, and, from what I hear, they aren't really giving legacy support much love.
They are taking it seriously because of the legal liability issues. Their lawyers are clearly worried about the legal implications of their devices being used to track people and things for illegal purposes and want to make sure they have a level of protection against lawsuits from consequences of tracking devices used for illegal purposes. There are already cases of women being stalked using these devices.
> It’s possible the tracker is attached to an item the user is borrowing, but if not, iPhone can view the tracker’s identifier, have the tracker play a sound to help locate it, and access instructions to disable it.
That means someone can steal your stuff, and then disable the tracker so you can't find it. Most people and myself included were sticking these cheap tags on everything we own, and it was genuinely useful during travel or in scenarios where theft was a consideration.
> That means someone can steal your stuff, and then disable the tracker so you can't find it.
This is by design. AirTags were never marketed as an anti-theft device. They had anti-stalking features from day one which were/are at odds with anti-theft.
It was marketed as helping you find things that are lost, nothing more.
> That means someone can steal your stuff, and then disable the tracker so you can't find it
This has always been the case with AirTags. They've had anti-stalking notifications since day one, and disabling one is as easy as a quarter test of the case to remove the battery.
It's possible to build your own tracker atop the Find My network without these anti-stalking features. The Find My network can even be abused for low bandwidth data transfer from any point in the world with an occasionally nearby iPhone.
Yeah, I think the point of these devices is for locating lost items, not stolen items. Trying to handle the stolen use case but not allowing nefarious tracking seems to be at odds with each other.
Can you please describe what scenario you imagine an airtag would be useful in tracking down a stolen item in an airport?
I ask because I'm at a loss. BLE from these little devices has ~40ft of range on a good day, and even if a mesh network were involved, I fail to see what the airtag could do that would help you recover your item. Sound an alarm? Great, the thief knows where it is now, and they can just yank it out and throw it in the trash. Give you GPS coordinates? Great, that'll really help after you find security, tell them what happened, convince them it's urgent, and explain to them what they're looking at when you show them the app. Of course that all assumes the airtag (or a nearby mesh device) has a useful GPS fix, and the thief hasn't already found the tag and thrown it in a trash can or something.
> Most people and myself included were sticking these cheap tags on everything we own, and it was genuinely useful during travel or in scenarios where theft was a consideration.
Yep. That ruins half the value of AirTags. It's a limitation that their competitors, like Tile, didn't have until very recently.
Every time this comes up, someone butts in with "they're for lost items, not stolen ones!", which is technically accurate but pedantic beyond reason. "Stolen" is a special case of "lost" for most people. In both cases the object is out of the owner's possession. "Stolen" just means it's deliberately missing and not accidentally so.
I understand, sympathize, and support the idea of making life harder for would-be stalkers. My gut instinct says non-notifying AirTags would make life harder for many more thieves than the self-tattling AirTags does stalkers. Apple and Google agree with each other that inconveniencing those losers outweighs abetting thieves. That's their decision to make. I'd still be irritated if I couldn't find my lost-with-the-help-of-a-thief bike because my AirTag told the thief I was looking for it.
Aren't there third-party devices like Tile that you could use? Sure, it can't be tracked by every iOS and Android device, but it's not like there aren't trackers that you and your wife could both use.
This is great and it came up at dinner last night which is kind of weird.
Had the odd experience of going to a retreat where everyone sat listening to speakers, and then all went to lunch, and then back to the speakers, then all to dinner, then back to the speakers. And my iPhone popped up an alert that there was an airtag following me. (It wasn't of course it was an airtag in another attendee's bag to track their bag which they had with them, near me kind of randomly, but being driven by the same forces of movement :-)).
My understanding is you should only get the notification if the tag isn't with its owner. That's how it plays out in my personal experience. Back when AirTags were completely broken and didn't support family sharing, I'd get notified if I had my wife's car keys with me only when she wasn't with me, i.e. because I grabbed hers to run a quick errand.
This notification would be utterly useless if that were no longer the case: you'd spend half your time on a flight or bus ride closing the unwanted and unhelpful popups.
You know what would be even better? That they agree on a common standard for interoperability between both systems. They both work in the similar way and do the same thing, this would be great to have a standard.
“Apple and Google have worked together to create an industry specification”
…
“Apple and Google will continue to work with the Internet Engineering Task Force via the Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers working group to develop the official standard for this technology.”
That’s what is happening here. I’m not sure why people are always quick to assume negatives without doing even the most cursory reading of linked articles.
This is such a charade. Making "invisible" airtags is trivial [1], and I wouldn't be surprised if such airtags are being manufactured en-masse.
We allowed the creation of a global tracking network under the false pretense of privacy. The entire Find My security model falls apart when considering "malicious" tags, and Apple knew about this from the start.
In the security world, it seems accepted that no security effort is a silver bullet that's 100% impossible to get around.
Rather, it seems best practice to compose many layers of security efforts, which all work to raise the level of effort an attacker is required to exploit people.
Will this work with malicious tags as well? I.e. tags that are designed to not communicate with a given phone but with other devices nearby? Can that be detected? My understanding is that regular tags will communicate with all phones, but maybe there’s a way to differentiate who to respond to or change identity for every ping? Not familiar with the exact protocol but basically many different tags near a phone wouldn’t trigger the warning, so if a tag can produce multiple identifiers that the adversary controls it could still evade detection?
As far as I am aware, there is no way to stop malicious tags without modifying the protocol to authenticate the messages being broadcast as originating form a genuine tag. [1]
Making a tag that is not trackable is currently as easy as flipping a bit in the BLE advertisement. The same message is broadcast to all phones, but yes, a tag could also produce multiple identifiers and evade detection. [2]
[1]: Section 8 of "Abuse-Resistant Location Tracking: Balancing Privacy and Safety in the Offline Finding Ecosystem". https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1332.pdf
Seems like in theory you could do that, though there are definitely heuristics you could apply to detect those tags, depending on how stealthy they are being.
Also on the servers side Apple could just limit you to a reasonable number of tags.
So if people are sticking these on valuable items, is the use case now for thieves to break into a house, wander around and be alerted when said valuable items (which are hidden or otherwise not obviously evident) are close by?
I would hope the threshold that has to be crossed for the alert functionality to trigger is more than a few minutes of proximity. Both items would have to move to together to weed out false positives, otherwise you’d set everything off at an airport terminal…
As someone that duct-tapes hidden AirTags in my luggage (replacing former use of Tile, but AirTags have a bigger network and I use an iPhone) this is not good news for me. I have close to a 0% concern about stalkers, and I have a significant concern about thievery while traveling. I have an AirTag in my luggage, on my keychain, in my wallet, and in various other places /specifically/ to ensure that while traveling I can recover my belongings and deter thievery. This just ruined all of that.
Well, anti-stalking notifications for AirTags have existed on iPhones (and Androids with an app) since the beginning. This only adds built-in support to Androids as well. So, sorry to break it to you, but your system has always been set up to notify any thieves with an iPhone (or a free app installed). Anti-theft is an anti-goal for the AirTag, and, in my opinion, that is the correct choice, because vigilantism is really not a good idea. What would you do with the location of your stolen item? Report it to the police, they won't do anything, and you shouldn't go to that location, the risk isn't worth it.
AirTags explicitly claim they aren't for anti-theft. I use them to track my luggage so they don't get sent to the wrong airport, not to deter thievery.
All the same I wonder how this will fare on airlines where many people are doing exactly your setup for their carry-ons.
If I'm not mistaken, you have to be actually traveling (i.e. beyond the house) with an unknown airtag for it to start alerting you. If your neighbors are not traveling with you places, it's probably not what's going on.
As soon as the new neighbor moved in I got airtag notifications for days until I silenced them. I can see the prompts being scary/confusing for a lot of people. It basically says "unknown airpod is following you around!!!!" almost making you think you have a stalker that put one on your car, when really its the neighbor getting home from work and tossing their keys on the counter near your wall.
I have two airtags on me at all time. So my wife can find my wallet or my keys. I have an android. The iPhone network is larger so Apple seems more useful. And I can do nothing about these alerts.
I'd like to repost this as a top-level comment because a lot of people are complaining about the same thing:
It's a common misconception that Airtags and similar products are designed to help you locate stolen items.
They not. "Tracker on stolen device" and "Tracker planted for the purposes of stalking" are indistinguishable situations.
They're to help you find things that you lost. They're amazing for that. They're sometimes helpful for finding stolen things too, but that is a side-effect.
I first read this as unwanted alert tracking. Like, I’d love to have my phone intelligently track and block unwanted alerts, from the apps and OS makers that spam me.
Apple/Google will alert a computer if a potential Apple/Google competitor is tracking them. Makes one wonder who this is meant to benefit. The computer user or the company.
Hence the term "unwanted" location tracking.
The assumption made by Apple is that the computer user _wants_ Apple to track their locaton; the assumption by Google is that the computer user _wants_ Google to track their location.
There will be no alert that Apple or Google are receiving location data. Why alert the computer user about something that they "want".
It's the same ruse with Google or Apple providing ad blocking. The ad blocking feature will only interfere with ads that are not serviced through Apple or Google. Ads provided by Apple or Google shall remain unaffected.
These companies are engaged in online ad services. Why would they protect the computer user from online ads and data collection that makes online ads more targeted. There will be tracking and there will be ads, along with an ongoing assumption that the computer _wants_ tracking and ads but only if provided by Apple or Google.
This is only possible because the unique identifier that an AirTag transmits only rolls over once per day.
This means with a network of trackers, it is possible to track the location of a single airtag over the course of a 24 hour period even if you aren’t the owner.
"Specification-compatible" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here. Sure, there are plenty of well-behaved companies making standards-compliant beacons, but there's nothing preventing proprietary approaches. Even with RPA it should be possible to implement "unwanted tracking" alerts for BT devices showing any given profile in their advertising data.
What truly bothers me as a user of both an iPhone, an airtag, and a Samsung, is the seemingly nonexistent option to "ignore this AirTag forever". I usually leave my iPhone at home, carrying my AirTag in my wallet. Yet, every day, I receive a notification about an AirTag tracking me. I wish there was a way to permanently disable this alert.
Will this affect battery life? I can see how Apple's proprietary AirTags don't affect battery (of smartphones around them) much, but if they're trying to detect other companies' trackers it seems less likely that the battery impact is quite so minimal.
A German Uni's (Darmstadt) IT mob developed an app called AirGuard that has been doing tracking device monitoring for some years now. I have it running right now.
Why on earth re-invent the wheel? A bunch of clever folk have been doing this for years.
I want a feature to save a tracker as unharmful. Friends of mine carry AirTags on their keys, and if I go for a walk with them, I get the tracker alert every time.
People always worry about malicious tracking and conveniently forget that you could buy GPS+cellular trackers years and years ago. They are 100% undetectable and very precise.
AirTags always need an iDevice to be close by to update their location.
I wish I could figure out how to configure my own trackers to stop beeping at me. I previously had an iPhone, but switched to an Android, and now my Airtags all think they're someone else's – even though they come home to the same place as my iPad and Mac every night. I can't figure out how to tell Apple they're actually mine, so they just keep randomly chiming in my backpack every few days... and my Android phone keeps warning me :(
Kind of, in that traditional tracking device aren't aubject to this, but it's more expensive; you can't both leverage Apple or Google's network of devices as BT location receivers to track the target and “not implement this”, since this isn't something implemented by the tracking device but by the receiver networks.
So, why even bother with an Airtag then? I mean, they're useful in luggage and things that are easily stolen, so this just destroys any usefulness in that capacity. I bet you see a huge drop in Airtags being purchased.
We decided to opt out of the Google and Apple finding networks and the new proposed standards because it completely ruins the ability to use Bluetooth devices to deter theft. If you put an AirTag on say your bike, and thief steals it, they will get a notification and immediately just find and disable it.
We actually built a (controversial) feature that lets you opt out of anti-stalking features if you scan a government ID. As of today, we have zero known instances of abuse—the friction of scanning an ID is enough to make a bad guy think twice, and a committed stalker can just go get an LTE-enabled stealth GPS device on Amazon. It is crazy that the press and regulators focus on Bluetooth devices when actual stalking devices are readily available.
Some people are commenting on how small our network is. People don't realize that Life360 is on 1 in 8 phones in the US. We are huge outside of tech bubbles. If you are at an airport, mall, or anywhere with any meaningful density of people, our network is on par with the big guys. There is a J curve to the benefits of increasing density, and outside of rural areas we essentially have complete coverage.
Beyond this, we just announced a new satellite-to-Bluetooth network this morning, and we plan to open it up to developers in 2025. It won't matter where you lose your stuff, we will be able to find it. And thieves won't.
> because it completely ruins the ability to use Bluetooth devices to deter theft
I'd rather have the assurance that at-risk groups like women, marginalized people, and notable people are not at risk of having a cheap and easy to use location tracker attached to them. As others have pointed out, these trackers are not meant for, and are ill-suited to use as anti-theft devices. We've had Lojack like devices for years and they'll still work all the same regardless of the reporting standard.
> People don't realize that Life360 is on 1 in 8 phones in the US.
So that's 12% of devices. Another way to look at it is you have a 1 in 8 chance that the device will work and notify you when a potential reporting device approaches it.
> CEO of Tile / Life360 here.
As an Android user who is only now getting to use Bluetooth beacon tech like our iPhone friends have had with airtags for quite some time, I'm in the market for these devices. Your statement here makes me think I should look for devices other than Tile, even if they did participate in the standard.
> As of today, we have zero known instances of abuse
Emphasis on known. The whole point of stalking is to hide the device and not get caught. How would a typical victim even discover it? Or even if they figured out they were stalked, that it was with a Tile device and thus report it?
ID scanning is easy to defeat. This is just ripe for abuse and it's good that Apple/Google took measures to block stalking, even at the expense of anti theft use cases.
I was able to track down my stolen vehicle with the help of Tile and now put them hidden in all my vehicles since they don't alert like an Air Tag does.
This has reaffirmed my decision to use Tile. It seems it's now the most effective option for tracking my property among similar bluetooth tags. Stalking is awful but as you say there are many more effective tools for that, tools which will still be available to people who want to use them no matter what Tile does. If an effective product gets crippled - for a good cause, sure - but crippling it doesn't actually advance that cause, why do it?
> Some people are commenting on how small our network is.
I'm currently in a city, and when I open the map it gives me a circle telling me that there are 1,807 people using tile in that circle. This city population is a bit shy of 1 million, and while the circle doesn't cover it all it does cover the densest parts, so if we conservatively say 400,000 people in that circle then that means that the percentage of people with the app is about 0.45%. Now I don't know if the Life360 users are included in that count, that said I also have never heard of anyone who uses it here.
As an aside, I do wish the app were able to update more often. I have a tile tracker on my bike (and obviously the app on my phone), and I can leave a place, bike ten minutes to home, lock up the bike, go inside, and the app will often still tell me that my bike is where it was before I rode it home. I guess there's a battery tradeoff there though.
Hey; Tile user here. I can’t figure out your iPhone app any more.
It switches between modes at random (map, we’ll notify you, and the signal meter) when the signal is weak, and it says we have to replace batteries constantly. (Even though we just replaced them — is the tile shorted out internally, or do we have to reset a timer somewhere, or what?). Also, it spams upsell attempts while doing this. You may as well be displaying ads for competitors at this high-stress point in the UI flow!
Other than the above stuff, which feel kind of like bugs, I’ve noticed it’s hard to figure out which building (in a 1 acre space) our keys were last seen in. We own all the phones and tiles around here, so giving better precision probably wouldn’t be a privacy issue.
I’d rather go with a smaller, cross platform provider, but we’re seriously considering switching to AirTag.
Thanks for standing up for functionality vs. questionable privacy protection.
Personally I feel like the anti-theft nature of these devices is massively outweighed by the horrible outcomes of stalking and clandestine tracking. They're not a theft deterrent, in fact they're generally hidden so a thief has no idea it's there. And what are you going to do, show up with a posse to get your stuff back?
The world would be better if tracking devices did not exist. It's a shame you've decided to actively reject anti-stalking features.
I do agree there is a role for an anti-theft device specifically where there is vastly higher requirements from the user (government identification, liveness checks, etc).
I presumed such a device would require a low-power cellular service. Glad to see you're making it work using Bluetooth.
That said these higher requirements should not apply if the device has these anti-stalking notifications.
Judging from the pettiness of the negative comments against Tile, I have to assume it’s the single greatest product on the market! Also, it appears your comment is being suppressed, because the age and number of replies should put it higher, but it’s now buried hours later.
> If you put an AirTag on say your bike, and thief steals it, they will get a notification and immediately just find and disable it.
And if a stalker puts it there, me finding it is a feature.
> scan a government ID
Considering how badly companies keep my private data private, be it email addresses or even direct passwords, scanning a government ID for a $10 tag seems really bad from a privacy perspective. Once you get hacked too (like many other, larger companies have been), the hackers will have all the peoples ID scans too to use with another company implementing such features.
Edit: Hey man I'm not engaging you on this, you chose to opt-out of this safety feature and you've enabled stalkers that target at risk groups like me. Nope.
So if someone steals my luggage they can drive around with it until it alerts them and they turn my luggage tracker off?
I am not complaining.
What it amounts to, is that the digital world enables so much information gathering and using flexibility, we need fine grain permissions and controls for our devices and services, so they "do the right thing" for all kinds of corner cases.
But we don't have an information infrastructure for that, so the best we can do is balance concerns.
> So if someone steals my luggage they can drive around with it until it alerts them and they turn my luggage tracker off?
It's a common misconception that Airtags and similar products are designed to help you locate stolen items.
They not. "Tracker on stolen device" and "Tracker planted for the purposes of stalking" are indistinguishable situations.
They're to help you find things that you lost. They're amazing for that. They're sometimes helpful for finding stolen things too, but that is a side-effect.
Sigh. I get it there's been a few abuses of the technology... but it was literally already ripe for abuse anyway.
Whether Apple intended this or not: The real world primary use case for AirTags is still tracking stolen crap. I would to _not_ want to alert thieves to the presence of an attached tracker in that case. I guess tracking your lost luggage is likely a #2, but if you were to survey what people were actually using them for, I'm betting it'd be #1 above.
The only way I can think of solving this is allowing a silent mode on the tracker that requires both a private key from the user (to avoid getting NSL'd) and a private key from law enforcement (Apple / Google already have law enforcement portals) and finally one-way hashing the keys and publishing the results to a public irrevocable block ledger. One could see if your key was on the list to see if you Airtag was silenced, but you couldn't pick out specific tags that were silenced. The law enforcement agency's keys would also be hashed and published, allowing us some transparency on who is requesting the most tag silences, so we could monitor the monitors. If this were bundled up in a blockchain, and the tags were programmed only to act on a blockchain, we could avoid abuse and gain a useful feature.
> Whether Apple intended this or not: The real world primary use case for AirTags is still tracking stolen crap.
You're conflating your primary use case with the world's. 95% of the AirTags I'm aware of in the wild in both my family and friends are used for finding misplaced items - not stolen ones.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
LorenDB|1 year ago
seanalltogether|1 year ago
tantalor|1 year ago
Apple is only supporting latest version of iOS (17.5).
lawgimenez|1 year ago
toast0|1 year ago
treve|1 year ago
josefx|1 year ago
kyrra|1 year ago
ChrisMarshallNY|1 year ago
zadokshi|1 year ago
tmpz22|1 year ago
Or for contractual reasons, or for some technical reason it was easy enough to be "why not"
pompino|1 year ago
That means someone can steal your stuff, and then disable the tracker so you can't find it. Most people and myself included were sticking these cheap tags on everything we own, and it was genuinely useful during travel or in scenarios where theft was a consideration.
thebruce87m|1 year ago
This is by design. AirTags were never marketed as an anti-theft device. They had anti-stalking features from day one which were/are at odds with anti-theft.
It was marketed as helping you find things that are lost, nothing more.
happyopossum|1 year ago
This has always been the case with AirTags. They've had anti-stalking notifications since day one, and disabling one is as easy as a quarter test of the case to remove the battery.
FriedPickles|1 year ago
https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack
atommclain|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
ryukoposting|1 year ago
I ask because I'm at a loss. BLE from these little devices has ~40ft of range on a good day, and even if a mesh network were involved, I fail to see what the airtag could do that would help you recover your item. Sound an alarm? Great, the thief knows where it is now, and they can just yank it out and throw it in the trash. Give you GPS coordinates? Great, that'll really help after you find security, tell them what happened, convince them it's urgent, and explain to them what they're looking at when you show them the app. Of course that all assumes the airtag (or a nearby mesh device) has a useful GPS fix, and the thief hasn't already found the tag and thrown it in a trash can or something.
lm28469|1 year ago
It has never been advertised for that has it?
kstrauser|1 year ago
Every time this comes up, someone butts in with "they're for lost items, not stolen ones!", which is technically accurate but pedantic beyond reason. "Stolen" is a special case of "lost" for most people. In both cases the object is out of the owner's possession. "Stolen" just means it's deliberately missing and not accidentally so.
I understand, sympathize, and support the idea of making life harder for would-be stalkers. My gut instinct says non-notifying AirTags would make life harder for many more thieves than the self-tattling AirTags does stalkers. Apple and Google agree with each other that inconveniencing those losers outweighs abetting thieves. That's their decision to make. I'd still be irritated if I couldn't find my lost-with-the-help-of-a-thief bike because my AirTag told the thief I was looking for it.
m463|1 year ago
AndrewDucker|1 year ago
Which is annoying, because I have an Android and my wife has an iPhone, and it would be nice to be able to both track the same objects.
gnicholas|1 year ago
kjkjadksj|1 year ago
ChuckMcM|1 year ago
Had the odd experience of going to a retreat where everyone sat listening to speakers, and then all went to lunch, and then back to the speakers, then all to dinner, then back to the speakers. And my iPhone popped up an alert that there was an airtag following me. (It wasn't of course it was an airtag in another attendee's bag to track their bag which they had with them, near me kind of randomly, but being driven by the same forces of movement :-)).
kstrauser|1 year ago
This notification would be utterly useless if that were no longer the case: you'd spend half your time on a flight or bus ride closing the unwanted and unhelpful popups.
bryanlarsen|1 year ago
larsnystrom|1 year ago
y04nn|1 year ago
happyopossum|1 year ago
“Apple and Google have worked together to create an industry specification”
…
“Apple and Google will continue to work with the Internet Engineering Task Force via the Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers working group to develop the official standard for this technology.”
That’s what is happening here. I’m not sure why people are always quick to assume negatives without doing even the most cursory reading of linked articles.
winterdeaf|1 year ago
We allowed the creation of a global tracking network under the false pretense of privacy. The entire Find My security model falls apart when considering "malicious" tags, and Apple knew about this from the start.
[1]: https://github.com/Guinn-Partners/esp32-airtag
foota|1 year ago
PaulStatezny|1 year ago
In the security world, it seems accepted that no security effort is a silver bullet that's 100% impossible to get around.
Rather, it seems best practice to compose many layers of security efforts, which all work to raise the level of effort an attacker is required to exploit people.
So I think it's unfair to say this is a charade.
throwaway63467|1 year ago
winterdeaf|1 year ago
Making a tag that is not trackable is currently as easy as flipping a bit in the BLE advertisement. The same message is broadcast to all phones, but yes, a tag could also produce multiple identifiers and evade detection. [2]
[1]: Section 8 of "Abuse-Resistant Location Tracking: Balancing Privacy and Safety in the Offline Finding Ecosystem". https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1332.pdf
[2]: "Track You: A Deep Dive into Safety Alerts for Apple AirTags". https://petsymposium.org/popets/2023/popets-2023-0102.pdf
IshKebab|1 year ago
https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack?tab=readme-ov-fil...
Seems like in theory you could do that, though there are definitely heuristics you could apply to detect those tags, depending on how stealthy they are being.
Also on the servers side Apple could just limit you to a reasonable number of tags.
unknown|1 year ago
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xarope|1 year ago
spuz|1 year ago
antoniojtorres|1 year ago
theshrike79|1 year ago
They can't just go around the house waving a very expensive iPhone to find the items :D
janandonly|1 year ago
perfmode|1 year ago
doublerabbit|1 year ago
tristor|1 year ago
jerbear4328|1 year ago
r00fus|1 year ago
All the same I wonder how this will fare on airlines where many people are doing exactly your setup for their carry-ons.
notfed|1 year ago
They're 70 years old. I'm sure seeing "AirTag found moving with you" is confusing them and possibly freaking them out.
I bought the airtag for my dog, but now am having second thoughts, I'm just imagining all the freakouts I'll cause when walking on trails.
lanewinfield|1 year ago
kjkjadksj|1 year ago
Jtsummers|1 year ago
You'd have to follow someone for 30+ minutes without your phone (or other device if you paired it with something else) nearby.
harshaw|1 year ago
LeoPanthera|1 year ago
It's a common misconception that Airtags and similar products are designed to help you locate stolen items.
They not. "Tracker on stolen device" and "Tracker planted for the purposes of stalking" are indistinguishable situations.
They're to help you find things that you lost. They're amazing for that. They're sometimes helpful for finding stolen things too, but that is a side-effect.
jkestner|1 year ago
Angostura|1 year ago
1vuio0pswjnm7|1 year ago
Hence the term "unwanted" location tracking.
The assumption made by Apple is that the computer user _wants_ Apple to track their locaton; the assumption by Google is that the computer user _wants_ Google to track their location.
There will be no alert that Apple or Google are receiving location data. Why alert the computer user about something that they "want".
It's the same ruse with Google or Apple providing ad blocking. The ad blocking feature will only interfere with ads that are not serviced through Apple or Google. Ads provided by Apple or Google shall remain unaffected.
These companies are engaged in online ad services. Why would they protect the computer user from online ads and data collection that makes online ads more targeted. There will be tracking and there will be ads, along with an ongoing assumption that the computer _wants_ tracking and ads but only if provided by Apple or Google.
shermozle|1 year ago
Bloating|1 year ago
At least it explains why the roads are so busy. Though, I thought everyone was working from home... which would make stalking yourself much easier.
sneak|1 year ago
This means with a network of trackers, it is possible to track the location of a single airtag over the course of a 24 hour period even if you aren’t the owner.
cm2187|1 year ago
sigwinch28|1 year ago
userbinator|1 year ago
ryukoposting|1 year ago
poszlem|1 year ago
enhancer|1 year ago
kjkjadksj|1 year ago
gnicholas|1 year ago
AndrewDucker|1 year ago
gerdesj|1 year ago
Why on earth re-invent the wheel? A bunch of clever folk have been doing this for years.
neilv|1 year ago
nottorp|1 year ago
And to nitpick, what kind of tracking do you actually want?
emayljames|1 year ago
codalan|1 year ago
phartenfeller|1 year ago
ultrafez|1 year ago
euniceee3|1 year ago
With Find My disabled, these Tracking alerts do not work.
downWidOutaFite|1 year ago
What is this other industry spec?
> Chipolo, eufy, Jio, Motorola, and Pebblebee
What about Tile?
unknown|1 year ago
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The28thDuck|1 year ago
theshrike79|1 year ago
AirTags always need an iDevice to be close by to update their location.
chobytes|1 year ago
majestic5762|1 year ago
solardev|1 year ago
Bloating|1 year ago
j16sdiz|1 year ago
dragonwriter|1 year ago
sambazi|1 year ago
HumblyTossed|1 year ago
nexus7556|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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aaroninsf|1 year ago
imwillofficial|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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ro_sharp|1 year ago
crhulls|1 year ago
We decided to opt out of the Google and Apple finding networks and the new proposed standards because it completely ruins the ability to use Bluetooth devices to deter theft. If you put an AirTag on say your bike, and thief steals it, they will get a notification and immediately just find and disable it.
We actually built a (controversial) feature that lets you opt out of anti-stalking features if you scan a government ID. As of today, we have zero known instances of abuse—the friction of scanning an ID is enough to make a bad guy think twice, and a committed stalker can just go get an LTE-enabled stealth GPS device on Amazon. It is crazy that the press and regulators focus on Bluetooth devices when actual stalking devices are readily available.
Some people are commenting on how small our network is. People don't realize that Life360 is on 1 in 8 phones in the US. We are huge outside of tech bubbles. If you are at an airport, mall, or anywhere with any meaningful density of people, our network is on par with the big guys. There is a J curve to the benefits of increasing density, and outside of rural areas we essentially have complete coverage.
Beyond this, we just announced a new satellite-to-Bluetooth network this morning, and we plan to open it up to developers in 2025. It won't matter where you lose your stuff, we will be able to find it. And thieves won't.
https://www.life360.com/find/
rezonant|1 year ago
I'd rather have the assurance that at-risk groups like women, marginalized people, and notable people are not at risk of having a cheap and easy to use location tracker attached to them. As others have pointed out, these trackers are not meant for, and are ill-suited to use as anti-theft devices. We've had Lojack like devices for years and they'll still work all the same regardless of the reporting standard.
> People don't realize that Life360 is on 1 in 8 phones in the US.
So that's 12% of devices. Another way to look at it is you have a 1 in 8 chance that the device will work and notify you when a potential reporting device approaches it.
> CEO of Tile / Life360 here.
As an Android user who is only now getting to use Bluetooth beacon tech like our iPhone friends have had with airtags for quite some time, I'm in the market for these devices. Your statement here makes me think I should look for devices other than Tile, even if they did participate in the standard.
abalone|1 year ago
Emphasis on known. The whole point of stalking is to hide the device and not get caught. How would a typical victim even discover it? Or even if they figured out they were stalked, that it was with a Tile device and thus report it?
ID scanning is easy to defeat. This is just ripe for abuse and it's good that Apple/Google took measures to block stalking, even at the expense of anti theft use cases.
darby_eight|1 year ago
This is not a good fit for bluetooth. Bluetooth is trivially detectable whether it's tracked centrally or not.
sprite|1 year ago
I was able to track down my stolen vehicle with the help of Tile and now put them hidden in all my vehicles since they don't alert like an Air Tag does.
SturgeonsLaw|1 year ago
csomar|1 year ago
So all I need is a stolen ID and then not only I am stalking but also ruining another person's life?
lilyball|1 year ago
eythian|1 year ago
I'm currently in a city, and when I open the map it gives me a circle telling me that there are 1,807 people using tile in that circle. This city population is a bit shy of 1 million, and while the circle doesn't cover it all it does cover the densest parts, so if we conservatively say 400,000 people in that circle then that means that the percentage of people with the app is about 0.45%. Now I don't know if the Life360 users are included in that count, that said I also have never heard of anyone who uses it here.
As an aside, I do wish the app were able to update more often. I have a tile tracker on my bike (and obviously the app on my phone), and I can leave a place, bike ten minutes to home, lock up the bike, go inside, and the app will often still tell me that my bike is where it was before I rode it home. I guess there's a battery tradeoff there though.
hedora|1 year ago
It switches between modes at random (map, we’ll notify you, and the signal meter) when the signal is weak, and it says we have to replace batteries constantly. (Even though we just replaced them — is the tile shorted out internally, or do we have to reset a timer somewhere, or what?). Also, it spams upsell attempts while doing this. You may as well be displaying ads for competitors at this high-stress point in the UI flow!
Other than the above stuff, which feel kind of like bugs, I’ve noticed it’s hard to figure out which building (in a 1 acre space) our keys were last seen in. We own all the phones and tiles around here, so giving better precision probably wouldn’t be a privacy issue.
I’d rather go with a smaller, cross platform provider, but we’re seriously considering switching to AirTag.
Thanks for standing up for functionality vs. questionable privacy protection.
Anyway, we’re rooting for you; good luck!
WheatMillington|1 year ago
The world would be better if tracking devices did not exist. It's a shame you've decided to actively reject anti-stalking features.
diebeforei485|1 year ago
I presumed such a device would require a low-power cellular service. Glad to see you're making it work using Bluetooth.
That said these higher requirements should not apply if the device has these anti-stalking notifications.
Btw I loved your TikTok account!
Noble6|1 year ago
N19PEDL2|1 year ago
Do you have any info or statistics to share about the size of your network in Europe?
imwillofficial|1 year ago
Bloating|1 year ago
ajsnigrutin|1 year ago
And if a stalker puts it there, me finding it is a feature.
> scan a government ID
Considering how badly companies keep my private data private, be it email addresses or even direct passwords, scanning a government ID for a $10 tag seems really bad from a privacy perspective. Once you get hacked too (like many other, larger companies have been), the hackers will have all the peoples ID scans too to use with another company implementing such features.
supportengineer|1 year ago
hnburnsy|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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urda|1 year ago
You were literally just sued for this https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/tile...
Edit: Hey man I'm not engaging you on this, you chose to opt-out of this safety feature and you've enabled stalkers that target at risk groups like me. Nope.
melodyogonna|1 year ago
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xyst|1 year ago
Oh wait, these companies need this to squeeze more ~~money~~ value out of paying customers.
Nevermark|1 year ago
I am not complaining.
What it amounts to, is that the digital world enables so much information gathering and using flexibility, we need fine grain permissions and controls for our devices and services, so they "do the right thing" for all kinds of corner cases.
But we don't have an information infrastructure for that, so the best we can do is balance concerns.
LeoPanthera|1 year ago
It's a common misconception that Airtags and similar products are designed to help you locate stolen items.
They not. "Tracker on stolen device" and "Tracker planted for the purposes of stalking" are indistinguishable situations.
They're to help you find things that you lost. They're amazing for that. They're sometimes helpful for finding stolen things too, but that is a side-effect.
jtbayly|1 year ago
Are they going to alert Android users that they have been tracking them?
foepys|1 year ago
Apple disallows disabling Bluetooth and WiFi easily because it allows them to track their air tags everywhere.
exabrial|1 year ago
Whether Apple intended this or not: The real world primary use case for AirTags is still tracking stolen crap. I would to _not_ want to alert thieves to the presence of an attached tracker in that case. I guess tracking your lost luggage is likely a #2, but if you were to survey what people were actually using them for, I'm betting it'd be #1 above.
The only way I can think of solving this is allowing a silent mode on the tracker that requires both a private key from the user (to avoid getting NSL'd) and a private key from law enforcement (Apple / Google already have law enforcement portals) and finally one-way hashing the keys and publishing the results to a public irrevocable block ledger. One could see if your key was on the list to see if you Airtag was silenced, but you couldn't pick out specific tags that were silenced. The law enforcement agency's keys would also be hashed and published, allowing us some transparency on who is requesting the most tag silences, so we could monitor the monitors. If this were bundled up in a blockchain, and the tags were programmed only to act on a blockchain, we could avoid abuse and gain a useful feature.
happyopossum|1 year ago
You're conflating your primary use case with the world's. 95% of the AirTags I'm aware of in the wild in both my family and friends are used for finding misplaced items - not stolen ones.
chatmasta|1 year ago
Unfortunately, this is practically indistinguishable from:
> I would _not_ want to alert my wife to the presence of an attached tracker in her purse
sunshowers|1 year ago