I mailed an AirTag and tracked its progress
intego.com
intego.com
The alternative is being constantly bombarded with alerts because other residents of an apartment building also own AirTags, which is not going to be useful to anyone.
So if you're a jealous husband who wants to track your wife's whereabouts as she goes through the day before returning to your home every night, well Apple has the product for you!
Or if you're stalking Cindy, just walk by her place every few days... until she spends the night at Peter's, but hey, your iPhone will tell you that, and where to find them.
So what methods are you talking about?
The Nordic Semiconductor NRF52832 used in the airtag, unlike NRF52840, does not support this.
https://colinoflynn.com/2021/05/apple-airtag-teardown-test-p...
https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Low-power-short-range-wi...
Apple seems to have removed support for long range coded PHY from iOS as well, so other vendors can't make use of coded PHY either. It was present in iOS 13, seems to be absent from iOS 14.
(Unrelated, but kind of sad that I got more information on how airtags actually work from a bike components review channel than dedicated tech reviewers)
The Verge still has quality content as long as you keep in mind almost all of their reviewers live in the US, they are all in the Apple ecosystem, and they wouldn't be able to talk their family and friends if they switched to Android anyway.
They have no reason to be enthusiastic about anything that's not an iPhone or an iPhone accessory.
The industry has a very carrot-stick mentality. Gamers Nexus for example gets shit on by everyone especially when they call this shit out while the "real gaming" channels just go along with anything to get review copies.
If i have an Android i wouldn't even know that.
That's why the alert only pops up when you get to a known location (home/office).
As for Android, I wonder if an app could be made for phones equipped with UWB radios that alerts you if a tag is always in close proximity, just based on the tags radio activity.
The cat is well out of the bag now. I think Apple, Google and Samsung all need to get together and standardize safety alerts.
Keep in mind the idea of "other iPhones will help you find your tags" was not even a thing you could test for when the first reviews came in, since iOS 14.5 was not out yet. Testing Airtags, therefore, was extremely complex for some edge cases and the experience was not as serendipitous as it would be now.
It didn't help that Apple was not very open on how the anti-stalking features work exactly, for obvious reasons (you don't want people to figure out how to bypass them).
My understanding is that this is not actually true. AirTags using the existing "Find My" network of devices and iOS 14.5 is not required for Airtags to be tracked in the wild. iOS 14.5 is required, however, to pair to an AirTag as the owner or get the "this AirTag is stalking you" notification.
This is not a very good reason at all. People have already worked out basically every detail a week later as well as how to remove the speaker.
All this did was spam the internet with billions of questions confused about these features and if they will be left with a bunch of ringing tags if they go on a holiday or take a bus.
They took her to the dog park on 5/9, and got the notification that an AirTag was following them. So I was gone for a little over 24 hours, but they only got the notification after they took the leash with them for a couple hours and then went home.
I believe the 3 days is for the audible beeping when it's moved, but they haven't seen that yet and they marked it as "pause safety alerts" so I'm not sure if it'll still beep.
Edit: Also, I have a bag at home with an AirTag and it's constantly updating location, so presumably one of my neighbors has an iPhone that's nearby. Kind of cool that it updates so frequently, and I'd say it was worth replacing my Tiles because of it.
I used to have a Tile and the AirTag is so much better with updating location just because the sheer number of iPhones.
If I do you the favor of watching your dog, I'm going to be pissed if you're spying on me during the process.
I'm sure they knew about it, so I don't think it's unethical, just sort of ugly.
It's more useful to know when someone is X minutes away when you're being picked up or whatever, so it's certainly not "ugly" to anyone that watches my dog either.
At least here in Germany I would imagine that the only answer to a question like that would be "do you want to resurrect the stasi?".
> It's more useful to know when someone is X minutes away
Usually a quick message is enough for something like this.
This isn't to say I'd allow this with anyone, or that everyone should do this—far from it—but it's a convenient tradeoff in this case, at least, for my friends.
I would guess that my father would have also said "who cares" if his best friend knew where he was at all times. Until he found out that his "best friend" did detailed reports on him to the stasi for Years. You never know with these kind of things.
Giving up your privacy for the tiny convenience of not needing to spend 5 seconds to write a message after you arrived home sounds insane to me.
> If I didn't want them to, I'd just disable the location.
Why is that the logic you apply here? It could easily be applied the other way around: If I want them to know, then I can enable it temporarily.
Doesn't that make much more sense than the opposite?
What would be the point of that?
Speaking as a fellow German, I would never share that info with friends, but using that feature with my SO or future kids, sure. Not to spy on them, but e.g. to know they're safe when I expected them to be home already.
There are much more dangers than just the government even if I chose to use the stasi as an example. I just thought that it makes for a good example where you can know a person for years and still get betrayed by them.
To your edit: Especially using this with kids (probably pressured to do so) is icky. You can claim that you are not spying on them, but you are. Maybe for their safety, but safety is often used to remove rights like this. You still spy on them.
I remember my cousin and I got lost in Disneyland once, because we both somehow forgot where the meeting spot was. We didn’t have phones, and we were, of course, fine—truth be told, Disneyland is probably among the safest places to get lost. But it would have been nice if we’d had a tracker that could just tell Dad where we were.
The negative I see here is that it teaches your child that giving up rights for the promise of more safety (or more likely just because an authority figure says so) is something good and normal.
Also teaching that the concept of constant surveillance is good and normal.
I don't understand why you would like to do this just in case or because "it would have been nice".
- Going on a date
- While out running
- Going to a bar
Plenty of other things too but those come to mind first
It also comes in handy if, for example, she goes to the store and I realized I forgot something and want to see if she's still there so she can pick it up. Or when she wants to know how soon I'll be home so she knows when to start dinner (my bike ride from work is around an hour)
My dog has a "Whistle" GPS tracker on her collar. Friends have no problem with it when they watch her even though they know what it is and that it can track them every time they take the dog out. They even keep it charged.
That is a little bit of a different context to what the comment above claimed.
"Curious, do you find an Airtag on your dog's leash to be effective?"
"It's just to see what they're doing with her"
"If I do you the favor of watching your dog, I'm going to be pissed if you're spying on me during the process."
"but how do you ask a friend if you can track them 24/7 without sounding like a giant creep?"
So it's not clear how a GPS tracker on the dog's collar is different than an air-tag on the leash?
> We're all on each others' Find My Friends, and have no problem knowing who is where. I even have non-blood-related friends on there, as do some of my other family members.
Along with a lot of replies that try to explain how constant surveillance of their friends is fine.
You tracking your dog and incidentally tracking a friend while they are walking said dog is completely different then tracking your friends 24/7 via their iPhone.
It does not make a difference if you track your dog with a GPS tracker or AirTag, but it is fundamentally different than what the comment was about.
I'd find that more invasive if I was worried about tracking. At least with an app in my control, I can turn off tracking when I want to, but if I watch my friend's dog while he's out of town and he sees me walking the dog to his girlfriend's house every night, he's going to ask questions.
Would you really prefer to be tracked by your friend every hour of every day instead of only when you are walking their dog?
I do not believe that.
Why do it then? In another comment I shared that even people you consider best friends for years could betray your trust and even if we take that possibility away there is still the question of how secure that data is in their hands.
Are they going to leak it inadvertently? Can someone else gain access to their systems and spy on you through them?
> many younger people don't think it's too too odd
Don't you think that is bad? People are just getting used to loosing their rights for minor "convenience". Not to mention that getting used to constant surveillance isn't great either.
So I've also been looking for a way to use an airtag unobtrusively. My cat isn't outdoors, but I have a big house and she's very old and likes to hide. I'm afraid someday she'll be sick or worse and I won't be able to find her, so something like this would make me feel a lot better.
Worst case if it falls off the caller is you just go find it (and come up with a better system).
This is probably the one aspect where Tile has been superior (for my use case). I never noticed the bulk of the Tile tracker on my keyring.
I'm keeping an eye out for less bulky attachments online. Everything I've seen so far emulates Apple's bulky keyring design.
[1] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP840?viewlocale=en_US&locale=e...
But if you forget your bag on the train, it would start alerting people on the train after a while.
Phrasing clumsy, but essentially: If your iPhone doesn’t have a Home icon in Maps for your home, you might not get AirTags tracking protection. Someone should test, or ask Apple to clarify.
So, if some guy hides it in your bag at the airport, with the intention of finding where you live, and you get to your home within the same day, you wont be notified about it for many days, or possibly months, if you leave your bag stationary at home.
Doesn't sound like a very good design.
>because other residents of an apartment building also own AirTags
How about just showing you a single alert (or stationary info page you could check optionally) "Airtag that's not yours travels with you, still here"?
You could then ignore it at public transport (where you expect others with airtags to be travelling along), but you could start getting suspicious if you still get that a "foreign airtag that travelled with you is still nearby" when you're at your home.
because there has to be a trade-off between usability and privacy. Something following you for a few hours (max trip for airport to home) could be a stalker, or could just be an airtag on your uber driver. Excessive alerts is counterproductive because people eventually tune them out, which makes them useless.
>How about just showing you a single alert (or stationary info page you could check optionally) "Airtag that's not yours travels with you, still here"?
You'll get that every time you're on a subway/bus.
You don't need excessive alerts, you just a place in the UI that the user can check and see if there's an alert or not. To make it even fancier, add a red dot to the "Find My" icon.
I don't understand why "excessive alerts" and the image of a constantly ringing iPhone is presented as the only possible way to notify the user...
>You'll get that every time you're on a subway/bus.
Yeah, so? As stated above, it could just be an entry "foreign airtag travelling with you" in some UI screen that you open and broswe -- tagged with the date and duration it happened. You can then blisfully ignore it (especially since it can also show "it's not here with you anymore" when you go to your destination).
Isn't this just spamming but slightly more discreet? If there's a red dot next to the "find my" icon every day you go home you're going to tune that out as well.
The original concern was about "excessive alerts" annoying the user with new popups/sound etc. This is unobtrussive.
It's potentially useful information, that can just show the last 2-3 entries, and consumed at will. So not really like spam.
>If there's a red dot next to the "find my" icon every day you go home you're going to tune that out as well.
Most of the time, and it can auto-tone itself down, so it's only shown when you should actually pay attention.
I gave the example of when you're back home, and the same airtags that were potentially "following" you on the subway (e.g. some strangers' airtag) - no longer follow you, so it's ok for the red dot to go back to green.
But if a foreign airtag is close consistently (the same foreign one), it could show the red dot.
And in the next sentence I said the problem is that users eventually ignore them, not that they're annoyed by them (although annoyingness is also a problem).
>It's potentially useful information, that can just show the last 2-3 entries, and consumed at will. So not really like spam.
A red dot is distracting in and of itself. I myself went out of my way to hide app store notifications entirely because it had no way to hide update notifications.
>I gave the example of when you're back home, and the same airtags that were potentially "following" you on the subway (e.g. some strangers' airtag) - no longer follow you, so it's ok for the red dot to go back to green.
>But if a foreign airtag is close consistently (the same foreign one), it could show the red dot.
I feel like this is in the class of features that are theoretically useful, but nobody but the most paranoid actually use. You don't see google/android IMSI catcher or rogue hotspot detection for instance, even though it might theoretically be useful.
Isn't this iPhone only, too? So if you have an Android phone and live near people with iPhones, your location would be identified but you would never be notified.
Sounds like a lot of work. If I wanted to (which I don't!) probably easier to sneak a peek at the luggage tag. Which may be privacy shielded but probably not and would only take a few seconds in any case to lift a flap up.
IMO, this is just proof that the impossible is being asked of Apple here.
Totally legitimate use case: you put an AirTag in your bag while at the airport. The bag is stolen and you use the tag to track the bag to the thief's home. You're able to recover your bag.
Illegitimate use case: you put an AirTag in someone else's bag while at the airport. That person takes it home and you use the tag to find out where they live.
In the first case, any form of notification to the thief would be non-ideal and go against the point of having an AirTag (tracking missing / stolen objects). In the second case, nothing but immediate notification would be sufficient. So unless tracking products are not to exist at all, there will have to be uses of them that are illegal but not technologically preventable.
I just might help out. But the idea that by owning an iPhone I'm automatically opted into this and I can't (temporarily) disable it is concerning. Especially since the feature to alert users of the possible privacy invasion outlined here, seems to not yet be working as advertised.
It's unclear to me if the "Participate in 'Find My Network'" option is what I'm talking about. But I also don't remember being asked about this at any point.
AirTags have some protections against using them to track people, and the AirTag network doesn't appear to leak any private information. That last part could be completely wrong, for all we know: it relies on the software to be correct. The whole point of the gizmo is to "track", and I struggle to come up with an improvement to their solution to allowing users to track things but not stalk people.
This is being automatically enrolled in some kind of public good, where "public" is the Apple ecosystem. Is that bad? I mean, I don't mind, but offering an opt-out seems... polite, at least?
They even might? It's not unheard of for Apple to release software on other platforms, however uncommon it might be. It's certainly not the kind of thing they do right at the time of release.
I don't imagine you'd get much penetration relative to running it on every device at the OS level, though. Probably rough on the battery running in userspace?
It doesn't seem like it solves a problem most people are likely to have.
People are not going to use AirTags to more effectively stalk people than the existing GPS trackers on the market. GPS tracker would be much better in fact.
AirTag: Very economical (no monthly fee), 1 year battery life, no line-of-sight required, easily purchased without attracting attention or providing an address, unguaranteed data freshness, size of a coin.
GPS tracker: Monthly fees, 1 month battery life, line-of-sight required, slightly unusual thing to purchase & may be difficult to obtain without supplying an address, usually better data freshness, at least as big as a box of tic tacs.
It's not that AirTags would always be ideal for stalking, but considering the ease of availability & use, it's definitely going to happen. The most interesting part is that Apple decided to release this product. It's only a matter of time until AirTags are linked to a case of stalking (whether the best device for it or not) and when that article gets written, it's simply not going to be aligned with the brand image they typically aim for.
The latter isn't something under the stalker's control, it's just a really poor tool for that particular type of antisocial behavior.
Plus it's tied to your Apple account, so we're talking about getting a fresh iPhone and ginning up an account, or leaking exactly who is doing the stalking.
The number of people who will try it isn't zero, we don't live in that kind of world. I don't picture it going very well for them.
iPhones can be grabbed used for fairly low prices, same for Apple accounts.
Let the user block types of devices from using their "find network". And let them block individual devices from using the "find network" through their phone.
If everyone could see, every local device, there would be no private tracking.
Sibling comments point out that opting out of the AirTag network is a setting in a given iOS device, which I didn't know, but I don't think that's what you mean.
Apple asks you every, single time you upgrade your iOS/OSX device to confirm your privacy and telemetry settings.
And all of the features they implement are private by design. They use features such as differential privacy to make sure they aren't leaking private data: https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Differential_Privacy_Over...
The AirTag was not moving, hence the lack of notifications. Otherwise you'd get a ton of notification practically anywhere you approach an AirTag. It is working as intended.
And it is opt-in... you need to enable Find My iPhone at setup time in order for that to be enabled.
There’s nothing on any of the apple pages I could find about opting out.
If it took me that long to disable it, it won’t be obvious for most people.
I found it through Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services -> Share my Location -> Find my iPhone -> Find my Network.
They could have put it 2 steps above or found a better way.
The only jump that is not immediately obvious is that the Find My settings are under your Apple ID settings. Everything else is blindingly obvious and is not confusing at all. You being confused does not mean the average person will also be confused. You could just be a confused person.
From there though, it is a root level option when setting up your phone and enabling "Find My iPhone".
I'm actually disappointed that the disabling of the network is even an option.
Bit of a tragedy of the commons situation if we have too many selfish people like you who want the benefits of being able to find their own phone when it's lost but not participate in helping find other people's.
> tragedy of the commons situation if we have too many selfish people
I can’t think of how helping the Find My network would compromise my privacy in any significant way. But I am still glad there’s an option to disable, there may be people for whom it is a concern.
Eh, I find it a stretch to consider things that need to be typed "discoverable" unless there's a user manual provided telling you everything that can be typed. This same reasoning is why many would consider GUIs (or text mode menu-driven interfaces) to be more user-friendly than CLIs.
Voice assistants have a very similar issue, but nobody likes IVR systems either, so who knows.
What if you only want to turn off airtags? This false choice is caused by apple.
Furthermore, when you disable the find my network it disables it for you as well. You can't just do it one way so it's not selfish.
They have a search bar at the top where you can type "Find my" and it jumps you straight to those sections.
"Find My Network: Participating in the Find My network lets you locate this iPhone even if its offline"
So in fact there is no option (there at least) to opt out of finding other people's AirTags unless you also want to opt out of finding your own iPhone, at least as stated.
Or is it the airtag functionality specifically that’s bothering you?
A phone is bigger, more visible, and expensive if someone would want to use it to track you. Not practical at all.
Maybe they should have 2 options: Phone and Tags (or All). Enabling find my phone would not necessarily allow tags.
Yes. What does find my phone have to do with airtags?
Either you use the roads and pay for all the roads or you don't.
Everyone interested in finding their lost or stolen iPhone already turned it on. AirTags will bring up another small percentage of people. The sum of everything available to you, means you have this small price to pay to be part of it: contributing to finding stuff for others.
The specs are here: https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1902/en_US/app...
Page 139 onwards.
If you can find a security/privacy hole in the spec, I think Apple will compensate you pretty well.
Not something a regular dude off the street will be doing any time soon. =)
Yes.
2) You can just disable this stuff when you first get your phone it walks you through these prompts there. If you don't enable it - it is not enabled.
3) Spam should be opt-in - most people don't want it. But a lot of Apple stuff should be opt-out, because people do want it. Ie, turn on GPS / location features - folks really want weather, maps with turn by turn etc. Apple already over prompts on setup for my tastes.
To be surprised that Apple uses "their" network of devices to provide services to their users shouldn't be surprising.
If you wanted control over your device you shouldn't buy Apple, their stance on user's ownership of devices is widely known.
My iPad has the "Find My network" setting (toggled on) but I was a bit surprised to see my iPhone has what seems to be the same setting (also toggled on) but it's called "Enable Offline Finding".
Find My Network is described as "Participating in the Find My Network lets you locate this iPad even if it's offline."
Enable Offline Finding is described as "Offline finding enables this device to be found when not connected to Wi-Fi or cellular."
Which makes me wonder if "Find My Network" is just a repacking and rebranding of something Apple has been doing for a long time. Regardless, I'd prefer to have opted-in. I suppose it's possible at some point I opted in while setting up a new device with "Find My" but I'm not sure. I certainly had no idea there was a way to find my iPhone even when it wasn't connected to wi-fi or cellular signal.
E- It seems this feature was added ~2 years ago and it did indeed use bluetooth and "crowdsourced" Apple devices[1]:
> Offline Finding uses a background process called "Search Party" to broadcast and receive Bluetooth beacon signals at regular intervals, and it can even do its work when the device is in a sleep state. And it does this with limited battery impact for all devices involved, so you should see little to no difference in power consumption.
And whether it was turned on by default seems to depend:
> By default, if you had Find My iPhone, iPad, or Mac turned on before updating to iOS 13, iPadOS 13, or macOS 10.15 Catalina, Offline Finding should already be on. However, if only one of the device's had the Find My service enabled but not another device, it may not have turned on automatically. To make sure it's on, check the following.
[1]https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/track-your-lost-iphone-ip...
I did get a little pissed that the Find My Network isn't opt-out, even though I would likely choose yes.
Informed consent is the gold standard, except when it's not.
You're thinking of medical research and experimentation.
In the practice of medicine the Hippocratic oath takes precedence over everything else so of course informed consent gets thrown out when there is concrete evidence that it interferes with medicine's purpose: healing people.
When's the last time someone gave informed consent while unconscious and bleeding out after a car crash or shooting? That's why we have DNRs.
How can it get any more opt-in?
For example, your device hardware serial is sent to Apple every time you open the App Store, like a permanent supercookie. Analytics are sent whenever you stream a video or make a FaceTime call, even with analytics off. Location Services sends your location 24/7 to Apple over the network, et c.
Apple's approach to co-opting the Apple-branded hardware that you own to benefit Apple is a poor one.
It turned out the USPS took a very dim view of this kind of thing.
I can't find any of this research now, of course, because all the search engines want to sell me tracking devices and package tracking services.
https://hackaday.com/2013/04/10/hacker-sends-this-through-th...
https://web.archive.org/web/20130411184048/http://www.rubenv...
> Is it legal to put a GPS tracker in a package and send it to a fan mail P.O. Box in hopes that you could see where the celebrity lives after it’s picked up from the post office?
which is another 'fun' use of AirTags I hadn't considered :/.
Suddenly these things become a Huge Problem when Apple does it :)
Plus, the FindMy network is much larger in certain parts of the world, and some people might not even know they're helping track AirTags that are being used for malicious purposes. There's so much more potential for abuse now than there was before.
If they really want to do it, there are a bunch of better ways to achieve the same goal.
Also, Apple can adjust the amount of time before a lost tag starts beeping remotely.
As I understand this feature monitors the signal strength of nearby airtags to identify ones that are travelling with you. In this case, if the person left it on a table at their house, they would constantly be moving in and out of range, so it's not moving with them.
"It’s also not clear how often AirTag locations update. I gave my partner an AirTag last week for her to take when she went on an errand, driving about 20 miles from home. Since she has an iPhone, I expected to see frequent updates in the Find My app, but that wasn’t the case."
Again, this is probably by design. If it worked as the author expected and gave you frequent updates, it could easily be used to track an unsuspecting person's location. This design seems much better. It still will give you enough information to locate your lost item, but it is not enough to track down the location of a single iPhone user.
This is almost certainly a product of iOS battery management. Presumably there was only one iPhone in range during the drive (GF’s). If the iPhone isn’t plugged in, then it generally doesn’t update its precise location unless it detect “substantial movement”, which is normally triggered by thing like switching cell tower.
Net result is the AirTags location only get updated when the nearby iPhone thinks it’s power efficient to do so.
If I attach it to your car to find out where you're parking your car, according to your logic it also presumably wouldn't trigger. But it's still a problematic and unintended use of the technology.
What if I merely want to find out where you live, not where you are at any point in time. This creates lots of problems for people at increased risk here that to me aren't answered sufficiently.
As a real me, I'd hope that one could bring the tag to the police, and law enforcement would be able to get the details on the person who owns it? Assuming the answer is "yes", this should deter most malicious use, as even with a burner iPhone/Apple account, the owner of that tracker would be exposing a big trail of their activities.
Or to remove the risk, you can drain the battery til it's got just enough to go a few more miles. Then, it'll keep pinging you the location and die when it gets to their house. With 3 days of leeway, you don't have to be too exact.
It's even easier if you know they aren't going to using their car at the destination. Like if they're going camping or something.
Much more reliable and accurate, zero chance to be found if you hide the device well.
People are inventing the weirdest scenarios to make AirTags be some kind of super stalking tool. =)
The low cost, simplicity, network ubiquity, and availability of these devices is different. Nobody what-if's cell phones (after all they can be used to coordinate terrible actions) because they provide a useful service to most people, as do cars (which require license and registration btw). Misuse is mostly obvious and punishable by law.
Employing a massive, worldwide, distributed network which can run trackers just for lost trinkets, with the nefarious uses so easily in reach (and defenses not available to anybody not on your fancy ecosystem) is a scary thing.
As for other products that exist, I have no defense except that their purchase is either obvious, their presence notable "oops, somebody dropoed an airtag here" (relatively innocuous) vs "oops, somebody dropped a gps tracker here".
I don't know how e.g: tile deals with this, but at the very least it doesn't get to piggy back on my resources by default to trace me home.
These kind of devices have been available for years, including from Samsung who has just as many phones out there as Apple. Of course as soon as Apple makes one – taking extreme pains to address privacy concerns – everyone pops up to armchair quarterback.
> These kind of devices have been available for years
Devices like Tile do not have access to a global network of iPhones. SmartTag only works with Samsung Galaxy devices, and we've yet to see if it works beyond the current model. Apple will make this work for everything. My old iPad from 2014 still receives software updates!
If I wanted to track someone to the point that I’d disable an AirTag speaker, I’d not bother with an AirTag.
Okay, but is that really different than driving down a random street, choosing a random house with a car in the driveway, and thus learning that that car parks at that address?
Knowing that the car you chose to put a tag on at the store later parked at a certain address is hardly that useful, isn't much easier than just following the car from the store one time, and presumably wouldn't upset most people because most people's security models don't rely on their home address being private and thus no one ever following their car home from the store.
Sure if you already know the person's car then just follow them.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/21/airtags-play-sound-afte...
Scenario: sinister stalker (government agent, for example) attaches an airtag to my car. All iPhone users in the area will be happily reporting tag location and helping stalker in his malicious designs.
How do I protect myself against this, if I am an Android user?
The problem is that this new service makes such snooping very casual.
I wouldn't be surprised if within a year we start seeing devices that can scan for nearby Airtags/Tiles/etc. so you can see if there's anything in your car before you head home.
Damn, that is a good point. It'll be very difficult to prove that anyone stalking using AirTags had malicious/illegal intent. Far harder than, say, a purpose-built GPS tracker.
So they are making the problem much worse? That's not really a defense.
Obviously, without GPS and without cellular they rely on being near someone with a smartphone in the crowdshared location system. I think Tile (prior to AirTag) was the biggest, they've got around 10 million sold, probably on the order of 1 million active users once you discount people who own multiple units, or replacements of previously sold Tiles, etc.
As a Tile user, this was sufficient for my needs. If I lost my Tile in a public place, something like 1 in 300 people had the app and I'd have decent odds of getting an update in a couple days. I inadvertently left my bag in a coworker's car once, they don't have a Tile but it pinged a couple times during their commute as they passed other cars with Tile owners. But neither they nor their neighbors had Tiles, so it didn't give their home address. Tile doesn't make a big deal out of mitigating car-tracking or stalking abuses of its products, because it's not really big enough to be a problem. Now, though, there are something like 120 million iPhone users. I don't know how many choose to opt out of the default "Find My" setting, I'd guess that both that population and the population of people who even know it exists are both negligible, so I assume something like 150 in every 300 people are in Apple's crowdsourced location service.
Speaking of populations that may or may not know something exists: lots of people who don't know about and wouldn't buy a GPS car tracker are likely to end up with an Airtag on their keychain. By introducing the product, Apple is inviting the idea "what if I dropped that in someone's bag" to come across a hundred million minds.
Scale matters. At Apple volumes, mitigations like this are smart and will likely prevent crimes from occurring. At Tile's volume, it doesn't matter that much. I'm sure Tile (or a niche manufacturer of GPS fleet trackers) would love to have that problem, but they simply don't.
Took all of 3 minutes. Super convenient.
But for a casual malicious user, airtags open up whole new worlds of abuse.
I think it's also important to consider that Apple getting into this market does a lot to normalize use of trackers and also make them commercially ubiquitous.
Any cellular device will report its location to the nearest cell tower. This data is sold to private parties and available to query nominally by law enforcement only but really to any bidder willing to pay Zumigo or Microbilt a fairly reasonable fee.
Further that location is in realtime and contains historical breadcrumbs.
The periodic pings from your device not masking it's MAC address by attempting to query nearby wifi points, your bluetooth sending out rotating EID's are useful for in store tracking of customers but worse than running footage through collected CCTV footage. Likewise the wifi/bluetooth breadcrumbs are worse data than the LTE pings we're already getting.
Ok. Another scenario. A serial rapist sees a girl he likes at the shopping mall, exiting her car. He attaches an AirTag to the car, and in a few short hours he knows where she lives.
Of course, he could do it with GPS tracker, but such tracker needs to transmit data, and cellular connection is rarely anonymous, creating risks for the perpetrator. So this wonderful technology makes all sorts of stalking much more accessible.
Or just tape a burner android phone to the car.
Or tape a GPS with cellular tracker using a burner SIM to the car.
Cellular connections are more than anonymous enough in most countries, and its not like a perpetrator in you scenario is gonna be leaving the device on the car for an extend period of time.
At the end of the day stalking someone who isn’t actively defending again being stalked is pretty trivial. AirTags don’t really change the status-quo that much. They’ve just shone a light on an existing issue.
He won't be participating in the network, but he's also unable to be warned of being tracked which does seem unfortunate.
(We have only so many iPhone users in Poland, and I currently live in a small town, so I can't just experimentally check it right now.)
If that's true, then one should be able to write an app that scans for AirTags in the background and warns you about their presence. I'd hope someone will do this. I'd also hope this would eventually be included in the Android OS itself, perhaps as a generalized facility to detect Tile/AirTag-like devices around you.
Long time ago, there were these things called "beacons", that IIRC started with Apple introducing iBeacon spec/protocol. They used BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) to announce themselves. Some of those were used for the purpose of tracking your belongings[0]. I assume AirTags must be substantially different from that, because saw zero mentions of the Beacons in articles and discussions about AirTags so far.
--
[0] - I even bought a bunch of these on Aliexpress to play with, but didn't want to install the vendor's sketchy app, so I ended up not using them (but I could make them beep and give me some telemetry by poking them over BLE directly). They worked off a CR2032, but there was no "tracking network" back then - you'd connect these tags to your phone, and they'd just start beeping when they disconnected from your phone. A pretty unreliable design, given BLE can be flaky when mixed with apps, battery saving modes, and thick walls in an apartment. Unfortunately, all the non-sketchy makers of BLE beacons seem to have focused entirely on the retailer market - i.e. using them to push spam to your phone as you walk through a mall. I lost all my interest in that technology then.
Airtags aren't some new possibility.
Stalking via GPS tracker is not new. What is new is going to be the “crime of opportunity:” Somebody who doesn’t plan and think through how to stalk somebody else, but in the heat of the moment they decide to try it, and the AirTags or Tiles or whatever they already own is close at hand.
I suspect that’s the factor of concern with AirTags being likely to become ubiquitous.
I can’t really think of a solution to this beyond Apple and Google working together.
Anyone that cares can already easily track/stalk you.
The AirTag is revolutionary: - Mesh network (no cellular reqd) - Very long battery life - Small - Deniable, unsuspicious - Great user interface
Hundreds of thousands of wives/girlfriends/etc will be tracked by these things within months.
This is not unreasonable to expect. They did it to build the contact tracing service.
When it comes to safety, profits and walled gardens need to come second.
these have existed for a long time at reasonable prices and none of the have the anti stalking measures airtags do.
Also, given how openly criminal russian government is these days, airtags can give them plausible deniability. Like, anyone could have forgotten an airtag in your back seat. With great battery life and virtial anonymity, it is a godsend for covert and unsuspicious surveillance and all kinds of crime.
Met some rich guy? Easily find out where he lives and kidnap his kids for ransom. I can't stress enough how casual this will get.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dylan.airt...
The worrying part is this could be combined with countermeasures to prevent the anti stalking measure from working and even prevent it being discovered by a bug detector. Thankfully Apple has a lot of visibility of the system so presumably would be able to track down bad actors and aid law enforcement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...
This AirTag does seem very nice in that respect. But then I realize what a gigantic privacy nightmare this can be for a large portion of our population.
Stalkers can put a tracker on you, and you'll never get notified if you don't have an iPhone? What if the user doesn't even have a smartphone?
How does Apple think they'll handle this scenario? Can it even be handled?
How real is this concern anymore?
The only difference I can see here is Apple's halo effect.
Possible action items:
- I will happily submit my Android location data to Apple to find out if I'm being tracked by an AirTag. Where's the API? (I realize this compromises the "theft prevention" use case. That's an unfortunate collision of interests. Maybe sell a Pro version, comparable to LoJack. If I understood correctly, "3 days since home" is too much window anyway.) - Let me use an iPhone with Find My disabled to receive stalker alerts, without participating in the mesh (read: sending the tag's location). Can someone confirm whether this is already how it works?
As I see it, these are table stakes. The optics are not my problem: you're selling a $30 private investigator with no legal oversight.
Doubt me? Volunteer at a women's shelter.
No need. Your android device can already pick up the airtag beacons. Google (perhaps with Apples help) _need_ to get safety alerts working cross platform ASAP. Someone and likely many people are going to be hurt by this tech so this needs to be done, and hopefully before regulators kill the whole idea of tracker tags.
You won't be owning the device at any point.
We largely go the same places every day, and apple could figure out how to send a message or request for a song/movie/file/update and it just appears a few hours or couple days later.
Like a transparent sneakernet that uses onion routing.
We have some satellite-internet fed remote areas in Canada, and how to get your phone updated without a local IX means everyone chews through data just for system updates. They do have daily or weekly flights however. Loading up an SD card for the trips back and forth could work, but complicated.
When MS released the Zune with wifi, I hoped I could sit in an airport and “borrow” songs from other users/hosters, but I don’t think it worked that way.
Worldwide, high-latency LAN. For basically free by doing what we already do.
I can’t imagine many of the staff there have iPhones nor would iPhone owners be super close to the building.
You do know that this exact same tracking can be done with a dozen other devices, which are not made by Apple? If you're tracking a car, AirTags are pretty much the shittiest option and not even the cheapest. You can slap a $20 tracker with a magnet under the fender while walking past and get 1 meter realtime tracking.
So for example, if a husband/wife share car keys, and the car keys have the wife’s AirTag, but then she misplaces her purse with both her phone and keys, the husband won’t be able to locate them.
Another scenario is if one of them wants to put an AirTag on their phone, so that when they can’t find it, the other person can help them locate it.
Anyway, I’m sure there are lots of situations in which it would be helpful for multiple people to be able to locate the same AirTag, yet this is not currently possible.
> To compensate [people whose houses I left the package at] for their time and willingness to risk putting a package on their porch I offered financial compensation for any successful recoveries of the package. [...] I've since confirmed in these two cases, the “thieves" were actually acquaintances of the person helping me. I have since removed those reactions from the original video.
All of the content in the video right now is legitimate and the video's author was not aware some of the original recordings were fake.
They aren't even legally obligated to protect people or enforce laws.
I called the Sheriff's Department and they sent a deputy to the address reported by the device. My understanding was they actually went so far as to say something along the lines of "hand over the phone right now or we'll call for a warrant, search the house, and arrest you for grand theft".
About two hours after calling I drove down to the Sheriff's office and they gave me the phone.
I couldn't believe it.
Edit: You can apparently play a role in returning a lost AirTag [0]. But it would be nice if there was an app. Maybe even a more open ecosystem where the network could be leveraged. It has been tried before but failed, but Apple has a nice change here because they can force iDevices to play along (and I don't mind for once, I feel they do it the right way, with a focus on privacy).
[0] https://www.cnet.com/how-to/2-ways-you-can-use-apple-airtag-...
That sounds exactly like extortion.
"Buy an iPhone, or we won't tell you whether people are tracking your every movement."
This is screaming for real regulation.
Yikes.
1) will the tag start ringing?
2) Will my next door neighbour (who has an iPhone and I can often find it in my Airplay bluetooth range) receive a notification that someone is trying to track him?
3) Is my neighbour able to make my Airtag ring when I'm at home (and maybe sleeping) ?
Thanks
Now there's hope that with a little hacking the iBeacon emulator I coded up to run on my laptop can participate on the Find My network, sweet.
Ya'll honestly think an AirTag is the best way for a stalker to track you?
very easy and cheap; yes
https://www.amazon.ca/Real-time-Worldwide-Coverage-Portable-...
But the ease of use of AirTags is undeniable.
The reason this works so well is the massive amount of IOS devices participating.
I have some Tile-trackers (which I think used to be the biggest player in this space - until Apple came along), and while they are OK, the number of devices tracking them is abysmal compared to the Airtags.
Someone had their rental car broken into, and their stuff stolen. He had a Tile on his keys, and noticed that he got a ping outside of SLU in Seattle, so he posted in the /r/seattle subreddit.
I happened to be working there at the time, so I messaged him and went for a walk. It took me about 30 min to find his keys (his bag was gone, they must have dumped it elsewhere) in a bush, which I was able to mail back to him.
So, I bought a couple Tiles since that was proof to me that it worked.
But, looking back, over the day or so it was there, he only got two pings to my recollection: one person that walked by (and caused him to post to Reddit), and me once I found it. AirTag's network is just so much bigger. I'm pretty convinced you would get at most a single ping if you mailed a Tile somewhere.
I also use a Tile in my snowboard bag. I was always able to confirm the bag made it on the plane because my phone would connect through the floor of the plane into the cargo hold, but I'd be very lucky if I got a ping when the bag was in the baggage belt system underneath the airport.
Tile was a great idea and worked well if you had other Tile users nearby. It's not really their fault the network is so small, it's a hard problem to solve to seed that network unless you happen to own a billion devices...
https://macdailynews.com/2021/05/07/tile-teams-with-amazon-i...
I hope that the military have instituted techniques to avoid this.
Unfortunately, it might need millions of Faraday cages or banning Apple equipment from military installations.
The firmware was recently dumped so maybe someone will figure out a way to build an alternative network to Find my.
But nothing interops with AirTags yet and I'm 100% sure they never will, since AirTags relies on Apple's backend to work. The actual devices are the simplest part - and you can get 3rd party AirTags already.
Put it all on one map. Come on.
This seems like one of those 'features' where 20% of the benefit is for the end-user, but the gold mine 80% is in the long-tail that goes to the company.
I don't get the "not advised" part from that page. It just sounds like they're just not advertising this articular use case.
If you have an iOS device, you're tracking all these airtags around you physically for Apple. Apple's not paying you for that service. It probably uses a little battery life, but all these individual device make the network great. But if you bought an airtag that's a great thing.
https://macdailynews.com/2021/05/07/tile-teams-with-amazon-i...
Airtags, just another piece of e-waste to poison the planet.
[1] https://twitter.com/PicklePunchD/status/1217991463503446016
How long until Apple decides to discontinue the tags on their current generation of devices forcing you to upgrade?
And now your tagging your items just for apple to see besides no one has answered how does that justify the e-waste these tags produces?
Seeing as I've been rated-limited.
> Not sure what you mean there, but Apple doesn't get to know where anything is.
To say Apple doesn't get to see any information, pfft. I trust them as much as any thief. Can you prove this?
> Something something covid vaccines and 5G base stations
Not at all. I'm hoping to get my covid vaccine, have you?
I presume you do. You are already being tracked.
Why you want to submit to a heat map of your objects, and what you do with them, I don't know. Call me cynical. I pity the people who feel its a fantastic toy when normally it's the same people criticizing about X FANG company thing. Yet they go and buy the recent crud they release. Talk about hypocritical.
But still, a gimmick which those with will get bored within the next six months and will be left with a thing that will constantly tag it's position.
Not sure what you mean there, but Apple doesn't get to know where anything is.
I wonder how many more of these have sold than is “necessary” just because they are cheap and nifty, only for the purchaser to get bored with it after a while and forget about it?
Example: iPhone 6. Released 2014, last sold 2016, lost new OS support in 2019. It's the newest iPhone that isn't compatible with AirTags. And with AirPod Pro and Pro Max you can only use it with regular Bluetooth, not the enhanced Apple proprietary version.
AFAICT the 6 to 6S upgrade involved doubling the RAM from 1 to 2GB, and the CPU improvement was almost doubled (+70%). The pace of raw improvement has slowed a great deal since then.
hopefully they would be recycled in some responsible way but thats wishful thinking. future archeologists will have a interesting time figuring out why there is such a dense layer of coin cell batteries on top of a layer of fidget spinners
I’m confused: what would require an upgrade?
Unless iPhones stop supporting Bluetooth, which obviously won’t happen, or ultra wideband, which is not impossible but very unlikely, these devices will work with iPhones effectively forever.