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?
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.
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.
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.
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[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.
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.
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.
The problem is that this new service makes such snooping very casual.
So they are making the problem much worse? That's not really a defense.
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.
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.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dylan.airt...
Took all of 3 minutes. Super convenient.
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.
But for a casual malicious user, airtags open up whole new worlds of abuse.