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Comment by pranau | Hacker News Reader

Can you please explain how Apple’s Find My is anonymous while Sidewalk is not? As far as I understand, Find My collects device location information through other iPhones and then upload them to Apple’s cloud where it can be viewed by you. Apple states that this is done in a privacy preserving way by using rotating identifiers. In the case of Amazon, they state that all the device information being relayed through your device is encrypted and capped at 80kbps.

I am not sure I understand why one is a concern while the other isn’t.

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Sidewalk is carrying all kinds of data from other users. You have absolutely no idea what. It’s a loosely defined system that Amazon controls remotely at their will. The encryption stops you from snooping like any other TLS traffic, but Amazon itself is the receiver on the other end. And it piggybacks on your own internet connection - 80Kbps is a huge amount of data.

Find My identifiers have a single purpose, are useless to anything but the owners device, cannot be used by Apple for tracking, ads or whatever, and id be surprised if the entire payload after a day out is > 8KB total. These look completely different to me.

> You have absolutely no idea what. It’s a loosely defined system that Amazon controls remotely at their will.

s/Amazon/Apple and you've got yourself the Airtag protocol. Obviously Airtags use less bandwidth, but both are proprietary and about equally as evil in my eyes.

We know exactly what goes in an airtag message. It’s very limited. https://positive.security/blog/send-my

The article you just linked is about an exploit that allows you to propagate arbitrary data through the Airtag network, which is the exact opposite of knowing what goes into an Airtag message.

Actually read the article. It’s so bandwidth-limited as to be useless

You are entitled to your feelings of course, but the design of the two systems could not be more different.

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