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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

Yep, that's not going to spark conspiracy theories and damage the brand at all, just like the backdoor they've recently put in. /s

Again, why would $3T company damage its brand like that? It's not "for children" and certainly not to "find your phone". There's something going on there.

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Apple has made it easier for users to locate lost (by being misplaced, forgotten, or stolen) devices with a feature that the user can opt out of on a temporary or permanent basis.

What is controversial about this?

Many will misinterpret it. We have seen how much the public can fundamentally misunderstand technical information over the past year.

People will just see that: 1. You can never disconnect your iPhone from the grid and stop it from being tracked. Even if you turn it off. 2. Governments, companies, and other (from the conspiracy theorist's standpoint) will be able find you whenever they want.

I am sure there are some legitimate security concerns here, but Apple seems to have taken reasonable steps to provide a pretty awesome feature which has solved a lot of risky edge cases.

> 1. You can never disconnect your iPhone from the grid and stop it from being tracked. Even if you turn it off. 2. Governments, companies, and other (from the conspiracy theorist's standpoint) will be able find you whenever they want.

Ok, I'll bite and play the conspiracy theorist. What reasonable steps prevent some three letter agency (or Apple itself for commercial reasons) from abusing the Find My network to do exactly that?

Many Hacker News people, who are prone to conspiratorial thinking will.

Regular people, not so much.

> What is controversial about this?

I'll predict that almost no one opted out of this for the simple reason that they didn't know this feature even existed. This is the "Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" method of faking consent.

They show it clearly above the slider when shutting down. Since this is a feature virtually 100% of users want on. This seems appropriate.

Ah, I'm sorry. Then I had a misconception about how the UI worked. I thought it was on by default and the only hint it even existed was buried in settings.

I agree, this UI is a lot better.

If they aren't under a gag order, that is. If they are, you won't even know it's on.

If you don't trust the software to do what it says, then none of this matters anyway since they could have added this in silently ages ago or they could push custom firmwares out to targeted individuals to do it.

Everything is based on the trust of the OS and hardware so it's not a useful point to make.

Software, sure, but up until this I could at least trust that if I turn my iPhone off it's not spying on me. Now I don't even have that. It's amazing the people _on this site_ in particular don't see a problem with this, and think it won't be abused by three letter agencies and their foreign counterparts.

You thought you could trust that if you turn your iPhone off it’s not spying on you.

In reality a software update was all that was required to enable this tracking.

If there is such a capability (a rather technically involved one, I might add, all the way down to the silicon), do you really believe Apple can't turn it on at CIA/NSA's request without popping that dialog? And you wouldn't even know due to gag orders. And before you say this can't happen in the US, I can give you a few publicized examples of illegal spying on US citizens just in the past few years.

People have been carrying around portable GPS devices in their pockets for over a decade now. This threat is not new, and if you fear it, don't carry around a GPS device or one that will connect to other devices to get its location reported to a central server.

In other words, don't use modern technology?

Don't you think there should be a law so a device has to at least indicate it has an "always on" component?

The difference, which will be missed by many, is that previously you could be reasonably certain your device is actually not spying on you if you power it off. That option is gone now. You should just assume it's on and sending your data directly to whoever wants it.

Even when on, the system is designed so that Apple themselves can't use it.

> recently put in

2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712681

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