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Comment by nojs | Hacker News Reader

Do you mean that every Apple device in the world acts as a proxy to forward Bluetooth requests from nearby (off) devices containing their location, automatically? E.g my laptop is pinging data to Apple about random nearby phones all the time that it sees with Bluetooth?

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Unless they opt out of it, yes. Which is pretty easy to do, pretty sure it's an option during initial device configuration, but regardless it's in the system settings. Which is pretty easy to navigate. There's even a search option at the top to help you find it instead of navigating to the setting.

If you know about it.

you have to opt in when setting up a new device, and I think when updating to the OS version that enabled it

It jumps off of general Find My functionality, so pretty much anyone that has BT enabled, and doesn't want their phone to be sellable when stolen, will act as a proxy node.

Maybe I missed declining a prompt in setup, but this latest feature was opt-out, automatically enabled after a software update, and only notified me once, the first time I powered off the phone after updating. To disable the feature, I had to go four levels deep in Settings, with the last two levels having seemingly unrelated names, disable a toggle, and accept a misleading confirmation prompt.

Not only a proxy. The other random devices use their known location to add to the data to show where the device was found. It’s all encrypted with the key of the lost device owner so apple can not read it.

And all of the data is encrypted so that no one other than the actual device owner can get any of the location information for their device. No one else, including apple can locate a device using the find my network.

Yes, essentially.

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