Someone else in another thread has a really good idea: tell people how often someone checks in on them (for location sharing info).
> I don’t claim that there are simple solutions here, but a starting point would be tech companies making it easier to see an audit of how this “innocent” tracking tech is being used on the trackee. For example, I bet my grandpa would think twice about checking in on my cousins location as often as he probably does if he knew that my cousin got a notification every time he checked in.
Doesn't solve the Tile problem, of course. A solution there might be counter-intuitive: make the battery worse. Its a lot harder to stalk someone if you need to re-seed a device every few days. Of course, i can barely remember to charge my phone, nevermind keys, so that might kill tile's utility all together.
Or, maybe you could have some sort of "did someone else's tile follow me home" sort of feature. You set your home location, and if any tile that isn't yours is at home, you get notified. (unless the owner is with it, or you white-list one for eg. partner's, children, etc). This tells you if someone planted you with it to stalk (you'd have to have tile app even if you don't have one i guess). Don't tiles support findmy? That means that any apple device will already warn people, so you just need to cover android users. Maybe the alexa/sidewalk partnership can impl similar features for when you come home? Maybe partner with google for built-in tracking warning standards? If they're open to it.
I think > half the use of tile is "ring my X at home" where x is probably mostly keys, or "did i leave X at Y place". Based on this, you might be able to not track tiles everywhere, but just at pre-set locations. Only if you set it to a "lost mode" can you track it everywhere outside of certain pre-set locations, but then it'll beep and have annoying antistalking features like airtags - where you notify people nearby. Maybe orphaned tiles could try to collect to random bluetooth devices after a period of time to make their presence known? It would help people who didnt set up an app to listen ahead of time. That could be annoying though if the balance isn't right. Can probs still be abused, but should make it a complex task, and you can never stop everyone anyways.
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aside, I'm surprised tile never tried to build any static infra in major urban areas to supplement their phone-based network (which seemed lacking when i used it compared to airtags). Do you see the use of Alexa/Sidewalk as a significant boost or advantage? Have you considered things like LoRaWAN based networks (thing network etc) as a supplement? A lot of that is built in major areas, and would just need a mapping step which may be able to be collected by existing users phones+tags in day to day use.
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Aside again: this seems like a fun problem to work on, are you hiring?