Other trackers don't tell you they are tracking you though, what about those.
On the bright side, the end result of this is that AirTags will be safer for everyone, and competitors with tracking products not designed for secret spying will be forced to step up their privacy games.
It's kinda dumb that our cabin has a 'smart' meter on a meshnetwork, but there's no way for me to remotely turn-on a heater 4h before I arrive without a $10+/month subscription.
Maybe one day I can offline order a book and it just shows up because the on-line devices nearby (or are likely to show up nearby) can drop it off wirelessly.
A traffic light won't be needing its own internet subscription or private physical network to beam up a picture of the intersection or status.
So, unlike GPS trackers or competing Bluetooth trackers, AirTags can do two things:
* Last for a very long time on a small battery, no recharging required.
* Reliably report location anywhere in the world that an ordinary person is likely to be.
What happens inside buildings when the phone doesn't have a fix? Does it store the tag's key and sends it as soon as it gets gps data?
Absolutely, yes.
> What happens inside buildings when the phone doesn't have a fix?
Have you never used your phone inside a building before? It still has a very good idea of your location, it doesn't rely solely on GPS signals.
Yes of course. That's how these phones are supposed to work. I don't have time to micromanage my devices. As long as I get a day of usage, why would I bother?
Your phone takes it's last position from GPS, refines it with RSSI of nearby WiFi networks and then you add in the broadband stuff they have to localize the tag further.
Prepaid sim. US (and many other countries) does not have mandatory registration for SIM cards. See: https://www.gsma.com/publicpolicy/wp-content/uploads/2013/11...
Compare that to the difficulty of tracking down where a commodity BLE antenna and battery pack were sold.
>Compare that to the difficulty of tracking down where a commodity BLE antenna and battery pack were sold.
The ESP (or whatever BLE chipset was used) probably will have a mac address burned in, which is essentially an IMEI. You'll have a hard time getting anything from that, because the aliexpress supply chain that supplied the GSM GPS tracker keeps records and/or responds to US subpoena as well as the aliexpress supply chain that supplied the airtag clone.
>If the SIM was prepaid, the network operator will have a pretty good idea of where it was sold (by tying the SIM number to a wholesale lot number), and that would give police a narrow pool of suspects (whoever bought a prepaid SIM from that seller while the wholesale lot was on their shelves) to work from.
It was sold from a mobile phone kiosk at a mall
>what payment method is used for service
voucher purchased at the same store, both paid with cash
>If anyone bought a prepaid SIM with cash, they may have been caught on security camera doing so.
the purchase/activation of the sim occurred a month or two ago, outside of the retention range of the surveillance footage. even if the footage exists, all you'd see is a masked (thanks covid!) 5'8" white possibly hispanic male, wearing a hoodie and jeans.
>> what payment method is used for service
> voucher purchased at the same store, both paid with cash
>> If anyone bought a prepaid SIM with cash, they may have been caught on security camera doing so.
> the purchase/activation of the sim occurred a month or two ago, outside of the retention range of the surveillance footage. even if the footage exists, all you'd see is a masked (thanks covid!) 5'8" white possibly hispanic male, wearing a hoodie and jeans.
That's so much op sec that you wouldn't have to do to exploit the Find My protocol! And let's hope the mall didn't change their retention interval and that the same 5'8" white male didn't do something stupid like buy something with a credit card on the same trip or park in the mall parking lot.
2. the same mechanism that makes it easy to build stalking devices for, also makes it convenient to use as a lost key finder. I'm not going to attach a GPS tracker and buy a sim card for my keys/bag, but I will buy a $30 airtag.
If you exclude the time to dev the software, design the PCB, and assemble the tracker then you can knock up a NB-IOT module + GPS module + Microcontroller & supporting parts (to tie the two modules together) for about $30-$35 in small quantities, keep your data usage low and you can throw in a pre-paid IOT-NB sim for about $15.
EDIT: Its not gonna be as small as a AirTag, But if you wanted to tag something like a car you could get it into a small enough box to easily hide under it.
EDIT The 2nd: Throw in a movement detector, keep everything asleep unless its moved, before firing up the GPS/modem write your code so not to power up the GPS/Modem up unless a certain time as passed since the last known location fix, when you do fire up the GPS compare the location to the last known location so you only need to phone home if the distance as changed by a certain amount and you could get a decent battery life.
(not that I've thought about this...)
Pretty much no regular stalker is going to design and build their own GPS+cellular tracker. Even if someone were to do that and then sell them online, the barrier to finding and buying those are still probably going to be higher than getting an AirTag. And the battery won't last anywhere near as long as well. And also consider that the software running on it, as well as the cloud service that lets you check the location, doesn't just magically appear either. Someone has to build and host that as well. Even a lower-tech solution that just emails a location report every few minutes still requires work to build.
Yes, it's absolutely possible, and not super difficult, to track someone using a GPS+cellular device. But it feels really disingenuous to claim that tracking people was just as easy to do for your average stalker pre-AirTags.
Oh yeah, Was just pointing out that the pricing of such things is dropping like flies.
> Pretty much no regular stalker is going to design and build their own GPS+cellular tracker.
Agreed, again was just pointing out the pricing of parts.
> Yes, it's absolutely possible, and not super difficult, to track someone using a GPS+cellular device. But it feels really disingenuous to claim that tracking people was just as easy to do for your average stalker pre-AirTags.
I don't think I did claim that. I wasn't trying to claim that. Maybe thats just the limitation of using text.
They're on Amazon, for $50-150 [0]. The first result for "GPS tracker" I found has 10 days of battery life, which is a fair negative, but you can do a lot to someone if you follow them for 10 days.
[0]: https://smile.amazon.com/LandAirSea-Waterproof-Magnetic-Pers...