Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

> The problem is easy to solve, just store copies of all public keys of each air tag you send out.

that kills the privacy aspect of it, because it also means apple knows about the exact whereabouts of each tag. airtags are specifically designed/marketed so apple can't do that.

View on HN

Software (and I guess hardware too) is about tradeoffs. The tradeoff here is that in not being able to validate if a device is a valid Airtag is that Apple has created a massive, completely uncontrollable surveillance network. The fact that anyone can interrogate the network to track devices that aren't even guaranteed to be running the official firmware or have the official hardware is insane. Not having Apple be able to know the location of the tags is pretty much irrelevant in the face of this downside.

It is by design not a surveillance network. That is the whole point.

No one, including apple, other than a device owner can determine where their device is, or where it has been.

If Apple doesn’t know, how does the user know? I thought Apple was just anonymizing but still centralizing the data. Genuine question.

It basically operates like dead drops. Airtags broadcast their location using a public key that constantly rotates. Apple maintains a mapping of public key to location. Anyone can look up the location of a public key, but the search space is so big that it's not worth bruteforcing. Even if you did, all you'd end up is a heatmap[1] of airtags, not very helpful. However, if you know the corresponding secret, you can predict what the public key will be and know the exact whereabouts of a particular device.

https://xkcd.com/1138/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com