How the Apple AirTag became a stalker’s gift
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It seems relevant that the most shocking story they could put together was about someone who found the AirTag and got a protection order against their stalker.
That is, in fact, how it's supposed to work. If you have an iPhone, you can find it quite exactly by playing 'hot cold', that being one of the main intended uses, emerging your keys from couch cushions.
If you don't, you do have to install an app. I guess the alternative to that is for Google to build this in?
More than evidence that stalkers will use AirTags, this article demonstrates that it's a good way to get caught red-handed stalking someone, with tangible physical evidence that a court will respect and understand.
If I were out there offering advice to stalkers, I'd tell them to use an AirTag, because: fuck stalkers, they deserve to get caught. You'd be sickened how many times these people can jump out of the bushes at their prey before the police pay attention.
An AirTag has already been used to track down and murder someone: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/06/15/woman-...
I might agree with the framing if it was more like a person was in witness security, and AirTags were used to discover their location and then execute an assassination.
I don't think anyone who clicked the article (besides you perhaps) was expecting the AirTag to be the actual murder weapon.
It's an indisputable fact that the killer used an AirTag to track and follow her victim to his destination and then murder him, I'm not quite sure why you're bringing up WitSec or "framing".
If the girlfriend had used the AirTag to track the boyfriend and found him planning a surprise party for her or something, then the AirTag served the same role, which makes the AirTag superfluous to the murder part of this story.
Edit: another way of putting it is if the girlfriend simply followed the boyfriend’s car, the end result was the same. But an article would not have been written titled “Woman used a vehicle to track boyfriend, then ran over and killed him, police say”
It's a lot easier to tail someone without being caught when you can wait for them to reach their final destination and just go straight there instead without ever being visible to the victim.
If you're unwilling to even acknowledge that tracking someone via AirTag is much simpler versus physically tailing them around town then we're just wasting time here.
I specifically acknowledged the AirTag was used to track, and obviously it makes tracking easier. I objected to the notion that an AirTag was involved in the murder, since it was not premeditated.
samatman: It seems relevant that the most shocking story they could put together was about someone who found the AirTag and got a protection order against their stalker.
SadTrombone then links to what they think is a more shocking story because the AirTags were presumably part of a plan to murder someone.
Me: points out that SadTrombone’s story is not more shocking because the AirTag was used to track, or stalk, but not as part of a plan to murder someone, as was insinuated.
I think the original story of a stalker stalking an ex is more shocking than someone stalking their girlfriend/boyfriend to verify if they are cheating. Most people would simply break up at this point, but that this girlfriend became enraged enough to cause violence or kill is unrelated to AirTags.
Probably better, but still not sufficient. It will probably take years before Android users get this builtin, and not everybody has a smartphone anyway. I don't currently use one.
If you really want to avoid tracking you may also want to avoid having a phone with you too. Both things enter in contradiction.
I guess Pandora's box is already open anyway. AirTags are not the only device with this feature if I understand correctly. There's probably no coming back to a world where there's no risk for you that someone puts such a device to track you. I don't know what is the solution, other than legal.
I guess my computer has Bluetooth/Wifi and could be used to detect such devices when they use Bluetooth since I'm using it for the most part of the day and all my stuff is within the Bluetooth range. But that's because I use a computer everyday.
I still think Apple should not have made this mainstream. If this kind of device already existed, the idea of using them was probably less in the mind of regular people and Apple's product is probably very convenient and possibly affordable enough. Obviously, I understand why this kind of thing is useful for people who keep losing their stuff, I'm one of them. Still, I'm not sure it was worth it.
Tile and Samsung have similar products, without similar measures for example. Tile was hugely available at many big retail stores.
and...
Also say that AirTags almost certainly made tracking more mainstream and on more people's radar.
I connected one to an old smartphone to test, then switched off BT and marked it as lost.
It took a whole month for one phone to see it. And I carried it in my bag on the subway in a city of millions (Barcelona)
The ubiquity of receivers in Apple's network (and Samsung's which was introduced only 1 month before) really was a game changer.
I doubt they ever will, but Google could roll this out very quickly by making it part of Google Play Services.
Not if Google integrates BLE tracker detection into Play Services, which can be updated independently of the OS and without OEM or carrier intervention.
Which is exactly what they're working on: https://twitter.com/MishaalRahman/status/1512488864488775681
"Safety alerts" is what it might be called: https://twitter.com/MishaalRahman/status/1518675920994848769
Just creating one with a fake protonmail email will make it quite difficult, though you will also have to purchase an iOS device just for that. Still not unthinkable.
You can even build your own tracker for some apple's network: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack
Airtags are convenient, user friendly. So they are widely used even if there might be technically better alternatives. They would not work as well without half of the planet having iphones. So criticizing Apple is fair.
AirTags don’t let you cover any tracks at all. A GPS tracker is easy to buy, without any nefarious connections.
I know guns kill way more people each year than baseball bats, but there were a few people killed with baseball bats last year. It's way easier to buy a baseball bat without leaving evidence, plus it's much easier to claim plausible deniability if you get caught with one, so let's regulate baseball bats.
> claimed to have just lost the AirTag
Most likely this. There was a lot of controversy over a Foxconn factory a few years back, which assembled products for pretty much all big electronics companies. Most of the articles had "iPhone factory" in the headline.
Our belief is that by adding more friction and increasing the risk of punishment we can make these devices far more powerful for the 99.999% of users who are responsible. We don’t want outliers to ruin it for everyone.
If a stalker wants to track someone there are inexpensive stealth GPS devices with their own cell connections that allow real-time location - we make them too - but for whatever reason there hasn’t been any negative attention on this side of the location device category.
Are there any thoughts or implementation suggestions on this?
This is the necessary trade off. Long time user of Tiles, and then later airtags - I travel a lot, and I have a tendency to leave my bags, so for me they save me a lot of money. My dog wears one. My kids and wife are bugged constantly with alerts that a unknown device is with them (with my name on it), but that's acceptable because somewhere a jealous ex-partner is using this for ill, or someone is trying to isolate someone for a crime.
This is the perception problem. Apple introducing anti-stalker controls with the Airtag's didn't introduce a new problem - it revealed one that was already there.
It would be a killer app to somehow have the best of both worlds. I agree that robust authentication is one way to go about this. Perhaps a tracker could have a “stolen” mode, that when enabled disables anti-stalking features but also automatically notifies the police with the identity of the tracker’s owner.
Is it really? In many places, the police won't do anything. Are you going to track down and confront the thieves who stole your bike?
They’ll help.
Police will respond, most assuredly, if you declare this intention, but you will be at best a complicating factor and at worst an additional deadly threat.
Finally, if it was all a ruse you could find yourself in serious legal jeopardy if any violent - or deadly - outcomes ensue.
You’re rolling the dice with that behavior and I hope you never come up snake eyes.
Calling the police would be more to deter stalking than to help with theft recovery. Knowing that the police will automatically be notified if the tracker gets set to stealth mode would be enough to deter many stalkers.
>Are you going to track down and confront the thieves who stole your bike?
I wouldn’t confront thieves but I certainly would track down where the bike gets ridden and take it back when it’s somewhere (semi) public. Years ago, a friend’s bike got stolen and by sheer luck we saw it a couple weeks later locked to a bike rack. We got some bolt cutters and took it.
So, yes - I'd use the tags location to track the item because the items wouldn't be easy to hide. And as others have said if you've located your stolen property the police will respond during an active situation.
I use AirTags and my main phone is not Apple. So if Tile comes out with a more targeted approach for this "stuff" of mine I'd be willing to drop AirTags because of the annoying beeping when "lost" and other issues the walled garden creates.
Eg, put tracker named backbag on victim, reguest full tracking on bagpack.
I cant see how you could remotely filter for that?
I'm curious whether you think there is any benefit for tracking technology to be proprietary.
I believe anti-stalking features should be added, but there needs to be balance and also perspective on the safety of things. It's easy to focus on those people who were injured, forgetting the perspective that in general, these trackers are very safe.
- How many people are killed from cars every year? Drunk driving?
- 1,000 children are injured in California alone every year from pencils. Some have died. As I've said elsewhere, you are more likely to die from a pencil than a shark.
- Over 1 million people land in the Emergency Room every year for a stair-related accident. Over 12,000 die.
- 12 people die from taking selfies every year.
- 450 people die from falling out of bed every year.
- 150 people die every year from having a coconut fall on their head.
- 7,000 people die every year from a doctor's sloppy handwriting on the prescription.
- 2,500 left-handed people die every year from using right-handed tools.
- 29 people die every year from being buried alive by accident.
All of these are things we don't consider dangerous, and would often happily give our children or teenagers. Thus, while anti-stalking features of a kind should be added (an alarm if left alone too long?), we shouldn't dwell on too few people. Many of these issues kill far, far more people and we just can't avoid it - we can't force people to not take selfies, or doctors to always have perfect handwriting, or open every grave every day following for a week. Attempting to mitigate every weird cause of death is not possible and would require totalitarianism.
Everyone is up in arms about the apple tracker, not your one which is nearly identical.
Take the win!
If someone is tracking you on a tile there is zero protection - android or iphone that someone has unless they installed the scan and search app, which was only available in march this year - _years_ after the product was introduced.
1) AirTags take advantage of Apple's global "Find My" network of hundreds of millions of Apple iPhones. No other tracking device has this capability.
2) AirTags are mass produced and mass marketed by the world's largest corporation, whose every move is followed by the news media. No other tracking device has this capability either.
3) Battery life is excellent, more than a year.
AirTags are inexpensive, easy to use, powerful, and pervasive, all due to Apple. For most consumer devices, these would be things to celebrate, but not in this particular case. Apple has "revolutionized" stalking.
Network of what? They have more phones, but I'm not aware of any tracking network or tracking devices sold by them.
I guarantee I can find a cheaper device that does not need to use apples network and is as easy to use; it's even more perfect for stalking because there's no information on the owner and no risk that the tag notifies the person nearby.
Apples devices are low power and do not have GPS trackers in them; it's pretty trivial to have a higher powered device with a GPS tracker in it.
EDIT: 10s of searching, it's even magnetic: https://www.amazon.com/Tracki-Magnetic-Required-Worldwide-Mo...
Also: "Works with GPS satellites when outdoors as primary tracking technology and when indoors Wi-Fi as a secondary backup tracking."
You missed the point about why Apple's network is a big deal.
I have a few Tile brand trackers, they're functionally the same basic thing as an Airtag and have been around for years. Most places that sell electronics stock them.
The trick is that if you lose something or have something stolen, it can only be detected if it comes near another Tile user who has the app installed and has given it appropriate permissions on their device to be able to scan. This obviously doesn't matter if you're just trying to find a set of keys around the house, but if your bike is stolen unless you're in a major city you're probably SOL. 10 times as many people have installed Apple Music on an Android device as have the Tile app, so that's not much.
Apple's massive advantage is that every single iPhone, iPad, etc. is by default a receiver for their tracking network. That same stolen bike is now trackable by something like half of all the smartphones in the world. If it's in a place where there are meaningful amounts of people it's going to show up on the tracking network.
Basically Apple's tracking network is the first time a low power solution like this has truly had critical mass.
> Apples devices are low power and do not have GPS trackers in them; it's pretty trivial to have a higher powered device with a GPS tracker in it.
GPS takes a hilarious amount of battery power and requires a significantly larger antenna. Beyond that you then also need a cellular service plan and the device has to remain in range of those towers. The device you linked has battery life of less than a week in an active tracking mode and in "battery save" mode can only provide a few updates a day. It'd be fine for a full size vehicle or piece of industrial equipment, but not a bike or a laptop bag.
If anything, it might end up better in some cases, since they’re quite detectable and linked to the owner’s Apple accounts, it will potentially lead to victims discovering they’re being tracked faster and police tracking down the perpetrator sooner than they might have, had the perpetrator used other easily available tracking methods…
If I wanted to stalk someone I’d get any gps tracker that doesn’t constantly remind whoever is carrying them that they are being stalked…
I can’t see how AirTags revolutionized anything in this space. So long as they are less useful for stalking than similar devices.
I own a number of them and have attached them to things that are valuable to me, and not just financially. The car is the prime example, but I've also attached one to my dog's harness. He's a rescue Fox Terrier with a prey drive like a missile and no recall skills whatsoever (yet): if he slips his lead somehow we have at least some slight chance of finding where he's run off to. Likewise my waist-mounted hiking bags - if I lose the one that holds my keys or first-aid kit on a long walk I could be in big trouble when I get to my destination. Sadly, the Guardian doesn't mention the positive aspects...
So is using this form of consumer tech for shipment tracking, for that matter. More robust trackers have long been in widespread use by the shipping industry.
A GPS tracker with a cell connection would serve you much better in either scenario. Those are less popular with criminals because they can often be traced back to the purchaser, but they are more reliable and won’t accidentally alert the kidnappers because they tripped an anti-stalking monitor.
Absolutely fantastic - very glad of the Airtag.
1. If the airline had kept track of your bag properly, it wouldn't have got lost in the first place (At least for a literal enough definition of 'lost') so the moment I land without my luggage, their data is already suspect.
2. The airline might not expose its data to you - or might only do so after waiting in a phone queue for 30 minutes, or only in a very low-resolution form.
It’s probably a good thing that Apple is sacrificing a) for b), but it does suck that I can no longer hide an AirTag on my bike and have a robust way of tracking it if it gets stolen, since a thief will now be promptly alerted that there is a hidden tracking device on board the bike.
I LOVE how this prevents my bike from being stolen.
Sure, if the police wont help you, all this doesn't matter, I know. Luckily where I live the cops still want to help the people.
The fact Apple makes it hard to get advice if you find one and suspect it's being used in a nefarious way is a problem which would be trivial for Apple to resolve though. They really ought to support users far more than they do.
There is extensive information available halfway down starting with section “Find the unknown AirTag, AirPods, or Find My network accessory”.
The above was the second link when I searched “apple find AirTag following” in duck duck go. Below is the 3rd link:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/02/an-update-on-airtag-a...
This allows anyone to write a program and act as a finder device. You can report whatever location you want of the "found" device. Send your stalker to the location of your choice :)
> In addition to making sure that location information and other data are fully encrypted, participants’ identities remain private from each other and from Apple.
I don't know that it matters whether or not there's any authentication information. If you could get your Apple device to misreport its location (would need jailbreaking for iOS probably)[1], maybe you could fool the Find My network into reporting the AirTag is elsewhere.
[0]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/find-my-security-se...
[1]: This would likely need to be quite involved, considering location may be determined from a combination of IP, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, etc., although I'd be surprised if there aren't already tools available to do that, especially on macOS.
"How the computer helped increase suicide"
"How knitting yarn became a strangulation method"
"How electricity became a torture method"
"How candles caused untold deaths and damage"
"How the pencil, landed in the chest, can kill you"
We could go on. Every tool has uses and abuses, sometimes extreme. Also, this has been around forever. If I wanted to track someone, I could get a battery-powered GPS tracker with 4G LTE and stick it to their car, or buy a Tile. AirTag attempts to notify people which makes it perhaps among the most least-desirable options. Heck, if I really wanted to track someone I'd just hire a Private Investigator.
Edit: And for those saying, one person was killed by an AirTag, look up how many children have been injured in schools from pencils (more than 1,000 per year in California). I'm not calling for banning pencils. You are more likely to die from a pencil than a shark. Likewise, I'm not calling for banning AirTags.
So if you don't use iPhone then you wouldnt know if you are being tracked?
It's still not ideal (and I'm not conviced small cheap standalone trackers are worth the risks compared to Find My built in to devices), but Apple do provide a lot more tools to protect people than other tracking device companies... and as a result an AirTag is a way worse choice within this category for stalkers from risk of getting caught.
1: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.trac...
An AirTag speaker can be removed in a matter of minutes. There are a bunch of instructional videos on YouTube.
Once discovered & the police are involved the tag can be linked back to the owner with a nice paper trail that can be presented in court... so it's still a worse device for a stalker to use.
They'd be much better served using a cheap GPS tracker[1] with a disposable SIM card... there are heaps of them available. You can buy both domestically and internationally from aliexpress, and they're cheap.
1: https://www.speakit.co.uk/products/speak-it-premier-mini-gps...
> Real-time audio monitoring by calling the SIM card inserted into the device
Oof.
(Actually, anyone, even I did [0] )
Did I mention hammers have been used to smash brains in? And we allow our teenagers to use them!
Also, I admire your audacity in denying reality, dismissing the dangers of technology as negligible right under that article that reports on its malicious use.
Someone died - yes. Also, 1,000 children are injured in California alone from pencils yearly. You are more likely yourself to die from a pencil than a shark. We're not banning pencils despite children having died from them. I need not go into cars, or how knitting yarn is a strangulation tool, or hammers a murder weapon. Not to mention the incredibly deadly thing called stairs (12,000 deaths yearly, over 1 million ER injuries yearly).
We as a society have decided hammers, pencils, stairs, and so forth are safe enough, even for children. Same for AirTags.
Whether or not that’s wise is another matter, but come on - don’t blame the victim.
Also, I wouldn't blame the victim. I'd rather blame Apple for making their users opt in.
If you enable "Find My iPhone" but do not enabled "Find My network" you can only find your phone when it is online.
Enabling "Find My network" to make your phone participate in the "Find My" network lets you potentially find your phone when it is not online.
Same with "Find My iPad".
I meant coupling the "Find My network" feature for iPhones and AirTags.
There are two separate "find lost things" systems.
1. There is a system for finding online things. This is available on devices that have internet connections, and can only be used to find the device when it is online. The device uses its internet connection to report to a central server, which can then tell the owner where to find the device.
2. There is a system for finding things that aren't online. Devices that do not have an internet connection can use this system to let nearby devices know they are there. If those nearby devices have an internet connection, they can relay that sighting along with their location to a central server, which can then tell the owner where to find the missing devices. The relay to the server is protected by some clever public key cryptography so that the server doesn't find out whose device spotted the missing device or where it was.
An iPhone is capable of using both of those systems. There's a toggle for each of them in the settings.
If you want to be able to find your missing iPhone when it is offline you need to use the second system. If you only need to find it when it has an internet connection, you just need to use the first system.
It seems pretty fair. If you want to use other people's phones to find yours when it is offline, you have to let them use your phone to find their offline devices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_My
tl;dr Apple devices broadcast IDs and then other Apple devices phone home with those IDs and GPS locations so the owners can find their lost devices even if they don't have internet connectivity.
Most of users want a way to find / lock / remotely wipe their 1000$ phone in case it gets lost or stolen.
It's really useful for locating lost headphones, laptops, etc. -- whether stolen, left on public transport/taxi, or left at a friend's house.
Edit: link to Apple's description of how Find My works: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec6cbc80fd0/...
Would have been nice if the article explained a bit what is actually happening. The wikipedia article doesn't mention it either...
That's right - you can read more at [1]
1: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec6cbc80fd0/...
So basically iPhones are now pretty much the biggest surveillance network in the world, constantly reporting on location of tags (and other iPhones) to Apple servers.
The localizers ?
For others' benefit, Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between star systems. Merchants often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit.
The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>
If they throw it under your car for instance, your phone will always show where your driving and you most likely will never hear any chirps coming from it.
Even if you don't have an iPhone, as soon as someone who does have one steps into your car and you drive them somewhere, they will get the alert and you will find out.
[0] - https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/02/16/airtag-found-mov...
An advanced tactic is to put an AirTag you broke inside in front of the real AirTag, a decoy so to speak. The target will find it and assume they are no longer tracked.
I wonder how far up I am on the top AirTag buyers list worldwide.
A hammer is a tool. You can use a hammer to kill somebody so effectively, that you could argue to an alien who knows nothing of hammers, that they're actually murder weapons. That doesn't make hammers inherently bad.
An Airtag is also a tool, but it is different in an important way for this comparison; it works by using the internet, thereby providing one degree of separation from the user and the victim. This single degree of separation has an important psychological effect on the user; that of a false sense of security.
Some proof of this, is the fact that people continue to use Airtags for stalking, despite the fact that they know they can be caught easily. It's a psychological safety that they allow to trick themselves with, rooted in how we work as human beings; "physical things are real, screens and ephemeral things aren't".
So yes, the Airtag is also a tool, but it's likelihood to be used by people (so inclined) for stalking, is higher than somebody using a physical object inappropriately (and illegally).
Unfortunately, many cops barely know how to operate a computer, way too many outright disregard cases where women are the victims (just look at the various rape kit backlog scandals to see how little the cops care), or have the knowledge on how to correctly request data from Apple, Samsung, Tile or whomever, and then how to use these data to get to the identity of the stalker.
On top of that, way too many people reflexively remove the AirTag or whatever tracker on their own - the correct way is to call the police which can at least use a sealed evidence bag so that fingerprints and DNA remains aren't compromised.
This network used to only exist for iDevices, making it very easy to track down a lost or stolen phone or tablet. People didn’t have any concerns about stalking because it’s not practical to hide a phone to stalk someone (and the battery would only be good for a few days anyway). The game changed when AirTags were introduced, which are both easily concealed and have replaceable batteries that last for years, hence why we’re seeing critical articles like the OP.
You seriously believe that, do you?
The protocol is fully published - and more then a few acadmeics are trying to earn their PhDs and creds by finding faults in it.
Tinfoilism isn't helpful here.
Back to the story. By default iOS "Find My" tends to be on when setting up a new phone with an Apple id. If it is not on, or switched off, does the 'stalkee' still get that notification that they're being tracked?
Why are you asking this question? The answer borders on the tautological.
Does the setting actually say "ignore AirTags", or does it say "help track other people's devices" or something else? Genuine question, as I don't have an iPhone.
As I understand it, if you want to track your things you need to opt-in into the "Find My network", which also means you will relay information about nearby devices. It's not specific to Airtags... as the "Find My" network helps locate iPads, Macbooks and even Airpods.
... However, I presume the functionality that lets you know that there's an AirTag following you is separate, since it has nothing to do with the network, but rather with the iPhone detecting that there's an Airtag traveling along with it. I don't see a way to opt-out of that... but probably it stops working if you disable Bluetooth completely, from the Settings app.
The victims are almost universally people oblivious to what can be done technically, they never adjust preferences; everything is 'on', as per a typical iPhone setup.
So the question remains... If a typical user turns off 'Find My' will they still get notification that they are being tracked?
The implication is that unless 'Find My' is on, they will be still tracked but not be notified.
See my point?