Tile adds undetectable anti-theft mode with $1M fine if used for stalking | Hacker News Reader

Tile adds undetectable anti-theft mode with $1M fine if used for stalking

macrumors.com

35 pointsclairity42 comments

>> Tile says that any individual convicted of using Tile devices to illegally track another individual without their consent will be fined $1 million, wording that is in the Tile terms of service.

Lol. Which lawyer came up with that one? You simply are not allowed to implement punishment fines in contracts. They should have instead couched this in indemnity language, a statement that the user shall reimburse Tile for legal expensive should a stalked person rightly sue them.

Of course by the time someone is actually convicted of stalking they aren't likely to have a spare 1mil lying around. That's why criminal defense attorneys demand money up front. Nothing will ever come of this scare tactic.

Yeah, I'm not a lawyer and even I knew you can't do that shit. Not straight-up punitive fines like that. You don't even need to have any familiarity with contract law to figure this out—those provisions would be everywhere if they had any chance in hell of holding up. They're not, so, they must not hold up. QED.

What's the difference between a punitive fine and something like a late fee?

A fee is (somehow) linked to costs suffered because of the breech. If you return a rental car late then you have to pay for the extra time, along with any other incidental expenses suffered. A "late fee" might cover the costs associated with them providing a different car to customers who had booked your car. Or, if they had no other cars, whatever they had to do to satisfy those other customers. You are allowed to identify so-called liquidated damages in a contract. You aren't allowed to create a lottery whereby you can demand millions from customers who make small mistakes.

Double-especially true in TOS that aren't even properly negotiated. There's a bit more leeway if it's, say, two businesses hammering out a real contract, a true meeting of the minds, but, in a display of uncharacteristic sanity on the part of the US legal system, these kinds of boilerplate take-it-or-leave-it "contracts" usually aren't allowed to get as out-there as the real thing can (though even in those cases, something like this would be pretty damn iffy)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidated_damages

"Under the common law, liquidated damages may not be set so high that they are penalty clauses rather than fair compensation... Generally, at common law, a liquidated damages clause will not be enforced if its purpose is to punish the party in breach rather than to compensate the injured party"

If Tile provides information to the police to help catch a stalker, they can't claim their reputational damage is $1m. Actually, even their statements in this thread show that it's intended as a punishment.

Yep.

I wonder if it serves any psychological purpose. I think not but I honestly don't know. Maybe it would scare a few would-be-stalkers from doing it... but I doubt it.

it'll (slightly) scare folks who don't think too deeply about it or don't have lots of legal knowledge/experience, but not the folks most likely to use them for illicit tracking. all it does is alert them to do their tracking more surreptitiously and perhaps to cook up an alibi beforehand.

Seems more like advertising that your device can be used for covert tracking/stalking without overtly doing so to me. An obviously nonsense clause that will be picked up by the media and provide exactly the coverage they are looking for, all while ostensibly being the good guys

Life360/Tile CEO. I came up with this idea, not our lawyers, as they would be the first to say it is unclear how enforceable this is. But what IS clear, is that based on our new TOS, and because this is opt-in, we definitely could take a flyer in court, and who knows?

Do you want us to unleash millions of dollars of lawyers on you? I don't think many people will want to find out. I genuinely believe this plus a ID scanning will be a huge deterrent. Stalkers will go buy $30 real time stealth GPS trackers on Amazon instead.

I understand the dilemma you're in. You have a product with a clear, legitimate use case that would provide a valuable function to millions of users. On the other hand, even a single instance of a stalker using the device to stalk and harm someone would be a tragedy, and create a firestorm of bad publicity. Unfortunately, I don't think this solution really resolves the dilemma.

Yea, it is challenging. We are prepared to deal with outliers, even though I agree a single one is a tragedy. I do think the friction we are adding will make it far more likely that a stalker will just by an anonymous real time GPS tracker with an LTE connection vs use Tile devices.

>> Do you want us to unleash millions of dollars of lawyers on you? I don't think many people will want to find out

Assuming you don't mean that as a threat to me or anyone else posting here on HN about your product ... lawyers are not caged dogs to unleashed at people who displease you. Even the most expensive of them will not fight a lost cause, one that might humiliate them in the eyes of other lawyers. Not for a corporate tech client. This isn't a typo or other laughable but forgivable error. This is contracts 101 stuff.

And statements made online about this contract language would probably come up in subsequent cases. The fact that the CEO thinks the language unenforceable, and by implication therefore never intended to enforce it, will not help you should this ever be before a judge.

To be clear, what I am saying is it is NOT clear how enforceable it would be vs saying we know it is not enforceable. Our terms also specify we can only collect after a criminal conviction. The press writeup did not go into detail. We've thought this through quite a bit, and it is in a grey area.

Without defending stalking: I want you to follow sound legal principles rather than throw money at courts to cause people trouble This is a repulsive and disingenuous tactic, you appear to be willfully ignoring the spirit of the law and using your power to manipulate the system instead.

This response makes me lose confidence in your company's ethics.

> “ID scanning will be a huge deterrent”

Oh, this will be a huge deterrent, alright, just probably not in the way that you’re thinking.

If they’re just making things up, why not make it a $1 billion fine? That would be 1000x more deterrent!

Gun manufacturers should start adding this to their TOS. $1M fine if used to illegally commit murder.

This reminds me of the time Limewire was sued, and the recording industry claimed damages of up to $75 trillion from copyright infringement. Now that's a deterrent!

Because Tile wants to be clear that Dr. Evil is running the show.

https://youtu.be/EJR1H5tf5wE

Hi All,

I'm the CEO of Life360, Tile's parent company. I wrote a very long post that goes into way more detail about what we are doing.

Here it is for reference. https://medium.com/@chrishulls/tile-is-taking-a-different-ap...

I'm also happy to answer any questions.

"Make stalking a first-time felony offense; as of now, this is not the norm in most states. Bonus points if this can be done at the federal level."

"consent to Tile’s ability to work with law enforcement — even without a subpoena — if a Tile device is suspected of having been used in a crime"

Why are you advocating overpolicing and warrantless surveillance when we already know the police, prosecutors and courts are institutionally racist?

I think that is your judgement re overpolicing and I don't agree. We will only work with law enforcement without a subpoena a) if people opt into the feature - they can continue to use it with the feature off if they so choose and b) only in instances of stalking where your device has been found on someone.

We are trying to thread a needle.

Isn't "undetectable" an overstatement? If you were a sophisticated attacker, you'd be able to detect RF coming from the Tiles every so often, right? Or do they only respond to the right signals from a signed-in device?

In addition, doesn't the anti-theft feature make it impossible to find the item if you aren't close with the proper Tile app signed into one login? The power of AirTags is that any IOS device can wander past, see the device, then send that info to the owner without the wanderer even knowing about the transaction. Tile was pretty restricted before as there are many, many times fewer Tile app users compared to AirTags. Now with this feature, instead of all Tile users being able to gather info, if the Tile isn't within a few feet of the one signed-in device, it's not going to find the Tile and the stolen item.

Seems like a thin layer of marketing slathered onto a product that isn't really competing anymore.

Tile/Life360 CEO here. Yes, undetectable is an overstatement in a context like this. Clearly they are detectable, but a regular small time thief is not going to know how to do this. Even using a bluetooth sniffer is complicated for a layman (you'll probably find a huge number of bluetooth devices hanging around you).

We can do things like rotate MACs to make it harder and that might be coming next.

The main point is adding increasing levels of difficulty and friction

Speaking as someone who owns several Tiles, I don't understand Tile. Airtags are an order of magnitude more useful and only slightly more expensive. The manufacturing cost for a Tile can't be more than a couple of bucks. Not only are they trying to charge almost as much as an Airtag, they charge you a monthly fee if you want to get alerted when you lose connection with your Tile. If Tiles were ten bucks a piece I'd have them all over the place.

Is this company suicidal?

Economy of scale. What they are, is tiny next to Apple, and they don't get the same efficiencies from mass manufacturing as Apple, with their practically infinitly deep pockets, is able to buy.

They had an eight year head start on building bluetooth trackers over Apple.

If I understand correctly, I think the key problem for Tile is that Apple can use the billions of Apple devices out there as a network to locate AirTags. Tile only has available to it those devices that have the Tile app installed. We had a Tile years ago in my mom's purse to help her find it, so since it wasn't with me personally I'd get notifications when it was located somewhere that wasn't her home. It seemed like there wasn't great coverage.

Does airtag have a button on it like tile does that can be configured to send a find my iPhone Bluetooth signal? I have a friend who has a tile so I know it can do this but I couldn’t find that listed as a feature of airtags.

It does not. However, a phone can be located using almost any computerized device, from another phone, a computer, or a smart speaker. Heck, you can even walk around yelling "hey google/siri, find my phone!" and the phone itself will pick it up.

No. But most apple users have several apple devices before they get AirTags, and one apple device can find another. You can ask Siri to ping your phone, you can use FindMy on a different device to ping your phone, and you can use a button on the Apple Watch (on your wrist already) to ping your phone.

> AirTag competitor Tile today announced a new Anti-Theft Mode for Tile tracking devices, which is designed to make Tile accessories undetectable by the anti-stalking Scan and Secure feature.

You too can use our product for stalking for the low, low price of $1,000,000?

If the punishment for a crime is money, the rich can commit those crimes at leisure.

Doesn’t really help the person who was murdered after being stalked, but congrats to Tile on the new revenue stream I guess...

It notable also requires an ID and some kind of live person verification.

I have a hard time imagining these threats really working to stop abuse. But recipeocally, the product as it stands today is a bit of a beacon for theft, is a signal that there are valuables around. This is definitely a product trying to negotiate a difficult moral edge.

(Oh while also getting absurdly deep personal data)

More detail from the announcement¹:

"To activate Anti-Theft Mode, users must submit and apply for an advanced ID verification process that includes a biometric scan to accurately detect fake IDs. Once ID verification is complete, the user will be registered with Tile, and Anti-Theft Mode will be activated across all of the user's Tile Bluetooth trackers. Syncing a government-issued ID with a Tile user's account is a proactive measure to deter the feature from being used for nefarious purposes, such as stalking. Anonymity is directly linked with abusive behavior both in person and online4, so Tile is eliminating anonymity and bringing in the latest ID verification technology to its Anti-Theft Mode offering."

¹https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tile-takes-aim-at-b...

I hadn’t realized the only reason stalking is an issue is because there’s no negative consequences for doing it. Glad someone finally solved that problem.

I don't think they have *solved* it. Rather, this strikes me more as making them less attractive for nefarious use than other options.

Clearly AirTags will still be the choice for stalking Android users -- better coverage, they won't get notifications anyway, and no pesky fines!

Oh this is good. Next up? Microsoft fining you a million dollars if you type up your illegal plans for world domination in Word.

Apple needs this. Airtags could eliminate theft if they were undetectable.

Put them in a car for £20 and even if they park it underground it doesn’t matter… their own iphone will betray them.

This headline indicates we are participants to their marketing stunt.

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