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Comment by 7speter | Hacker News Reader

The whole thing about the mayor and NYPD telling everyone who watches or listens to the news to buy a 30 dollar gps patch that someone can put under some car carpeting anywhere in said car should be enough to discourage most car thieves with 2 or more active brain cells, but hey, I'm an idealist.

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Only if the police were actually interested in seeing the location of your stolen property & going there to look for it, which is not a typical experience when reporting a theft to an urban police department.

For what it's worth my car was stolen last year and the Orlando police response was swift, professional, and effective.

I called in with my report, dispatch quickly verified that the car had not been towed then asked me some preemptive questions to make sure it really was stolen (no one else had keys to it, etc).

My car a tracker that the thieves disabled but I sent the dispatcher the last known flair location before the tracker shut off.

The police sent one officer to get my statement while three other cars of officers canvassed the area around the the flair location building by building until they found the car inside of a gated community.

Then they took me to it to confirm it was mine, dusted everything for fingerprints, and gave me a business card with the officer's name, department, etc. and a case number I could use to for reference with insurance or to follow up and see if they managed to catch the people who stole it.

The entire process only took about an hour and the police went above and beyond. I'll forever be grateful for their efforts.

> …should be enough to discourage most car thieves with 2 or more active brain cells, but hey, I'm an idealist.

With all the dubious “stalkers put an airtag on my car” stories from a while ago they are also trivial to find and disable.

Apple isn’t stupid, they are good for finding your lost keys but not for finding your lost girlfriend.

On Amazon I see them as low as 5 for $13 {GPS tracking tags. No need to buy Apple}

I'm not sure what you're seeing but you're definitely not seeing genuine AirTags 5 for $13. More likely you're seeing the AirTag holders for that price.

>> No need to buy Apple

> you're definitely not seeing genuine AirTags 5 for $13

I didn't see anything in the comment which suggested they were. It is specifically points out there are devices not produced by Apple. Third parties can create compatible devices:

https://developer.apple.com/find-my/

The advantage of AirTags is the large phone tracking network: every recent iPhone defaults to tracking them. That's hundreds of millions of devices globally, with probably even more density in the US. The main competitors (Tile and Samsung) have much smaller networks. I'm not sure what network you'd get with generic "Bluetooth Tracker" tags: technically it could be Apple but I can't find any evidence for such products online.

I am convinced you are not reading the things you reply to.

That person specifically noted and gave you a reference to how those 3rd party tags use Apple's own network.

> That person specifically noted and gave you a reference to how those 3rd party tags use Apple's own network.

What is the clear reference? One person said they searched GPS tracker tags on Amazon and the other gave a link to Apple’s licensing program which in turn links to NDAs and contractual agreements as well a multi-step design and approval process. There seem to be some knock-offs claiming they work with Find My, but there’s all sorts of weird counterfeit crap on Amazon. Do you have links to a product that’s actually licensed/supported by Apple (ie works and will keep working), because that’s what surprised me.

https://chipolo.net/en-us/products/category/chipolo-spot

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HQF72ZM/A/chipolo-card-sp...

I own one, and it works just like an airtag and appears in the find my app. It doesn't have precision feature but everything else works(like using the apple/iphone network to find it)

Is a Apple device required to actually find the tag? Is there an Android app?

The off-brand ones lack a sufficiently large network to be used for tracking. They're only good for finding stuff in range of your own phone.

What do you mean? They can use the same network of Apple devices.

How? Airtags only work because Apple uses any iPhone with BLE support as a detector, whether or not an app is installed. An off-brand BLE beacon would require an app to work at all, and I highly doubt Apple would make it easy for a third party app to run all the time in the background.

According to https://developer.apple.com/find-my/ manufacturers of third party hardware CAN leverage the iPhone BLE network to connect to the FindMy network.

That's pretty neat. I wonder, is the user experience any worse than using airtags? Or is it functionally the same?

Link plz?

Yeah I investigated a few. The ones I checked were Bluetooth and used your phones GPS to mark their location.

So like, if you left your keys somewhere, you'd know where they were when you walked away, but not where they are afterwards.

I've been using atuvos tags, which work on the find my network (no third-party app required) and appear to work exactly the same as airtags with the exception of the LF radio for precise location finding - you just don't get the radar mode in the find my app.

They cost half as much as legit airtags

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