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Comment by ridgeguy | Hacker News Reader

Find My came to the rescue when my wife unknowingly dropped her phone during a pullover to take some pix. The turnout was on New Priest Grade, the best way to Yosemite from our home.

Next morning, after the frenzied "Where's my phone" search petered out, we remembered Find My. No way, I thought. Rural road, many miles away, etc. Which new phone would you like, Dear?

Find My immediately found it 43 miles away. My wife looked at Google Earth, identified the likely turnout and high-tailed it. She found it about five minutes after stopping at that turnout.

There were enough passers-by with iOS devices that Find My worked as hoped. It amazed me that we got a little piece of our property back through operation of planetary-scale infrastructure.

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Even with all the hate Apple gets in the tech sphere, they do have a lot of very handy features in their products.

IMHO the volume of hate isn't so much once you calibrate for Apple setting high expectations for its products, and Apple selling these products by the metric crap-ton.

Thought: hate for a product is at least partially a factor of who buys it - or, more precisely, how often you see dickheads with it.

Self-infatuated people are attracted to premium brands, and entitled people and premium brands are both more visible than the converse. Hands up if you've never been cut up in traffic by a BMW? Likewise, when someone cuts in line at a cafe and then sits down with a macbook, it's going to sensitise you to the failings of Apple

Perhaps next time someone holding an Apple device acts like a dick, maybe also take a look at what brand of shoes they're wearing. It's possible their dickishness is actually a consequence of being a Nike fanboy. It might sensitise you to the failings of Nike.

Oh come now, that's ridiculous. Let's be real for a moment. No serious person would ever say that Nike is responsible for the coffee shop etiquette of people who wear their products. It's not the Nike shoes, it's obviously the Apple laptop.

Sure, but I'm not defending cognitive bias, merely describing it.

Well the main thing is them creating stuff like this and intentionally locking others out of it. They're happy to use USB, Wifi, Bluetooth standards to further their business/because money. But they don't go "oh let's create a UWB standard that we can adopt across the industry to help people find lost devices/prevent theft".

Like "air tags", gimped when used with Android.

"Yeah, well that makes sense it's just good business practice". Yeah good for the business but shit for consumers, we should hold Apple _and_ all other companies to higher standards but humans aren't very good at working in groups of larger than like 5 people apparently.

They have leveraged their userbase into an (admittedly very useful) spy network

Have you read up on how Find My works? I don’t see how it’s a spy network when only the device owner can see where a device is.

Lots of people imagine that every Apple user, or at least Apple themselves, can track devices. But it doesn’t work that way.

The implementation seems reasonable, but how are the private keys shared between devices? It should pass through Apple some time since a phone can decrypt a laptop’s location. Or do they use bluetooth whenever near?

Generally, they have special computers that basically self-destruct when tampered with, that handle transferring key material. It's in the Apple design docs if you read them.

Apple really tries to get this right. Some countries(like China) require the computers to physically live in the country, so there could be special implementation details that alleviate some of those security guarantees, but we don't really know.

Of course, if you live in China and rely on any vendor that operates in China to protect you from the Chinese govt, you probably are wrong.

If Apple can access your account, they can see any device location the same as you. Which means that three letter agencies also have access

This is true of literally everything with a modem in it. Tracking via tower triangulation has been around for 20 years or longer. Also the entirety of your browsing history is tracked and logged by your ISP and also given to three letters agencies. And companies like Google give basically unrestricted access to all your data. Nothing is private anymore.

> Also the entirety of your browsing history is tracked and logged by your ISP

Presumably a) this is websites, not web pages, and b) a VPN negates this?

It is every page you visit. Any time you make an HTTP request it's logged.

VPN might do a little but browser fingerprinting is virtually impossible to negate unless you're using Tor on TailOS, and Google/CloudFlare will still know exactly who you are through a VPN, and so therefore so will government agencies.

> only the device owner can see where a device is

Apple itself can also see where it is. This automatically means the NSA can also see where it is.

Considering the NSA probably doesn’t allow an electronic product to be sold in the US without a back door, and every square inch of the surface of the US is probably being imaged by satellites, its not like this presents new risk to you.

Backdoors tend to be sloppy and invite more than who they were built for. Nobody needs another attack surface. Ignoring and disparaging legitimate privacy concerns is unhelpful antisocial at best, gaslighting for tyrany some less cheritable might say.

What should I read?

> infrastructure

Imagine if anyone, not just Apple, could build on that, creating an automatic sneakernet. Populous areas without cell towers would come online, with ultra high latency. Throughput would also need to be throttled by the owner of each device to accommodate battery consumption preferences.

We’re not that far off from the planet being covered with low bandwidth internet anyway.

NB-IOT and LTE-M, along with the possibility that SpaceX can use Starlink satellites to provide low bandwidth LTE coverage, seems to give a viable path for global coverage soon

Only problem is that in the short term NB-IoT/LTE-M devices are rather expensive, both upfront and monthly costs. Guess that will come down over time though

> Only problem is that in the short term NB-IoT/LTE-M devices are rather expensive.

I never heard of those before, but maybe LoRa gateways could work as a low-cost solution if having a very low bandwith isn't an issue?

> Throughput would also need to be throttled by the owner of each device to accommodate battery consumption preferences.

Ay, there's the rub!

Tile did exactly that. Except of course according to the privacy policy they track where everything and everyone is.

Apple let's you build products for the Find My network.

Third parties are allowed to use the Find My network. I have a Find My "credit card" in my wallet made by Chipolo.

No they are not. They are allowed to create devices that can be found, but I can't use my Android phone to find an AirTag.

Yes you can, there's an official Apple app to do it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.trac...

And a 3rd party tool that does even more: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.seemoo.at_t...

This does a different thing

What OP means is that I cannot purchase an Airtag/Chipolo, and then subsequently find that Airtag using the Find My Network with my Android device.

I can identify airtags around me with that App, but I cannot locate a missing Airtag.

I was about to correct you saying "icloud.com works on any browser, even an Android phone", but then I went and looked and you can't locate AirTags (or people) using the Web version of Find My, just Apple devices. An odd omission on Apple's part.

I have a couple of Tile fobs from before Apple moved into the space. They're still good enough for checked bag tracking while flying (at least to confirm the bag has made it to the terminal). Tracking is pretty limited without the subscription, but enough to sanity check. It would also work as a "last seen" location, which might be enough for your example (you don't need the network unless your device moves).

Find My should also give you a push notification if you leave a device somewhere? But you'll get false positives if you turn off Bluetooth.

>Find My should also give you a push notification if you leave a device somewhere?

It does.

And it’s annoyingly good at it, emphasis on annoyingly. Fortunately it has settings to turn it off in common scenarios

> There were enough passers-by with iOS devices that Find My worked as hoped.

Wouldn't the phone tell Apple servers where it was? No need for passer-bys.

Without cell coverage?

Okay let’s say there wasn’t any. Why would passer-bys have coverage?

Maybe a different carrier with different coverage?

I'm also wondering if Find My will save the "find", including GPS coordinates at the time, and report it out when it has connection?

Find My doesn't require the passerby to have connectivity _at the time it passes by_. They record where they were when they saw the lost phone, and whenever they get connectivity back, they report that to the owner.

They didn’t, they were passing by, and eventually headed to an area with coverage.

> There were enough passers-by with iOS devices that Find My worked as hoped

I'm not sure I understand why you would need nearby devices to locate your phone. The phone itself already had GPS and a network connection, right?

Find my works without a network connection. So if the phone is lost without signal and another iOS device comes in range it will remember seeing it, and then upload the location to apple for the devices owner to see when it has internet again.

Oh really. Wow that's pretty amazing. I thought it worked by piggy-backing off the connection of nearby devices meaning that those nearby devices would still need to have an active network connection while near to your device. I didn't know that it would remember the location of a device and then upload that location later on.

It's like 50-100 bytes of data per device seen to cache, not exactly data cap shattering amounts :)

Timestamp + GPS coordinates + device ID is about what gets sent to the cloud for each device.

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