Find My Device on Android
blog.google
blog.google
Google and their customers don't have much to gain through a proprietary implementation. If anything, open-sourcing Find My Device Network would allow third party devices to join the network, enhancing its value to Google's customers. Google emphasizes ad nauseum that this system is extremely private and secure, so third party implementations shouldn't be cause for worry.
Governments and various potentially dangerous organizations stand to benefit greatly from a closed implementation for reasons that hardly need explaining.
Google makes a lot of lofty claims about E2EE and privacy considerations in that blog post, I'd just like to see them prove it.
An open source version would make absolute no difference on what is trackable.
That's the point: transparency is necessary with critical data like this.
Unless, of course: That centralized data store were also open -- perhaps even by using something like DNS -- but then, anyone of sufficient skill would be able to craft an application to see where others' things are.
(Unless... E2E encryption for location data, so it can only be understood by those who generate it? Hmm.)
Something like shamir's secret sharing with split up keys effectively making the encrypted data useless, or based on time frames so you can only track the last "epoche" (like the last 24 hours, maybe?) similar to how HOTP/TOTP works could work nicely I'd imagine.
At Tholian (my company) we're using team based keys where at least 2 of x keys (the elected lead and co lead) in the team must co-sign a data changing action. It's peer to peer, meaning those peers can find each other and co-sign this without our servers having to store any transaction queue that could be compromised.
This way we prevent abuse, and if the feds come knocking on our doors, our users stay protected because without those keys we cannot see what's going on in any of the registered teams.
That's how I think it should be like, for any web service that supposedly keeps their privacy promises. If they don't do this, their promises were likely lies and once the root keys or the databases are compromised there's no turning back.
Looking at you, cross-tenant keys at Azure. Everyone knows you were and are still lying about the security aspects.
Try FMD. https://f-droid.org/packages/de.nulide.findmydevice/
The thing Google is announcing here is like the Apple "find my" network--it seems to allow you to use other people's devices to find your lost device simply based on a BLE ping.
That is something that is hard to build by yourself, and would benefit greatly from an industry-wide standard (more peer devices reporting locations!).
> simply based on a BLE ping
What if they disable Bluetooth?
The linked open source find my device app uses cell network to both receive commands and for location.
It wouldn't do a lot of good if thieves could just turn off Bluetooth, right?
The design of this is pretty clever: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet....
I presume somewhere you can turn this off for real, but the defaults seem sensible to me.
I'd guess that Bluetooth will never fully shut off, it would just look like it's turned off to other apps that would want to use it.
I think the real utility of tile/airtag/google-find-my-device is the network of other colluding devices listening for bluetooth pings and reporting on the location. Not least because apple (maybe google, don't know) forces your device to send reports if you want to use the feature. Heck, on modern phone OSs, you can't use BLE in apps without turning on the location service.
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/find-my-security-se...
With these few huge tech-companies, the industry has lost its natural "feature" that required competing players to work together and form an Alliance/SIG to make really big things happen.
Instead, the really big companies are happy to take the fruits from that time (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC,...) and build something proprietary on top instead of contributing back to it...
It also took them almost a DECADE to acknowledge that they should work together on this topic, and STILL they don't fully acknowledge that.
I wonder how long it will take for them to complete the journey on NOT cooperating on messaging, by butchering the RCS-specification in secrecy...
They don't need google for that. It's built right into the phone network.
They should have sold out (edit: to a mobile platform company, either Google or Apple) while they had the chance.
edit: I don't think Google would have had much to gain by acquiring Tile, the actual technology is very simple, their moat was just the fact that they had the largest install base of tracking apps on Android. Google could, and did, just rug-pull them by pushing their own network out to every Android device with Play Services (so nearly all of them).
The only thing Tile really has going for it now is that their trackers can be used with both Android and iOS simultaneously, if you have devices in both ecosystems.
Tile has a feature where you can submit your info and sign some sort of extra contract stating that you won't use your Tile for stalking/illegal activity, and you can actually hide a Tile in your bike frame and it can be used to find your bike if it goes missing. AirTags are useless for this because Apple doesn't want them used for stalking.
Also, the attitude of “don’t go and get your stuff back yourself, it’s not safe” is just castrated cowardice and only emboldens thieves. Thieves should be afraid of both law enforcement and vigilante response. Better society when both are on the table.
Cars are frequently stolen, as you may have noticed.
Cars are stolen far less often than they would be otherwise partially due to technology like LoJack. Did you grow up in the US? Steering wheel locks used to be on every other parked car. Immobilizers and LoJack made them a thing you buy for your weekend classic car only.
For instance: One or more well-hidden surveillance cameras cannot ever deter anyone from doing anything. However: One or more cameras placed out in the open can do so. (They don't even have to be functional cameras to be a deterrence.)
LoJack isn't a deterrence. It is instead a way to react after a theft has already occured.
The AirTag, meanwhile: It also can't prevent or deter the theft -- if a thief is going to steal a thing, they're going to steal it whether it has an AirTag hidden somewhere or not.
And when an iPhone-using thief is alerted to the presence of that AirTag tracker, they have options beyond just ditching the bike: They can make the AirTag make noise, and also use Precision Finding to draw an arrow on the screen of their phone that helps them to locate the AirTag so it can be destroyed.
(This is a deliberate anti-stalking feature on the part of Apple.
Tracking stolen goods is fundamentally incompatible with anti-stalking measures: There cannot be both things in the same ecosystem, since if a person can silently track their [stolen?] bicycle, then they can also silently track a living human being.)
You lose credibility right there. No need for such bullshit it you actually have a point. Performative machismo is completely useless.
> Thieves should be afraid of both law enforcement and vigilante response. Better society when both are on the table.
lol no. Actually, what the hell are you thinking? Mob justice is not justice at all. What happens when someone decides you are a thief (or rapist, or murderer) just because they don’t like the look of you or would like to have your car very much?
This does not frighten thieves; this frightens people other people don’t like. I mean, we’ve had plenty of examples in recent history. I would take the risk of losing my bike every now and then instead of the risk of being lynched any day.
(Also: AFAIK the "large"--not really, in comparison to the AirTag + adapter, lol--Tile Pro variants have a noticeably longer range than AirTags.) Honestly, the only thing, to me, missing from Tile is the direction arrow finder, which is certainly useful, and yet... the speakers on the Tile are much much better so it just doesn't matter so much?
(BTW: it is extremely stupid that that arrow only works in two directions. I waste so much time following the arrow only to realize I need to go upstairs -- I live in a two story apartment with a bedroom and an office above my kitchen and living room: it isn't larger than my friends's apartments, but it is really nice having two floors -- that I am only doing because the sound isn't loud enough on AirTags.)
Frankly, the whole argument for AirTags being inherently better is merely that they have a "bigger network", but for most of my objects I am not scavenging around town looking for then, nor am I ever going to be chasing some thief around the city in my car looking to steal it back, hoping to catch up to them before they disable or throw out the tracker... that vigilante justice idea associated with this product category is just a crazy pipe dream.
Instead, I am pretty much always just trying to figure out which pair of pants I left my wallet in today, or on which shelf I left my keys: I would actually be much happier with a purely local product that only responded to encrypted pings from my personal phone and only even did that when I actively ask it to (as despite using both Tile and AirTags for years now the "you left your item behind" notifications have only happened before I myself noticed once or twice in a way which was helpful... it just doesn't ping often enough, with either product, to be maximally useful).
And looking at the replies to this, I have learned AirTags are actually missing what is to me a glorious feature of Tile: that I can push a button on my keys and find my phone in reverse. I hadn't noticed this lack before as I am only using AirTags in large objects I don't keep on my person (which makes their notifications really annoying as the UI fails to eat old ones even when I walk back to my object... this seems very fixable), but I don't want to have to buy an Apple Watch just to have a way to find my phone :/.
I don't believe third party accessories support the compass-style precision finding though.
Both variants you list are supported by Chipolo: https://chipolo.net/en/products/category/chipolo-spot
Apple not allowing 3rd parties use of their proprietary technology is not the entirety of the DoJ’s argument. For example, their claims about Messages and Apple Watch are about support Apple hasn’t built, not about what they prevent 3rd parties from building.
Hang onto your old RF-transparent wallet, because RFID blocking has become a standard bullet-point feature they all have to have now.
It was nice-enough case for my phone and it primarily kept the phone from getting beat up by other pocket-stuff that would happen in a workday. But it also had two compartments: One was shielded all around by conductive fabric and this made a fairly good Faraday cage, and for the other one layer of that conductive fabric would be pushed aside so that the Faraday cage was incomplete (and thus largely non-functional).
It gave me a choice, and that choice worked well.
I think I paid $3 for it back in the day from DealExtreme (which was a lot like Temu is today, except shipping normally took months instead of days or weeks).
Is choice not a thing in modern RFID-blocking wallets?
[0: There was a time when my company felt it was useful to track people with their company-provided cell phones. I didn't mind that during the workday, so much, but we were also encouraged to use these as our personal phones if we chose to, and strongly encouraged to keep them with us 24/7 so we would be reachable.
And I didn't mind being reachable most or all of the time and I certainly enjoyed not having my own cell phone bill back then, but I did not like being tracked 24/7: Sometimes, I wanted to do my own private shit on my own time without being snooped on.
I could tell the tracking app to exit, and that did work, but doing so sent a notification to my completely stupid, abusive manager -- who would variously either call to ask why I did that, or just silently turn it back on remotely (which the system permitted).
And I did not (and do not) think that, as a professional, I needed to excuse my choice to have privacy at any given time. (Given my own role in the company I had access to this tracking data as well, but I'm not the abusive type.)
So, the solution was simple: Normally, the phone was in the non-shielded part of the case. And when I dropped it into the completely-surrounded Faraday portion instead, the phone just simply dropped off and silently stopped providing updates.
This worked 100%, and while I refer to them as separate compartments to aid in functional clarity, the design of this case didn't really take up any more space than any other phone-case would have.]
There's like three different places I put my phone in different areas of the house, and only one where I put my wallet and keys as soon as I enter.
I would like an airtag to put on my bike or laptop or other high value item to track it if stolen, but I'm not about to buy Apple stuff.
I imagine apple removed it because tags are not paired to phones (like tiles) but instead to the whole account. If you were to push the theoretical button on the airtag your entire house would probably set to chiming (apple tv, homepod, all the phones and ipads on the account all the macs...)
There is a simple solution to this: if you press the hypothetical AirTag button, trigger the closest iPhone attached to your account, and then you can manually pick any specific device in Find My as usual from the iPhone.
99.9% of the time the network doesn’t matter because the item isn’t lost, I just don’t remember where I left it, and it’s either in range or wherever Tile shows the last known location to be. And even if it is lost, Tile app remembers it as being at the last place where I had it and my phone, which is practically always where I left it.
Airtag surely has better coverage, since like 50% of phones are helping, but the one time I actually lost something Tile found it. Someone had moved it so the location must have been uploaded by another Tile user. I use my Tiles daily to find my AirPods or a key set, I’ve used it once in years to find that (my Airpods case) when it fell out of my pocket in a park.
Tile is louder and easier to hear. Tile has several form factors, Airtag only has one, and honestly, any tile form factor is better than Airtags. I swear they picked the worst possible shape for it, it just has to make whatever you put it in bulge. You have to buy some sort of case to even use it most of the time, whereas a Tile can pop directly onto your key ring.
Airtag can’t ring my phone. I do that frequently.
I’ve used both extensively, I’ll keep buying Tiles. Or maybe one of these newer ones. I’d go so far as to say Airtag is only better at finding something that’s been stolen, and that’s just a tiny percent of the use cases. Tile is better in every other way.
Yeah, this functionality is the ultimate "network effect" model. While my most common use case for Tile is walking around my house with my phone to see where I've misplaced my keys, the other (and more advertised) case is that if I lose my keys while out and about, I can get notified of their location if anyone else with the Tile app installed is near my keys.
The iOS and Android platforms have a huge advantage because they don't depend on having any app installed - that previous sentence just becomes "I can get notified of their location if anyone else with an iOS device (for AirTags) or Android device (for this new functionality) is near my keys." That's huge, because it means there are fewer places that won't have anyone with those phones. And now that Android has this functionality, I see more and more people switching to it from Tile, which means the Tile network will get smaller and be even less useful for the Tile users who remain.
I wonder just how quickly this'll roll out over the Android devices in the wild? It needs Android 9+ it seems, which is about 80-85% of the devices from memory. I wonder if it also needs vendor updates? How quickly will Samsung/Huawei et al provide Android updates with this feature? (And will vendors be able to choose to block it?)
Glad I decided to buy only one to test it out rather than go all-in.
The one place I'd really like a tile is on my Pixel Buds, but a Tile is a significant %age of the size of the case, and again not something I need super frequently.
The Apple value prop used to be “it all works together”, now it’s “half the shit you spent thousands on won’t work if you leave the island”.
The Tim Cook era is great for stock holders, but he’s one of the prime enshittifiers in Silicon Valley.
Also would have forced the Internet to a lowest common denominator of capability.
Z-Wave was a proprietary standard and have a device certification process.
Zigbee was a open-source IEEE standard.
Both had their pros and cons but weren't interoperable.
Manufactures have agreed to create and move to a new standard "Matter"
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)
I don't see why this success storey couldn't happen for the 'lost device world' or most other proprietary non-interoperable systems. (why can't i send a message from Whatsapp to Messenger)
Not anymore, since 2022 apple stock was mostly flat and today is even below January 2022. Vision Pro is a flop as today (maybe future iteration will change that) - just look at google trends.
Hopefully Apple change the course or Tim Cook get replaced - especially if they don't show anything meaningful related to AI/ML at this WWDC.
The feature that lets you ring nearby trackers is actually standardised between Apple, Google, Samsung and the others. It goes by DULT - Detection of Unwanted Location Trackers.
The crowdsource networks are not compatible.
Google isn't significantly better on that metric, of course, but I feel like it's often in Google's business interests to interoperate more often than it is in Apple's.
Apple adopted USB C on their phones because the EU compelled them to. They tend to oppose standards they aren't already using.
They had already switched their laptops to all USB-C many years ago. And iPad Pros. I think the iPad Air and iPad (no name) switched as well.
There were also strong rumblings Apple was going to release the USB-C iPhones when the rule was passed.
> They tend to oppose standards they aren't already using.
You’re kidding right? Then explain USB. Or Thunderbolt. Of every other thing I listed above. Apple didn’t invent any of them and open them. They were all existing standards.
Sure, and they're now allowing game streaming apps and retro emulators on iOS because that's what they always knew was best for the world anyway. What a coincidence (with the DMA, in that case)!
> Apple didn’t invent any of them and open them. They were all existing standards.
Counterpoint: Magsafe. They had USB-C and went back to something proprietary.
Another counterpoint: Thunderbolt wasn't an open standard until very recently, and I can only imagine that Intel gave Apple some heavy discounts on the controller chips used (or even their main CPUs) to push the standard.
Apple doesn't always hate standards and interoperability, but they will absolutely try to push their proprietary protocols and interfaces whenever it's in their business interest.
The fact all their other products were moving seems to indicate they’d move to USB-C on the iPhone as well. Rumors had them working on it for years.
Now maybe it would have come out this year and not last.
MagSafe: they added something back. You can still charge with USB-C. Works fine, I do it.
Thunderbolt: that wasn’t Apple. Intel invented it and Apple put it to use. I have no idea if it’s open or closed, that’s my fault. What I meant was it wasn’t an Apple invention. Besides, what else had that kind of bandwidth at the time in a cable? It’s not like there was some common better thing they shunned.
They added MagSafe and still kept USB C charging.
> So you're saying that's what they wanted to do all along, it just took them almost ten years, and it just happened to neatly coincide with the EU regulation as well?
They had already starting to move iPads to USB C
Which they're explicitly selling as laptop alternatives, at least the Pro line.
People were already connecting all kinds of things (audio interfaces, mice, ethernet adapters etc.) to iPads using the hilariously named lignting-to-USB-host "camera adapter", and all of that is just better over USB-C.
On the iPhone, the vast majority of people only use the port for charging and maybe listening to music; the few additional iPhone sold to people that actually use them with external storage for ProRes cinematography probably pales in comparison to the lost revenue from MFI license fees.
And how much do you think Apple really made on MFI licenses as a percentage of revenue? It was a rounding error and many of the knocks off people bought from Amazon weren’t even licensed.
Honestly I am still blown away that the switch last year to USB-C was met with some positivity (often from tech people) and a bunch of ’meh’. I was expecting tons of screaming and “Apple’s making you buy all your cables again to juice their books!”
Bluetooth used to support file transfers from device to device on feature- and early smartphones no matter the brand; now there's AirDrop (and maybe sometimes Google Nearby, but only if the humidity and lunar phase is just right).
In home audio streaming, there was once DLNA; now there's AirPlay and Google Cast.
We have two mutually incompatible walled gardens, and while life within them is admittedly nicer than in a world of poorly-implemented standards, the walls are getting higher by the day.
But would it kill them to just support both? I’d take sometimes janky, always slow transfers to Android over having to WhatsApp photos to somebody literally next to me any day.
But much more reliable than pairing and connecting/reconnecting to audio devices for example.
There are clauses in there that mandate gatekeepers to give access to all kinds of interfaces only accessible to the native OS or first-party apps. I'd expect AWDL/AirDrop to match the type of thing the EU wants Apple to open up quite nicely.
If Google had any interest in shaking the duopoly, they'd of course be first to request Apple to open up AirDrop access to Android.
Realistically we'll hopefully see at least some third-party app vendor that bridges the gap with something that doesn't need an install on both iOS and Android, since in many AirDrop scenarios people don't have time, knowledge, or a network connection to install some unknown third-party app.
That still leaves 2 years past Apple’s long rumored debut.
Presumably Google would have, eventually, said "ok, enough is enough, we're releasing on X date whether or not you've updated yet". And maybe that's indeed what happened! At that point Apple really would want to finish that update, since not doing so could be a privacy hole for their customers. (The same privacy hole Android users had to deal with in the early days of AirTags when we couldn't detect them.)
This difference is even stronger when you leave EU + US and go to Asia, Central / South America, Africa where iPhone users are not less, but very rare.
My use case is clearly to track my hand luggage, wallet, backpack etc. when I travel and I'm a nomad. Gonna wait on reviews but I'm very excited!
My RAZR MAXX could sit for months on the one charge (with already busted battery) without any cell activity.
So if you don't need the display and a hungry wireless tech to keep on constantly you can have enough juice for days, even when the phone is no longer in the power profile to have a full run.
1. https://www.theverge.com/22697218/iphone-apple-ios-15-find-m... 2. https://developer.apple.com/find-my/
The amount of juice your entire phone needs to run for, say, a half hour can probably power just the bluetooth LE chipset for occasional wakeups for beacon-sending for... weeks? Months? (Completely made up time spans, but the BTLE chipset really does need a tiny amount of power for infrequent wakesups compared to the entire phone.) Certainly this can't last forever: if your phone is missing for long enough, the battery will eventually run down to a point where the battery controller won't let even the BTLE chipset draw any more power.
This definitely requires hardware, firmware, and software support in order to set up, which is why only Pixel 8 is supported so far. Clearly when they were designing the Pixel 8 hardware, they already knew this feature was in the pipeline, and wanted to be able to launch with a supported phone.
As far as I remember there's a separate microcontroller that controls "Find my phone" beacons without having to boot up iOS on the main application processor.
That explaines why my work iPhone has an empty battery after 2 weeks of being turned off. Good job Apple. /s
This suggests there is separate hardware with its own power and network capabilities, designed for location tracking, designed to be always on. Is there a way to disable it?
But it's even more secure than that - them made it so it's such a poor phone that I never managed to get it into use as a daily driver phone for more than a day or two at a time! The most private device is one you never bother carrying!
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/11520-android-find-my-devic...
https://www.androidpolice.com/android-15-powered-off-finding...:
> To solve this problem, Google is working on a “Powered Off Finding” feature that allows a device to store precomputed Bluetooth beacons in the memory of the Bluetooth controller. This means that even when a device is powered off, it can continue broadcasting Bluetooth beacons to nearby devices.
> Unfortunately, Powered Off Finding isn’t the kind of feature that can just be enabled on any device. This is because the device needs to have hardware support for powering the Bluetooth controller when the rest of the components are shut down. Plus, device makers need to put in some extra engineering work to support this feature. For example, they need to support the Bluetooth Finder hardware abstraction layer (HAL) so that the Android OS can enable Powered Off Finding mode and send those precomputed Bluetooth beacons that I mentioned.
I don't know how that could work if the battery is dead, unless they're letting the Bluetooth controller draw on some reserve battery capacity after the phone has powered itself down.
Google owns the OS; if they want your location, they don't need to care about per-app location permissions.
Unless you install something else.
Google is still beholden to consumer privacy laws. I’m sure if you turn off location data in your Google account they won’t track you. The guys in the Room 641A will.
To ignore them or what ? None of the FAANG respect the privacy laws (GDPR for example). They just pay lobby money and insignificant fines from time to time and no government cares about it.
There's my anecdata...
This is great. I wanted my next phone to be Z Flip since Apple stopped making small iPhones (and no foldables in sight), but reliance on Find My stopped me.
This is great
And I like my iPhone. If it was twice as thick and half as tall when folded, I just don’t see that as “better”.
If it was the same thickness as today when folded and half as thick when unfolded I’m not sure that’s better either (and would be harder to make anyway).
Folding phones seem like one of those neat things that can be made but don’t solve any problem most people have. It seems like it would be most useful to make something the size of a lipstick case that unfolds into something a bit wider. That would’ve been cool 20 years ago. But I don’t wanna phone that tiny these days.
I like my iPhone Mini but apparently most people didn't.
Then they are not really offline or off are they? Bring back removable batteries in the phones.
https://findorbit.com/en-eu/products/orbit-x-glasses-eu
https://home.tag8.co/products/dolphin-smart-eye-wear-tracker
You should assume the location of your devices will be disclosed whenever the US gov has a plausible reason for requesting it, regardless of which part of the globe you live in.
My wife keeps her phone on silent but loses it multiple times a day. We use the computer to make it ring using Find my Device, but it'd be a lot easier if I could just do it from my phone, which I can if I install the app and then add her Google account to the accounts on my phone, but then I get access (and notified of) all her emails, google photos and stuff like that.
Is there an alternative ? Some way to just have both phones agree to sync somehow and then one can make the other ring, regardless of sound settings.
And use Tailscale to create a secure network
Mask off moment.
I’m surprised they can only do proximity, though. AirTags do direction quite well and can sometimes even tell altitude difference.
The Homepod is amazing too. It's stuck with Siri (is this what you mean?) but has fantastic sound that integrates with the TV for movies and Mac when playing music.
The irrational part of me agrees with you, but I already have an Android phone, so the Google Home doesn't really give Google any extra insight into my private life that they don't already have.
This is why I don't get it when people are weirded out by a stationary always-on microphone in their homes, when they carry around a mobile, always-on microphone (and tracking device!) in their pockets.
(If you also refuse to have an Android phone on these same grounds, then your position seems pretty reasonable, of course.)
Or is this more like the older iPhones where it simply tells you if you’re getting closer or further away?
Hopefully they’ll add that in the future.
Since Android supports UWB [1] (depending on the device of course), I don't see why they couldn't support the same feature.
> At home protection. If a user has chosen to save their home address in their Google Account, their Android device will also ensure that it does not contribute crowdsourced location reports to the Find My Device network when it is near the user’s home.
This is a feature that is fundamentally on-device, and it’s even a privacy feature, but for some reason it requires a Google account.
"Come on...tell us where you live. We already know anyway, but it's better if you tell us. It's for your own protection!"
In the landscape of 20 years ago this "Find-My" use-case would have already been made an industry-standard, with an Alliance or SIG of the industry controlling a global spec and roadmap.
Tech-companies would have proposed a spec, lobbied competitors and other players to join and contribute to an industry standard to make this happen, because no single company was large enough to launch such a multi-disciplinary product all by itself.
You would get a wide range of companies joining, reviewing and vetting the specification to create a strong ecosystem for service providers, component makers, device-manufacturers, etc.
Now, a few established big corporations happily use those legacy industry standards (WiFi, BT,...), and instead of contributing back to it to make it stronger, they create proprietary products/services on top, ensuring that everyone else is just a petitioner/supplicant.
The barrier to entry is so high, that only a handful companies can launch an item tracker service. And everyone who wants to offer a product in that space needs to play by their rules, they prohibit a lot of use cases.
I use a few Chipolo trackers with my iPhone, and I find it infuriating how limited they are. There doesn't seem to be a way to query the data, so I can't eg. make a dashboard that shows location of my items, or make my own app that makes it easier to find my stuff. Every time I look for my keys, it takes me 30 seconds to navigate through Apple's stupid interface, wait for it to update, scroll to the right button, and press the "make sound" button.
Without competition we're forever stuck with mediocre software and a fraction of what would be technically possible.
Even worse, I doubt that ANY company can actually compete with such a service. Apple and Google create the tracking-network by baking the capability to scan for trackers into the Smartphone-OS.
A competitor first needs to make users install an app to "manually" build this network. There's no company capable to build a global network of equal scale.
I want a direction finding arrow that points to my lost headphones case or my wife's phone. I want a smart door lock that unlocks automatically when I approach from the outside but not the inside. I want to stop relying on flaky Bluetooth for Tesla's car key. Why are there literally zero products on the market that support UWB on Android as far as I can tell?
So the answer is, whenever a manufacturer thinks it's worth including in the tag.
If it could eventually do it within the app that could be pretty neat, but even if it doesn't and just has a button to open the manufacturer's app - just like it currently does to open the maps app - it would be basically as good.
Alternatively, the manufacturer's app can just show a notification to get you into the UWB UI when active proximity mode is enabled and when you are within UWB range.
Apple isn't the only manufacturer to do UWB, and Samsung's UX is pretty similar to this and works just as well.
Other manufacturers like Pebblebee, Chipolo and Tile decided not to include it - neither on Android nor iOS. They could have added it for years now, they just decided not to. Chipolo says they think it's just not worth the tradeoff. I don't necessarily disagree - I rarely use it with my samsung tags or airtags, it's just more convenient to use sound 95% of the time. Only time I'll use it is if I'm afraid of waking someone up.
I could definitely see it being useful for people with hearing limitations, though.
Where can I buy a UWB tracker that supports direction finding on Pixel phones? I have looked and didn't find a single one. Or literally any other product of any kind with UWB that works on Pixel at all for any purpose, for that matter.
The third party UWB API is available (though it's in alpha) and it supports AoA and direction finding : https://developer.android.com/develop/connectivity/uwb
I'm guessing the reason you can't find anything compatible is because there was no way to make anything worthwhile before the Find My network economically. It made no sense for Tile to add UWB only for Pixels (since the Smarttags are better), and no one else could make their own network.
Once this rolls out, there will probably be trackers with UWB trackers. Otherwise, you can make your own - the chips are pretty cheap and it's a relatively accessible DIY project that has been done before.
Only sorta -- the Pro models have it, but the regular ones do not.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google eventually rolls this out. But it's probably bad optics to say it's only supported with a very limited set of models.
Ah, but it only shows devices logged into my account. Well, let's log into hers. Which required 2FA from... her device.
Sooo useful.
Hackers were able to steal private photos of half of Hollywood in 2014 because someone at Apple decided that 2FA is not needed for one particular iCloud function.
Perhaps some combination of no 2FA IF you are a trusted contact that I've specifically added to the account would be safer.
But I absolutely don't want it to work without 2FA, and if your only 2FA is your phone you have other problems.
If you don't get that message because you don't have your device that means you're not being tracked / are looking for your device and if you get that message because you have your device you've now been warned that someone has breached your account.
All Google had to do here was copy Apple's solution of having access to that one feature work with only the user name and password.
Just don't log out. Let us collect your data forever and at all times. No need to restart your computer, ever.
You're dumb because you didn't create hard copy two factor backup codes! User error.
I am really happy that there are people doing security and making things more secure, but the truth is that usability is necessary too. The reason Signal is so great is not just because encryption, it is because my Grandma can use it. Not aware of any other encrypted text message system besides iMessage and WhatsApp that has that usability and those come with strings. I really think there needs to be something similar for MFA. Consider the user.
Edit: A possible suggestion for FindMyDevice is to have trusted users. That you can give your wife, friend, whatever permission to find your device without needing to sign into your account or any other permissions. This seems like a relatively obvious solution, is there something wrong with it? Google devs, can't you patch this in in a few weeks (or less? But we all know, bureaucracy exists)
>> I find these issues difficult when also considering security keys like Yubikey. Like you can't clone a yubikey and that's considered a feature not a bug.
Yes, I am quite aware of this. My complaint is that I cannot expect my grandma to be able to perform this action. It would even be difficult if there was a cloning program, but without it, this is certainly an insurmountable task.
Sure, you can make the argument that my grandma is dumb and tech-illiterate, but the truth of the matter is that this is the bar for the average person. You, me, and other Hacker News users would have no issues with these tasks, but this is not representative of the general FIRST WORLD population. Not to mention those in developing countries.
The technical aspects are great! But they also need be made available for the average person. Be that by bringing the average person up to sufficient level or through careful design to bridge this gap. But what is clear is that the current state of things is insufficient. Especially consider that this is Apple's main value: design.
I use these with my car key fobs because my neighbors teenagers discovered key fob amplification attacks.
i.e. how do I opt out of tracking other people and being tracked myself, i.e. without explicit consent?
And judging by the other comments in this thread ATM (with one possible exception), nobody seems to care...
Stop using Google services if you don't want to be tracked by Google tracking services.
Second, it's not mine or EFF's responsibility to police what Google does. Let's make it very clear that the current situation is Google's responsibility and nobody else's.
Third, it doesn't matter whether I stop using Google services because other people using those services will track me anyway.
And fourth, what does it say about a company that you can only use its services if you agree to be tracked and agree to track everyone on the planet without their explicit consent?
I mean, let's be clear here. This is not "I'm tracking a pseudonymous ID across websites". This is literally tracking the physical location of someone whose real ID Google can easily find out, through a wide variety of means.
Best of luck.
That's not how society works, though. There's no such thing as "natural human rights". If you want rights -- like privacy, or the requirement that you can control all aspects of your devices -- you have to fight for them sometimes. Millennia of human history is littered with examples, and plenty of people in power would prefer you didn't have any rights.
Companies are in some ways sorta just agnostic: they often don't care if you have rights or not, but if you don't, they're going to exploit that situation for their own financial gain. It's lame, but that's the system and society we live in. Ignoring that doesn't make it go away. Organizations like the EFF exist precisely because this sort of thing is our collective responsibility.
So I 100% reject your assertion here. We are all responsible for our collective situation, even if often it feels like we are powerless to change things. Ultimately we aren't actually powerless, but it's hard (and sometimes risky, depending on the issue at hand) to work to band together to form a large enough power base to change things, collectively.
If you don't want to be an activist, that's fine. But complaining about your rights then feels a little hollow and lazy.
I know this sounds defeatist, but I've gotten to the point where I don't think it's possible in modern technological life in a developed country these days to avoid being tracked to some extent. At least not without dropping most (if not all) of the conveniences I care about too much in day-to-day life. And yeah, that's on me for becoming so accustomed to those things that I'd feel worse not having them.
It's a sad state of affairs, really. But I don't think this will change without some heavy-duty privacy-focused legislation (with massive, tightly-enforced penalties for non-compliance) that forces companies to prioritize user privacy. Part of me would like to believe that sort of thing is coming within the next decade. But the more cynical part of me thinks it won't come, because governments benefit from companies tracking their users, as they can buy that tracking data even when their own laws say they cannot collect it themselves.
Unfortunately this is the way things are now. I wish there were good open source phone contenders but they have yet to catch up to the feature parity and quality of iOS and Android.
Alternatively, don't use an Android phone with Google Play Services.
Or will they still send my location and Bluetooth ID information to Google?
Not a great situation, to be sure.
(I know I know)