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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Can someone point me to something I saw earlier? Apple alerts users to "tags that might be following you". Someone made an implementation that used a KDF to rotate the mac address or private key or something, but it was predictable in a way you could track each derivation of the of the mac/private key.

There is a really obnoxious petty theft problem where I live, and the time it takes to constantly get my windows fixed or forced entry crap removed is worth a significant amount of my personal time. I have zero desire to confront anyone, but I'd like to be able to create a track for a PI or Law enforcement some day.

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You can buy GPS cellular trackers. Then just get a really cheap or even free IOT sim.

Alternatively you could probably just walk to your nearest drug addict hangout with case of bottled water and ask them to stop breaking into your stuff.

Can you though? Every time airtags come up here someone is like "you can get GPS trackers already! they're cheap!" but I actually looked and actual GPS trackers that don't require a subscription or have various other flaws seem to be very difficult to find.

If there's a GPS tracker that uses an eSIM and isn't sketchy af and has decent battery life and isn't £100 let me know! I would love that for my bikes.

Yup, usually $20-30 per month is what I found. It would be cheaper to just use an old phone and use a cheap pay as you go cell service

Do you have more info on free IOT sims? Are the plans just super low data rate?

Hologram used to have a free developer plan that gave you 1MB per month. I don't know if it still exists.

Doesn't sound like much, but it's a monstrous amount of data for a battery powered GNSS tracker.

Hm, AFAIK AirTags rotate their private key anyway, so I don't know if that will help your problem. Maybe they rotate it slowly, though, I'm not very familiar with the exact algorithm.

In my submissions you can find a link to an article I wrote about OpenHaystack and those alerts. TL;DR, I was never warned by iOS about an OpenHaystack based tracker that I stuck inside my car for a while. That was a couple of years ago though, so things may have changed.

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