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Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

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Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#171

Post by jacquesm »

kazinator wrote: post #38

What's sad is how the local police seem to have some sort of learning disability or amnesia about this problem. They showed up there repeatedly and harassed the occupants.

In the eyes of the police more such reports increases the credibility, when in fact the opposite should happen.

In other words, the more frequently someone reports that particular address as the one that 'stole their phone' the more likely the police are to believe that there really is something going on there, rather than that all those apparently independent reports are false.

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#172

Post by PhantomGremlin »

ghshephard wrote: post #165
asciimo wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software that puts a blinking dot on a map should not be considered probable cause.

The findmyfriends feature on my iPhone has been 100% accurate in identifying where my friends are. If I had a child who went missing, and findmyfriends showed that they were in a house, I would absolutely hope that the police would go to the house and rescue my child. I would also hope that the police would have enough sense to prevent any occupants from the house from going into the house and potentially destroying/…

The findmyfriends feature on my iPhone has been 100% accurate in identifying where my friends are

My wife and I use Find My Friends quite often to keep track of our children. I've used it for years, so I'm quite familiar with it. Our experience is quite the opposite of "100% accurate".

I provided more detail in this other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10950107

Edit: just looked up the USA version of "probable cause" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probable_cause#United_States

In my opinion Find My Friends does not meet the standard of probable cause as defined by that Wikipedia article. I'd characterize its behavior be somewhere in between "reasonable suspicion" and "probable cause". I've seen the location be wrong and stay wrong for 1/2 hour or more. And I don't mean it can't find a location, I mean that it is repeatedly reporting the wrong location ("now") for an extended period of time.

Oh, and BTW following that Wiki link for "reasonable suspicion" says that it is sufficient for obtaining a warrant. IMO Find My Friends does meet that standard, at least as I understand it by a quick reading of Wiki.

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#173

Post by mindslight »

simoncion wrote: post #156
mindslight wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even more unfortunate that the committees designing these protocols don't think this way. People with an identifier number tattooed on their arm don't walk around continually reciting it. In fact, they generally wear long sleeves.

> It's even more unfortunate that the committees designing these protocols don't think this way. So. How would you design a system to permit associated or unassociated stations to passively determine whether or not they were in range of a given AP? Remember that unassociated stations may never have ever interacted with the AP in question before this moment.

That's the easy part. If previous contact hasn't taken place, persistence is irrelevant. Simply envision the current system with a periodically changing BSSID as your proof of existence.

If the AP and client possess a shared secret (as in WPA2), then there's no reason for a third party to be able to deduce any identifying information.

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#175

Post by GhotiFish »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #132
GhotiFish wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

out of curiosity, does it only show you a single point? Does it not show you the potential error? I'm working on a mapping app that uses GPS data and the first thing we had to address was the fact that the data we got from the GPS units in the field are not perfect, they have error, hell they report their error, and our application shows that error as part of the map data. based on the data we have gotten from mobile…

Does it not show you the potential error? I often use Find My Friends to keep track of the kids. I presume its location methodology is similar to Find My iPhone. Here's how it behaves: About 10% of the time, it doesn't show a current location at all for the kid. It does remember the previous one, so it will show a location and say something like "46 minutes ago". When it does display a location, about 60% of the time…

Thanks for the response, we've seen this behavior indoors. It may be that some applications will choose to show a single point if the error is below 20 meters or so. Looking through a record of our location updates, iPhones seem to have a habit of broadcasting 5 meters error, 10 meters, 20, and so on. Even when indoors.

We don't have as much data on android phones yet.

You're right about how the laymen might interpret potential error. The team I'm on is also concerned about that, but I know on the android that as the map tries to find your location through GPS, that it displays a large radius approximating your location through a cell tower, and I had always figured that would communicate the notion of "error" pretty clearly to most people. Maybe most people don't pick up on that?

By the way, The largest error we have received so far seems to be at 2015-11-17 23:11:11.421.

33149.68 meters large

"So I'm sooomewhere in this 33 kilometer radius"

Better than nothing I guess!

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#176

Post by simoncion »

mindslight wrote: post #173
simoncion wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's even more unfortunate that the committees designing these protocols don't think this way. So. How would you design a system to permit associated or unassociated stations to passively determine whether or not they were in range of a given AP? Remember that unassociated stations may never have ever interacted with the AP in question before this moment.

That's the easy part. If previous contact hasn't taken place, persistence is irrelevant. Simply envision the current system with a periodically changing BSSID as your proof of existence. If the AP and client possess a shared secret (as in WPA2), then there's no reason for a third party to be able to deduce any identifying information.

> That's the easy part. If previous contact hasn't taken place, persistence is irrelevant. A periodically-changing ID would do.

Okay. How would you design a system to permit associated or unassociated stations to passively determine whether or not they were in range of a given AP? Remember that human-friendly names for a given AP are almost certain to collide.

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#177

Post by kuschku »

egypturnash wrote: post #163
kuschku wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it’s horrible when no one activates it, and you’re the first to do so – every minute your phone will activate WiFi, scan, activate GPS, get a lock, and upload the data. Battery is empty in a few hours. But, after doing so for a few days in a row, your battery consumption goes down again, probably because it has mapped enough for now.

Or maybe because it's not seeing many new SSIDs because you mostly go to the same four or five places in the same routes.

That’s what I meant - it has mapped enough around my home that it doesn’t see new SSIDs anymore.

In the end, I turned off Google’s location service anyway.

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#178

Post by lenomad »

incompatible wrote: post #149

"Avast’s software kept tracking the phones after the other programs were cleared with a factory reset" Does anyone know how that works?

It should work only for those phones which came with Avast factory installed. After you do a factory reset and turn on phone, they send an SMS to contact their server. This gives them the phone number which can then be used by the server to send remote commands to the phone.

One of my phones had McAfee pre-installed with a similar setup. If you do a factory reset and they find that it is a different phone number now, the phone locks down (You can enter a pin to unlock). You can't even access the bootloader or do another factory reset.

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#179

Post by mindslight »

mikeash wrote: post #153
mindslight wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even more unfortunate that the committees designing these protocols don't think this way. People with an identifier number tattooed on their arm don't walk around continually reciting it. In fact, they generally wear long sleeves.

That's the most unexpected and off-the-wall Godwin I've ever seen.

Does being able to draw a parallel affect the validity of the point? Or is your memetic immune system misleading you?

FWIW despite what our modern religion emphasizes, the Nazis were hardly the only ones to track prisoners with tattooed numbers

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#180

Post by trunnell »

How about GPS spoofing?

There's a claim that it's been done before [1]. Maybe a criminal organization has the resources to build a GPS spoofing device that's used in their "holding facility" before they root the phone?

Can anyone with RF or GPS experience guess the difficulty?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

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