How does Apple privately find offline devices? • Hacker News Board

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#151

Post by jodrellblank » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 10:47 AM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #117

kevas wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your WiFi is on, it’s already doing this. It’s saying, here’s all the networks I’ve joined in the past. Are you one?

> If your WiFi is on Many people disable Wifi when they're not planning to be actively connected to a network. Even ignoring the privacy benefits, it can improve battery. I'll add my voice that this is nice, and I appreciate Apple's approach and privacy improvements, but I'd kind of like to be able to turn Bluetooth on and off the same way I can with WiFi. I want most connections on my phone (with a couple of small e…

> Many people disable Wifi when they're not planning to be actively connected to a network. Even ignoring the privacy benefits, it can improve battery.

In a recent iOS update, it turns on automatically again; you can only disable it "until tomorrow". Not sure if that's until midnight, until "morning", but it doesn't seem to be "for 24 hours".

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#152

Post by graton » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 10:50 AM UTC

Milwaukee Tools (and possibly others) do something similar. Not sure about the privacy part though.

https://www.milwaukeetool.com/OneKey

Basically anyone who runs the Milwaukee One Key app will watch for signals from tools and other devices with the One Key transmitter and upload the location. So if your tool is stolen and comes within range of someone running the One Key app the location should get uploaded.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#153

Post by bredren » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 11:01 AM UTC

HALtheWise wrote: post #89

Phlarp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they do and have internally assessed that it would be too creepy to provide to users, but are happily using it to better target advertising.

Or they have decided that it's too creepy to use at all, so they don't use it for targeted advertising. Seriously, why does everyone assume that companies are evilly cackling in volcano lairs? They know that violating user trust is really expensive and a bad idea. By the way, I'm pretty sure I've seen that Google's advertising targeting is only allowed to use "neighborhood level" location, which is designed to be coa…

No comment other than appreciation of the evil volcanic lair imagery.

Reminds me of Superjail, which is an uber-maximum security jail inside a volcano, that is itself inside a second volcano

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#154

Post by mensetmanusman » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 11:03 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #145

Xelbair wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are a business. Their only goal is the make money - by definition. It is not that people assume that they are evil - just that they will follow on things that will earn them money.

Uhm, yeah but an evil person also follows on things that benefit them. Does this somehow make this person ok?

I doubt there are ‘evil people.’ There are just people, some who do evil things more than others.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#155

Post by mensetmanusman » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 11:12 AM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #103

zed88 wrote: post #101

Well...a bit off topic but kind of relevant. My car got broken into and my iPad nicked. I was able to locate that, however, the cops here in NZ were really unhelpful. They said the GPS location wouldn't be sufficient for a search warrant as they have had many cases of false positives. I said I would give the ssid and ip address of their wifi network, even then they wouldn't agree for a raid. It was only when the thie…

It's not just NZ. Police in the US are no better. In the Dallas PD, the detective assigned to the case when our house was burgled would not respond to emails sent to him providing evidence. After reaching out through other avenues to reach the detective, he flat out responded with being too busy to read emails. The case went uncleared. However, a few weeks later, there was a random call saying they found an iPad repo…

When I get frustrated with the police, it helps to remember that they make like $25/hr or less. In a wealthy suburb I just moved into a few months ago, I learned that a majority of the children of the police are growing up below the poverty line.

The local politicians are apparently very liberal about their views on police (do not support), so they keep the pay as low as possible. All the police have to live outside the community and commute to work the area since it is unaffordable for them to live here.

I’m actually surprised they serve as well as they do under the circumstances.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#156

Post by bo1024 » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 11:44 AM UTC

zed88 wrote: post #101

Well...a bit off topic but kind of relevant. My car got broken into and my iPad nicked. I was able to locate that, however, the cops here in NZ were really unhelpful. They said the GPS location wouldn't be sufficient for a search warrant as they have had many cases of false positives. I said I would give the ssid and ip address of their wifi network, even then they wouldn't agree for a raid. It was only when the thie…

I can definitely see the point regarding GPS location, I remember an article about people living at some default coordinates suffering from something like daily or weekly police raids.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#157

Post by dannyw » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 11:51 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #70

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I pulled my data in the standard takeout.google.com/ process. The result is a json (? iirc). I parsed the json into x, y, and rasterized it using gdal. https://imgur.com/a/ZhyTsDV See I wasn't sure if I lost it in the couch in the living room, the office, or the bedroom. This got me within a few feet.

That's amazing, so cool. Is that something Google's not doing with the data, but could? (E.g. they don't because their maps don't show most houses precisely enough or whatever, so it wouldn't be useful?) Or is it relying on the fact that you are triangulating or similar from the known exact position of your WiFi routers or similar down to the inch, and Google doesn't have any way of knowing that?

Considering that google has a history of cloaking information via the UI (see purchase history hidden if you have G Suite, but still fully accessible via takeout), and that Google offers advertisers the ability to see if you have visited a particular store even in an indoor mall, I am sure google knows your location more precise than it reports.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#158

Post by snarf21 » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:26 PM UTC

graton wrote: post #152

Milwaukee Tools (and possibly others) do something similar. Not sure about the privacy part though. https://www.milwaukeetool.com/OneKey Basically anyone who runs the Milwaukee One Key app will watch for signals from tools and other devices with the One Key transmitter and upload the location. So if your tool is stolen and comes within range of someone running the One Key app the location should get uploaded.

Tile meshes the same way.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#159

Post by wongarsu » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:29 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #137

m463 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed in my lifetime that a number of crimes have become ad-hoc decriminalized. Smaller crimes like bicycle theft or small electronics are basically "who cares" to the police. Many police departments don't even do bicycle registrations anymore. Even car theft has sort of fallen to insurance companies to take care of. A lot of people just want a police report to turn in to insurance so they can get a new car. I…

I'm sure they prefer to focus on bigger cases - why go with a single bike theft if they can investigate an organized bike theft and laundering organization? Why bother with a single phone theft if they find a warehouse full of stolen merchandise? But yeah, that does mean a lot of petty crime goes unpunished. Stealing a bike here has become normalized - as in, "my bike got stolen, I need to get home so I'll just steal…

> why go with a single bike theft

because of

> Stealing a bike here has become normalized - as in, "my bike got stolen, I need to get home so I'll just steal another"

There's three options:

1. We abolish ownership

2. Everyone is responsible for protecting his own stuff, resorting to vigilante justice if he finds the thief after the fact

3. The taxes we pay fund police and courts to bring justice.

Option 1 is a version of socialism, option 2 is anarchy, that only leaves us option 3 if we want capitalism.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#160

Post by GeekyBear » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:36 PM UTC

LordDragonfang wrote: post #132

Phlarp wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because time and time again it is proven that "these companies" (Facebook and Google) will use any signal they can get their hands on to make money? I'm pretty sure they've both been caught with their hands in the cookie jar doing things they swore they never would.

Genuinely curious, could you provide an example of Google "doing things they swore they never would" with consumer data? Because I know they do plenty of things with data that people think are creepy, but I don't recall ever seeing a story about them doing things they swore they wouldn't (besides the nebulous "don't be evil") or even lying about what they were actually doing with consumer data. If it's happened time…

>Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we contemplate new kinds of advertising products.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/google-has-quietly-droppe...