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AirGuard: Protect yourself from being tracked by AirTags and Find My accessories

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101–110 of 156 posts

Re: AirGuard: Protect yourself from being tracked by AirTags and Find My accessories

#101
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why annoy people like this? My e-bike has Find My tracking built in to the firmware. As long as you don’t steal my bike you have no privacy concerns from me securing my bike. Even better I can track my bike down without involving the police, so the potential thief doesn’t even have to worry about being shot by some trigger happy cop.

In many areas of the US, that trigger happy cop will be the difference between you recovering your property and you being severely beaten when you show up in a rough neighborhood trying to get your bike back.

In my experience, the most an American cop is going to do to help you resolve a property crime is take a report. If they happen to find the item, you _may_ get it back.

Re: AirGuard: Protect yourself from being tracked by AirTags and Find My accessories

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "fairly common"? You are about as likely to get hit and killed by lightning as you are to die from being shot by police. Chance of getting hit by lightning: 1 in 500,00 = 2.0 * 10^-6 [1] Chance of getting shot and killed by police (2020): 993 in 331,449,281 = 2.99 x 10^-6 [2] Hardly seems "fairly common" now does it? And, your second post about the relative frequency to other countries is a different statement, one…

Wait a second, why is the chance of getting shot and killed by the police a per capita statistic. The denominator should be the number of police-initiated encounters. I could only find 2018 data, but it's likely in the same ballpark. [1] Thus, the chance of getting shot and killed by police (2020): 993 in 28,880,900 = 3.44 x 10^-5 For African Americans (2020): 241 in 3,393,800 = 7.10 x 10^-5 So it's an order of magni…

Or even better, the number of citizen-initiated encounters, since the formulation is often "I wouldn't call the police for help because I don't want to end up getting shot by them when they show up and misread the situation."

Re: AirGuard: Protect yourself from being tracked by AirTags and Find My accessories

#103
post #6
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a specific policy you think should be legislated that would prevent unwanted tracking?

A blanket ban on hoarding, storing and selling personal data for any purposes other than natsec. Basically, treat personal data like nuclear materials in the laws.

stop posting

Re: AirGuard: Protect yourself from being tracked by AirTags and Find My accessories

#104
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The small evil part of me wants to extract this part of the source and just bring my phone onto public transit for a while to see what happens.

You don’t AirDrop cat photos to people at mass gatherings?

Pre pandemic I would change my phone name to cta lemur and send lemur pics to people on the “L”. I’ve been on public transit twice since March 13th 2020 and there’s not enough people to get away with this anymore.

Re: AirGuard: Protect yourself from being tracked by AirTags and Find My accessories

#105
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just have all packages go through a central location first, like an office in the city or something, where someone can open them and pass on the gifts? This is already a thing for celebrities/people who get targeted by stalkers/attackers.

They are probably even thin enough that can embedded into cardboard or somewhere in the product so only open the box to inspect doesn't matter

The gifts could then sit in "quarantine" for a day or so, with an Android phone running AirGuard sitting nearby.

Re: AirGuard: Protect yourself from being tracked by AirTags and Find My accessories

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "fairly common"? You are about as likely to get hit and killed by lightning as you are to die from being shot by police. Chance of getting hit by lightning: 1 in 500,00 = 2.0 * 10^-6 [1] Chance of getting shot and killed by police (2020): 993 in 331,449,281 = 2.99 x 10^-6 [2] Hardly seems "fairly common" now does it? And, your second post about the relative frequency to other countries is a different statement, one…

Wait a second, why is the chance of getting shot and killed by the police a per capita statistic. The denominator should be the number of police-initiated encounters. I could only find 2018 data, but it's likely in the same ballpark. [1] Thus, the chance of getting shot and killed by police (2020): 993 in 28,880,900 = 3.44 x 10^-5 For African Americans (2020): 241 in 3,393,800 = 7.10 x 10^-5 So it's an order of magni…

Overall, I agree with what you've written, though on the disparity in shooting incidents regarding race Roland Fryer's paper[1] came to different conclusions (it's different data but a more extensive data set and approach):

> In stark contrast to non-lethal uses of force, we find that, conditional on a police interaction, there are no racial differences in officer-involved shootings on either the extensive or intensive margins. Using data from Houston, Texas – where we have both officer-involved shootings and a randomly chosen set of potential interactions with police where lethal force may have been justified – we find, after controlling for suspect demographics, officer demographics, encounter characteristics, suspect weapon and year fixed effects, that blacks are 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics. This coefficient is measured with considerable error and not statistically significant. This result is remarkably robust across alternative empirical specifications and subsets of the data. Partitioning the data in myriad ways, we find no evidence of racial discrimination in officer-involved shootings. Investigating the intensive margin – the timing of shootings or how many bullets were discharged in the endeavor – there are no detectable racial differences.

If looking at any kind of force though:

> Blacks are almost eighteen percent more likely to incur any use of force in an interaction, accounting for all variables we can in the data. Hispanics are roughly twelve percent more likely. Both are statistically significant. Asians are slightly less likely, though not distinguishable from whites.

He does give caveats and goes into an extensive discussion on the limitations of the data available (one being the lack of data, which I would say should be the first order of the day for anyone looking for solutions to this) and possible interpretations. As an aside, I'm now unsurprised when I encounter progressives (an irony that might be amusing if they weren't so insidious and invidious) who've not heard of Fryer, nor how quickly they move to dismiss his work or even smear him without ever bothering to check his work in the slightest.

I didn't find anything about lightning, sadly (that would've been a welcome funny moment in amongst these awful stats), although earlier in the pandemic I checked the chances of being hit by lightning (for use as a comparison to some other stats) and was surprised to find out how high they are. Just last month I read this article[2] on the BBC site and decided never to go out in a thunderstorm ever again. If you read to the end it gets worse:

> In 2016, Bangladesh declared lightning strikes a natural disaster when more than 200 people died in the month of May alone, including 82 people on a single day.

Shocking, literally and figuratively.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58094680

Re: AirGuard: Protect yourself from being tracked by AirTags and Find My accessories

#107
post #89

So if someone steals my air tagged device they can just turn it off. Nice

If someone steals your AirTagged device, after it's away from whatever you paired it with for a while, it'll start beeping, which will quickly alert the thief that they need to find the AirTag and throw it out. So I don't think AirTags were meant to deter theft; I think they're just there to help people find stuff they've misplaced.

Re: AirGuard: Protect yourself from being tracked by AirTags and Find My accessories

#108
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking if we should judge the horror more differently? Certainly. One (school shootings) is obviously far more horrible, for obvious reasons. But, if you're commenting on how common something is (as the original poster did), then having an actual understanding of the frequency is important. For instance, I don't think we need armed police and metal detectors on every single campus. That would be an over reacti…

> then having an actual understanding of the frequency is important In which case it’s important to add some more context to the numbers you cited. Lightning strikes kill about 50 people/year. Police kill about 1,000 (US). You’re significantly more likely do die at the hands of police than you are from lightning. Does that make either occurrence particularly likely? That’s where things get messy. Lightning doesn’t di…

If context is important then how many people go out in thunderstorms and how many of those shootings were justified?

Re: AirGuard: Protect yourself from being tracked by AirTags and Find My accessories

#109
post #44

Great. So you just made an app that helps bike thieves find the airtag hidden in my bicycle.

Won't the AirTag start beeping if your bike is stolen (that is, if the tag is away from your iPhone for too long)? I think that will alert them much better than this app will.

Re: AirGuard: Protect yourself from being tracked by AirTags and Find My accessories

#110
post #100
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a specific policy you think should be legislated that would prevent unwanted tracking?

Civil and commercial penalties would be a start

Isn't it already illegal in most places to put tracking devices on people without their knowledge?
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