While it’s theoretically possible that this happened, I think this particular story was made up. For a number of reasons: 1) How did the stalker know that that’s her car? She said she was on a night out. Unless she went back to her car all the time, he must have seen her arrive in it. 2) Sticking an AirTag to the inside of the front wheel well isn’t easy. There is dirt and grime there and the surfaces aren’t flat. The stalker would have had to use a very strong adhesive to make the AirTag stick while the car was moving. 3) While it’d be a smart idea to not drive home while a foreign AirTag tracks you, who is alert enough after a night out AND happens to have friends in the vicinity that you can wake up at what must have been a very late hour? 4) Her friend who found and removed the AirTag took no photo. Really?
Someone attached an AirTag to my car while I was in a bar
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Re: Someone attached an AirTag to my car while I was in a bar
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
While you're correct, I think there is something to be said about the popularization of the technology. Most people aren't aware of GPS trackers other than movies and think they are much harder to come by. AirTags are also less nefarious by nature. If you get caught with a GPS tracker on your person that's pretty suspicious. If you're caught placing an AirTag on someone's car it's easier to pretend you dropped it and…
Security by obscurity is not security at all. Thinking you were safe because “people didn’t know about it” is not safety at all! Bad people are going to be bad. They don’t need AirTags for that. Knowing it can happen is far better for everyone to know about than living in a false sense of security.
As someone who has been in this field professionally for almost 20 years, my thoughts on this have changed quite a bit. The idea of condemning security through obscurity traces back to cryptography, not security in general. In cryptography, you want the security of your protocol to not depend on the protocol being secret, but the cryptographic keys themselves being secret. There are a lot of good reasons for this, the main one being that the whole point of cryptography is to create protocols that can survive public scrutiny and thus are more easy to implement and more robust.
So for example, without cryptography you'd need to secretly pass a message by courier who might take a secret route, constantly changing his route and delivery time. With cryptography, you can encrypt and sign the message, and then broadcast it over an insecure channel. The second option is much easier than the first. So the whole enterprise of cryptography is based on the principle of abandoning the confidentiality of the protocols themselves.
But there are many situations that require security which are outside of cryptography, because the security of the overall system cannot be reduced to high entropy secrets, and in that case, there is some security benefit that is obtained from obscurity.
For example, we are concerned about username enumeration because we understand users choose weak passwords that might be found in databases, so we do not publish usernames and consider it a vulnerability when usernames are leaked.
As another example, we consider information disclosure consisting of stacktraces leaked to the user to be a vulnerability.
Similarly, there are data centers that cannot just get up and move, and so locations and protocols of these installations are also kept secret.
So while it's true that things which are hard to change should not rely on secrecy in order to maintain their security level, and we should constantly be improving and hardening our protocols so that they can resist public scrutiny, nevertheless it's not the case that all protocols have been or are able to be improved so that their security properties are reducible to high entropy bit strings - in fact most systems don't fall into this category and most will never fall into this category - and for these systems, part of the security will continue to rely on obscurity, even though we are painfully aware of the drawbacks of this approach.
Re: Someone attached an AirTag to my car while I was in a bar
#193The worst part of this is, if you don’t have an iPhone, you’ll never know if you’re being tracked. Edit: Yes, I know there’s an app. Do you think more than 1% of victims will have it installed?
If you already knew that there was an app out there, maybe don't use absolutist sounding phrases like "they'll never know" just to come back and make defensive edits about how nobody out there knows about its existence when you yourself obviously knew about it.
Re: Someone attached an AirTag to my car while I was in a bar
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the street. If you are in downtown San Francisco for example, all bets are off...
At the risk of being offensive, it does not matter if you are in downtown SF - stop being afraid of the homeless and black people and assuming that they are more likely to harm you than someone you know. That statistics are not with you there. But let's look at some statistics: https://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm Bathtub: 341 Assault by sharp object: 1,805 From that, assuming their data is correct, for every…
> stop being afraid of the homeless and black people
I'm not afraid of homeless and black people, I'm afraid of clinically insane people. The kind which are not legally responsible for their actions.
And why did you pick "Assault by sharp object: 1,805" instead of "Assault by firearm: 10,801" or just "Assault: 16,765"? Maybe because that changes the odds from 1 vs 5 to 1 vs 50.
Re: Someone attached an AirTag to my car while I was in a bar
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends how you were caught. On your back reaching up? No. On your knees? Yeah. Consider that this tag was placed in the wheel well, which doesn't require getting on your back and would only take a few seconds. It isn't like someone is there for a significant period of time. Especially since you can then produce said AirTag after inquiry and people will generally believe the claim even if suspicious. All you have to…
Your argument isn't very convincing. AirTags are one of the few location tracker that the public can recognize by sight and identify its use. This makes AirTags much less effective for use by malicious actors than other generic black-plastic case electronics.
It's only less effective if it's somewhere that can be seen. I think most people don't check the insides of their wheel wells more than, well, at all. In which case the device could be neon green and it wouldn't matter for the purposes of visual detection.
Re: Someone attached an AirTag to my car while I was in a bar
#196While it’s theoretically possible that this happened, I think this particular story was made up. For a number of reasons: 1) How did the stalker know that that’s her car? She said she was on a night out. Unless she went back to her car all the time, he must have seen her arrive in it. 2) Sticking an AirTag to the inside of the front wheel well isn’t easy. There is dirt and grime there and the surfaces aren’t flat. Th…
Not to disagree with your overall point, but on #2 magnets work well for this and there are a lot of “hide-a-key” type things on the market that are often used in wheel wells by people who have a history of locking their keys in their car.
Re: Someone attached an AirTag to my car while I was in a bar
#197While it’s theoretically possible that this happened, I think this particular story was made up. For a number of reasons: 1) How did the stalker know that that’s her car? She said she was on a night out. Unless she went back to her car all the time, he must have seen her arrive in it. 2) Sticking an AirTag to the inside of the front wheel well isn’t easy. There is dirt and grime there and the surfaces aren’t flat. Th…
I think the problem with saying something was made up is that it becomes blaming. I would hope people don't vote you down because I think that blame is justified, because I questioned how it was presented, on Twitter. I think if it was something related by a friend or close acquaintance to me, then I'd believe it. That it is being disseminated on Twitter in the way it was, I have a tendency to suspect there is more to the story, given I have no idea if I can trust the individual making the claim.
This seems pretty obvious that this will happen and not necessarily something that is surprising or adds to the story, other than them claiming it happened to them and horrible that is...and maybe an indication everyone should make a big deal out of it.
Re: Someone attached an AirTag to my car while I was in a bar
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
The danger is that predators could track a child to a secluded area and abduct them.
The vast majority of abductions of children are by family. Same with other crimes against children. People they know are far more dangerous than people they don’t. The predators aren’t hiding in the bushes, they are already in the house.
Human trafficking is a huge problem even in America. This includes many children sold for sex. They often find and groom victims online now though, so yes, perhaps they aren't hiding in the bushes.
Re: Someone attached an AirTag to my car while I was in a bar
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
While you're correct, I think there is something to be said about the popularization of the technology. Most people aren't aware of GPS trackers other than movies and think they are much harder to come by. AirTags are also less nefarious by nature. If you get caught with a GPS tracker on your person that's pretty suspicious. If you're caught placing an AirTag on someone's car it's easier to pretend you dropped it and…
Security by obscurity is not security at all. Thinking you were safe because “people didn’t know about it” is not safety at all! Bad people are going to be bad. They don’t need AirTags for that. Knowing it can happen is far better for everyone to know about than living in a false sense of security.
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Re: Someone attached an AirTag to my car while I was in a bar
#200This is news just because it's an Apple device being used for something that was already trivially possible. GPS trackers designed to be magnet-attached to a car which report their location via cell signal cost ~$20 on Amazon. You then tend to need to pay for either a SIM card or a subscription to the device maker's service -- bringing you up to about the cost of an AirTag. These are much harder to detect, as you mig…
While you're correct, I think there is something to be said about the popularization of the technology. Most people aren't aware of GPS trackers other than movies and think they are much harder to come by. AirTags are also less nefarious by nature. If you get caught with a GPS tracker on your person that's pretty suspicious. If you're caught placing an AirTag on someone's car it's easier to pretend you dropped it and…
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