Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are fobs different in this scenario?
You can drive your Tesla using your smartphone app or other devices.
unless if their servers go down, in which case you can't unlock your car
An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking
41–50 of 508 posts
Re: An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking
#42> ...and we condemn in the strongest possible terms any malicious use of our products. Then subject them to malicious users before releasing them to see what sort of ideas they can come up with in a few days, and mitigate those before general release. Go schedule a room at Defcon, give people AirTags, and see what they do. If they neutralized your mitigations in an hour, well... other people can figure that out too.…
To what extent is any hardware manufacturer responsible for malicious usage of their product in your opinion? Surely you don't believe that all bases can be covered no matter how simple the product prior to launch. I credit Apple for making a best effort at launch and continuing security and support for much longer than the industry standard in their products. But realistically there is no way to launch something fla…
I'd really want to ask weird and possibly insensitive, but nonetheless (I believe) a legit question - shouldn't be it a society that needs to somehow change (I've no idea how, though), rather than technologies killed because it threats existing societal stuff? I hate to say this but it really feels that our assumptions of privacy are becoming outdated and there's no going back.
Unlike e.g. facial recognition, AirTags are not even some new breakthrough, just some well-known existing technologies made a bit more mainstream/commonly available (can't even say "more affordable", the price point hadn't changed). Yet, it causes an uproar.
Technological genie just cannot be put back in the bottle and it's only gonna get worse in the future, as tech will become smaller, smarter and more magical.
Re: An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meanwhile, you can get a cheap GPS tracker for the price of an AirTag or two…
And if you want it to report out, it has to have an active cell plan, and the power consumption is rather radically higher than "years on a button cell," so the device is bigger, it needs a clear enough view of the sky to get a GPS signal, etc. They're an awful lot less useful and less discreet. Again, not impossible by any means, but certainly quite a bit less convenient than an AirTag with a removed speaker.
Or just get a Tile, that will ping any Amazon echo or Ring doorbell it goes near.
Re: An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meanwhile, you can get a cheap GPS tracker for the price of an AirTag or two…
And if you want it to report out, it has to have an active cell plan, and the power consumption is rather radically higher than "years on a button cell," so the device is bigger, it needs a clear enough view of the sky to get a GPS signal, etc. They're an awful lot less useful and less discreet. Again, not impossible by any means, but certainly quite a bit less convenient than an AirTag with a removed speaker.
I just checked and all the reports of misuse so far don’t seem to be “for months at a time”. I can also get a prepaid sim with very little identification and there’s no direct link from an arbitrary gps device to the person who used it.
I think there was a brief surge in people abusing them because they thought AirTags were untraceable, which they very explicitly are not. As apple says in the article they can directly go from an AirTag to the account that owns it.
Re: An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking
#45I get an alert every time I ride my wife’s bicycle. It would be nice to be able to mark her tags as ok to be near me.
Being able to share AirTags via a family iCloud account seems to be a pretty commonly requested feature. It does seem a little silly that I can track every device attached to the account but not AirTags.
I suspect they are working on it, but the crypto is privacy-preserving enough to make centralized authorization management hard.
Specifically, you get a cryptographic secret when you pair the key, it broadcasts as a bluetooth beacon with encrypted messages based on that secret and current time, that get reported up to an Apple service.
When you want to see your accessories, your device will compute the encrypted messages at appropriate times and have apple search for them.
However, there's no network push to an AirTag available to tell it to rotate keys. You could grant more people to see a tag by sharing the secret - but you then could not remove that permission without physically resetting the tag.
I suspect the solution will eventually be having derived keys from the secret and date, and date-based "leases" for permissions - I share the current key to allowed peers. That would mean revocation might be represented in the UX immediately, and take a day (or some other time period) to actually start to fail cryptographically.
Re: An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meanwhile, you can get a cheap GPS tracker for the price of an AirTag or two…
And if you want it to report out, it has to have an active cell plan, and the power consumption is rather radically higher than "years on a button cell," so the device is bigger, it needs a clear enough view of the sky to get a GPS signal, etc. They're an awful lot less useful and less discreet. Again, not impossible by any means, but certainly quite a bit less convenient than an AirTag with a removed speaker.
I don't think the typical issue is that someone can maliciously track some other person specifically for years. Longevity of the tracker is an added benefit, not what makes it different.
Honestly, in my personal opinion I feel that only thing that's really different is the company's notoriety. It's no fun to bash Tile (people just don't have any beef with them), but kinda fun when it's Apple. And that they've actually sent out a viral idea ahead of product release focusing attention on this aspect (so, naturally, it echoes back).
Re: An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking
#47> We hope this starts an industry trend for others to also provide these sorts of proactive warnings in their products. I guess they're hoping Tile (or whoever else) will feel obligated to create similar nerfs or annoyances on their trackers? I thought this was interesting because this is one time vertical integration (having a huge network of iPhones) is putting an Apple product at a competitive disadvantage
This kind of scares me. Privacy first tech groups seem to be getting more vocal about trying to change the whole industry. I hope someday we have a fully open global tracking network, not affected by Apple an Mozilla and all the rest who seem to want to destroy any technology that can be used to invade privacy, regardless of how many legitimate uses it has.
Can you give examples?
Re: An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking
#48I like the functionality of the AirTags so I don't want them nerfed, but I can think of no way to fix their fundamental problem of being such easy to use stalking devices.
Chefs knives are great for cooking and are inexpensive and easy to purchase; they can be very dangerous weapons in the wrong hands so we make it against the law to use them in that manner. Maybe that's the best we can do with AirTags.
Re: An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being able to share AirTags via a family iCloud account seems to be a pretty commonly requested feature. It does seem a little silly that I can track every device attached to the account but not AirTags.
I suspect they are working on it, but the crypto is privacy-preserving enough to make centralized authorization management hard. Specifically, you get a cryptographic secret when you pair the key, it broadcasts as a bluetooth beacon with encrypted messages based on that secret and current time, that get reported up to an Apple service. When you want to see your accessories, your device will compute the encrypted mess…
I do think it should be possible to share encryption keys (ignore this MAC alas doesn’t work because the MACs and randomized and rotate fairly frequently when in the vicinity of an owner’s devices)
Re: An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking
#50I'm sure they're frustrated that people keep using AirTags as tracking devices rather than local thing-finders, but I think there are good reasons for that. Local trackers have been around for a long time. I had a "TV remote finder" years ago that you'd stick to a TV remote (or keys), and it would beep when activated by a second device. More recently, Tiles work pretty well, assuming you don't need direction finding.…
> "TV remote finder"
I was sorely disappointed when they announced the new Apple TV remote, and it didn't have airtag built into it.