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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
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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 I hate to say this but it really feels that our assumptions of privacy are becoming outdated and there's no going back.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…
We've allowed, collectively, anything that falls in the "tech" realm to deploy first, ask questions later, and more or less force society to conform. I think it's been absurd, we see more and more backlash against it, and rightly so. A company shouldn't be able to just ignore the law and do whatever they want because they use computer chips, but we've seen more or less exactly that in a number of cases.
- Uber/AirBnB can be seen as venture-capital funded, money losing ways around existing taxi/hotel/rental laws, and their tendency to expand into a market without permission and then demand the right to stay there against the laws that prohibit exactly such things, is an example of this model. - The various "Dump tons of scooters in a city without asking, profit, and make cleanup the city's problem" is another example here. It's littering, really, but somehow tech companies involved get a pass because it's neat. - Literally every "We collect all the behavioral data you don't realize we're collecting to improve our models of you so we can sell better advertisements to our actual customers" business model does the same thing - take first, ask permission never (or, at least, try very hard to never have the topic come up).
I'm not OK with this, and I hope more and more people aren't OK with it either.
> I hate to say this but it really feels that our assumptions of privacy are becoming outdated and there's no going back.
Privacy shouldn't be something subject to the current state of technological surveillance. We should, as a society, decide what privacy ought to be, and then limit tech companies accordingly.
Europe seems to be making decent headway on this front, with "No, you can't just keep doing that..." rulings against tech companies. I hope that spreads.
I'm not always a fan of Apple's decisions, but short of pulling AirTags off the shelves and scrapping the product entirely, they've gone far beyond any of their competition (Tile) with this stuff. Ultimately, maybe we're better off just losing things sometimes.
Let’s see how hard it is to neuter the sound generation within the AirTag itself. If it’s silent itself, an Android or no-device trackee is vulnerable. There is not much tech that lacks unpreventable malicious use. Needs to be expected for pretty much anything.
> ...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.…
I've said this in other threads, but I'm probably done buying AirTags, because the anti-stalking features, that I assume you're aware of, are so annoying, that I don't want to add any more to my life. When I get in my car with my wife, we both get a notification that an AirTag is following us, because my wife is potentially stalking me with her purse and keys. I can silence this notification for only one day. I can't…
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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 directl…
Its also only like 6-8 months old at this point.
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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 actuall…
> ...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.…
Have any of the AirTag stalking mitigations actually been defeated by hackers? Besides physically removing the speaker. The “an AirTag is traveling with you” alerts haven’t been defeated as far as I can tell. Apple tweaked some of the time periods after launch but the core technical mitigations are the same. I agree the current situation is non-ideal, but it’s not clear to me this is from a lack of sufficient pre-rel…
Perhaps not, but they're meaningless to the >50% of the population that doesn't have a modern enough iPhone as their daily carry phone.
Having moved back to a flip phone, I literally have no way to identify if such a tag is being used against me.
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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 think that a key issue in this case isn't just that Apple made a device that could be used for tracking - after all, you could engineer or buy a different tracking device from a number of vendors - but that its feasibility was massively increased due to a unique Apple asset - its network of iDevices. That is, Apple released a product that was uniquely good at tracking people due to an Apple-specific asset . Slightl…
Of course you have to know about it and it only provides scanning when the app is open instead of constantly doing it in the background like iOS.
> ...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.…
I've said this in other threads, but I'm probably done buying AirTags, because the anti-stalking features, that I assume you're aware of, are so annoying, that I don't want to add any more to my life. When I get in my car with my wife, we both get a notification that an AirTag is following us, because my wife is potentially stalking me with her purse and keys. I can silence this notification for only one day. I can't…
Yes, it does. It really, really does. The absolutely human-toxic nature of most modern consumer tech ("You buy me, I feed you ads, and collect absolutely as much data as I can to improve the ads other people pay me to deliver to you!" model being the core complaint here) has done a huge amount of damage to humanity.
There are upsides, but we culturally seem horrible at actually evaluating things fairly. Always-on devices, constantly sending notifications, are just horrible to every aspect of humans - and the more we learn about just how horrible the are, the better the companies involved refine their ability to "drive their users nuts" for more eyeball-time to view ads, desired or not.
So, yes, if what you get out of my writings are that we should radically pull back on what consumer tech is and can do, you're evaluating my position quite accurately.
> 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.
I think the Amazon Sidewalk has a lot of potential in this space as a viable alternative to the iDevice network apple has. Google should def release competition that can leverage their device network too, considering their comparable hardware penetration.