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I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move

nytimes.com

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Re: I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move

#221

Post by maccard »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #218

This may sound nuts - but I don’t want certain kinds of security. For example, I don’t want my home in specific to be safe – I want my society to be safe. So I’m less interested in cameras/locks and more interested in social programs, education, and access to resources. As another example familiar to those who travel in wild places, there’s not much value in trying to avoid getting robbed. Mitigate the losses with pr…

> for most people sacrificing this is not worth increased privacy in the form of closed blinds.

There is an assumption here that people wake after sunrise and that people go to bed after sunset. I live in Scotland where during winter it's dark at 4:30 pm and bright at 9am, and during summer it's mostly dark by midnight (we've technically had sundown but it doesn't dark dark) and bright at 4am.

I sure as hell am not going to be a healthier person for being awake at 4am after having gone to bed at midnight

Re: I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move

#222

Post by astura »

toxik wrote: post #187
technothrasher wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Checking in constantly. Wondering and/or quizzing their child This behavior is rampant in my peer group. Most of my friends/neighbors are constantly monitoring their teen age children's location, reading their recent calls, texts, and emails, looking at internet usage logs, etc. One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she's driving over the speed limit and yells at her. It all seems so creep…

How do they see their texts calls emails etc? Surely that’s illegal.

Children do not have any legal right to privacy. Especially not when the parents are paying for the cell phone and service.

Re: I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move

#223

Post by seanmcdirmid »

technothrasher wrote: post #171
kbos87 wrote: post #32

My comment isn’t specific to AirTags, but there’s a much larger conversation that needs to be had about this gray area of stalking capabilities that are now built into many mainstream products. Here’s a pattern I’ve seen play out more than once among friends and family - they share their location willingly and for seemingly benign reasons. It’s helpful to know when you’ll be getting home so I can start dinner! Just i…

> Checking in constantly. Wondering and/or quizzing their child This behavior is rampant in my peer group. Most of my friends/neighbors are constantly monitoring their teen age children's location, reading their recent calls, texts, and emails, looking at internet usage logs, etc. One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she's driving over the speed limit and yells at her. It all seems so creep…

I want to let me kid (now 5) be more independent. These days, at least in the USA, kids aren't allowed out until they are 10 or even older, and even then they often don't get to take the bus alone (I started doing that when I was in 2nd grade, in the 80s when crime was much worse than it is today, I was biking on my own outside when I was in Kindergarten). But I thought...something like an air tag, cellphone, and maybe a bodycam, might be a great way to balance a need to let the kid explore some things independently and keep safe at the same time. I don't know, I'm still in the planning stage on this.

Re: I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move

#224

Post by r00fus »

BeefWellington wrote: post #12
ameminator wrote: post #3

Look, I usually try to be charitable. However, this article offered no new insight on Apple Airtags. If you don't want to waste your time, allow me to summarize: Woman puts Airtags in a car. Her husband isn't able to find them, even using Apple's "anti-stalk" features. Ergo, Apple needs to do more. I ask - what new insight did this article offer on Airtags? I don't think anyone can conclude either way on the effectiv…

> I ask - what new insight did this article offer on Airtags? I don't think anyone can conclude either way on the effectiveness of Apple's "safety measures" when it comes to Airtags, from this small anecdote. While I understand where you're coming from, I think there's value in adding to the chorus when it comes to putting pressure on a company to rethink a strategy. Certainly, while articles such as this may not be…

Apple is literally the best vendor in the field in terms of providing privacy controls for their tracking products.

Great if criticizing them sets a baseline for all other vendors, but given how the US government decided Apple was price-fixing ebooks while ignoring Amazon's monopsony (2012), I'm not really confident that they'll do something that isn't essentially a bill-of-retainer to limit Apple while not solving the tracker privacy problem at all.

Re: I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move

#225

Post by grujicd »

cmckn wrote: post #189
technothrasher wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Checking in constantly. Wondering and/or quizzing their child This behavior is rampant in my peer group. Most of my friends/neighbors are constantly monitoring their teen age children's location, reading their recent calls, texts, and emails, looking at internet usage logs, etc. One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she's driving over the speed limit and yells at her. It all seems so creep…

I definitely did things as a teenager that were dangerous, unnecessary, detrimental to my physical or mental health, etc. etc. I don't have kids, but I would probably make some effort to dissuade my kids from doing the same things I did. How do you approach that, without heavy surveillance? Did you just get lucky with good kids? Is having conversations about it enough?

There's an excellent Black Mirror episode about tracking a child, looking through their eyes using implant, and even blocking stuff that could be scary or upsetting for them. Needless to say, it turned our quite bad for both child and parent.

Black Mirror is great in exposing how ideas which look good on the first look can have very dark side. I even thought some of these things would be great (e.g. recording everything you see) before watching BM, I didn't think at all about all the negative consequences. It's sobering.

That said, I share location with my wife and also monitoring our children. If you have full mutual trust with other person, there are no drawbacks but there are positive sides. Full trust implies that one doesn't monitor location constantly, that there's no jealousy or stalking, that's it's used basically when you're worried that something bad happened. If someone is late from school or work it's a relief if you see they're moving towards home or that they are at known location.

Re: I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move

#226

Post by 908B64B197 »

technothrasher wrote: post #171
kbos87 wrote: post #32

My comment isn’t specific to AirTags, but there’s a much larger conversation that needs to be had about this gray area of stalking capabilities that are now built into many mainstream products. Here’s a pattern I’ve seen play out more than once among friends and family - they share their location willingly and for seemingly benign reasons. It’s helpful to know when you’ll be getting home so I can start dinner! Just i…

> Checking in constantly. Wondering and/or quizzing their child This behavior is rampant in my peer group. Most of my friends/neighbors are constantly monitoring their teen age children's location, reading their recent calls, texts, and emails, looking at internet usage logs, etc. One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she's driving over the speed limit and yells at her. It all seems so creep…

> Most of my friends/neighbors are constantly monitoring their teen age children's location, reading their recent calls, texts, and emails, looking at internet usage logs, etc.

I'll be very blunt: Do they really want to read text messages from their teenage daughter/son? They might regret that decision really fast.

> One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she's driving over the speed limit and yells at her

If he doesn’t trust her why is she driving his car?

Re: I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move

#227

Post by fencepost »

hnrodey wrote: post #108
acomjean wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I took my partners dog for the afternoon. It has an airtag (not an official supported use). I knew the dog had it but there was some comment made about our walk. Monitoring by proxy. When I worked at a power monitoring startup (we monitored home power use, by individual circuit) this passive monitoring came up. And our CEO mentioned to his wife that she was home early.. "how did you know?" He saw the garage doo…

Care to share the competitors in the power monitoring space? I could really use a solution to this because my home electric bill is crazy high. We moved in to a new house about eight months ago and this electric bill is like 30% higher than my previous home. Not just the raw total of the bill - my consumption is higher in this house. I know of sense.com but perhaps there are others?

If it's an older refrigerator or a dusty house, check the refrigerator coils. In particular if it's set to a pretty cool setting but doesn't seem very cool or is running frequently it may be time for replacement.

You can also get any of a variety of temperature sensors (I like SensorPush) and stick one in the fridge to get a pretty good idea of how much it's running the compressor.

Another thing to look at if there's central forced-air heating/cooling may be whether it's set to have the fan always running. That can be useful in balancing temperatures between floors, but it's still a fan using electricity to move air.

Re: I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move

#228

Post by bombcar »

kbos87 wrote: post #47
micromacrofoot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, I bet my grandpa would think twice about checking in on my cousins location as often as he probably does if he knew that my cousin got a notification every time he checked in. I think this is a partial solution to keep honest people honest. Like door locks. They keep the temptation at bay for the average person. In abusive relationships it likely wouldn't accomplish much, but notifying might at least c…

Exactly. Being held accountable, and knowing you are being held accountable, could likely stem some amount of bad behavior from the start, and at the very least it makes bad behavior harder to conceal.

It could also amusingly have people asking “why didn’t you check where I was” heh.

Re: I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move

#229

Post by loceng »

acomjean wrote: post #86
kbos87 wrote: post #32

My comment isn’t specific to AirTags, but there’s a much larger conversation that needs to be had about this gray area of stalking capabilities that are now built into many mainstream products. Here’s a pattern I’ve seen play out more than once among friends and family - they share their location willingly and for seemingly benign reasons. It’s helpful to know when you’ll be getting home so I can start dinner! Just i…

Yeah. I took my partners dog for the afternoon. It has an airtag (not an official supported use). I knew the dog had it but there was some comment made about our walk. Monitoring by proxy. When I worked at a power monitoring startup (we monitored home power use, by individual circuit) this passive monitoring came up. And our CEO mentioned to his wife that she was home early.. "how did you know?" He saw the garage doo…

Does anyone know of any communities who are designing to avoid passive monitoring or at least have a "dark mode" that's possible to enable?

I think such things should be enshrined in law, however we've not reached that state with the law yet in most places - I don't think?

Re: I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move

#230

Post by apetrovic »

xeromal wrote: post #141
hnlmorg wrote: post #36

Can someone explain to me (because I cannot work it myself) why everyone is suddenly worried about AirTags yet these kinds of devices have been around for a while (eg the Samsung Galaxy SmartTag was released last year and little was talked about it). And GPS tracking isn't even a new thing either. So why is it most conversations focus on the AirTag? What is it that the AirTag does better/worse/differently to the othe…

Because Samsung or Tile is a subset of a subset compared to Apple. When apple does something, hundreds of millions of people are instantly involved. The scale is what matters.

So, basically, the argument is that is ok to make shitty tracker.
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