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NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car thefts

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351–360 of 439 posts

Re: NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car thefts

#351
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a stalker, but that agreement is almost certainly unenforceable in civil court. It violates the basic principles of consideration and equity. There is extensive case law on those areas, which you might want to look into before wasting people's time making empty threats and bullshiting about subjects you clearly don't understand.

We are a public company with an audit and risk committee, multiple in-house lawyers, and external counsel. This was heavily discussed. Perhaps a court would limit the fine, but liquidated damages are a commonly used concept, and I don't think most people will tempt fate. Aggressive stalkers will buy dedicated GPS devices - this is a real roadblock.

> I don't think most people will tempt fate.

In so far as I would hope most people would avoid doing business with companies that mention $1 million dollar civil lawsuits in their terms of service.

Re: NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car thefts

#352

I'm the CEO of Life360, Tile's parent company. I chimed in on another comment but adding to the conversation directly here. I'm biased, but I am surprised how little pushback this is getting as AirTags explicitly are NOT meant to deter theft - to combat stalking (which is exceedingly rare) Apple notifies you if a tag you do not own is near you. That goes for thieves - they will be told an AirTag is nearby. At Tile we…

There are third party apps that will see right through your "secret stalking mode". Basically, since apple doesn't give a damn about android users, they just unleashed airtags on the world with no way to be alerted you are being stalked if you only have android. Months later apple did release some half assed android app that doesn't do automatic scanning. So android users need to use something like airguard and that…

I'm curious how those third party apps work. Are they tailored to specific vendors' beacons, or do they operate generically on all BLE announcements? I'm curious because I have a medical implant that broadcasts a burst of announcement frames once every minute.

Re: NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car thefts

#353
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notification doesn't fire until you've been moving along with the tag for a while, so the vehicle has already been stolen by the time the thieves are aware there's an AirTag present. I guess it might encourage them to dump the vehicle somewhere and abandon it, and you can then go pick it up using the AirTag's last known location. Doesn't really prevent the initial theft, but improves your chances for recovering t…

How many car thieves carry iPhones? That Venn diagram will have an overlapping area, but I'll bet it's not that big.

They’d get one if they do it regularly. We catch the stupid ones but not all of them are stupid. I imagine most are aware of AirTags and could get the cheapest iPhone to detect them.

Re: NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car thefts

#354
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notification doesn't fire until you've been moving along with the tag for a while, so the vehicle has already been stolen by the time the thieves are aware there's an AirTag present. I guess it might encourage them to dump the vehicle somewhere and abandon it, and you can then go pick it up using the AirTag's last known location. Doesn't really prevent the initial theft, but improves your chances for recovering t…

How many car thieves carry iPhones? That Venn diagram will have an overlapping area, but I'll bet it's not that big.

Why wouldn't most car thieves have iPhones?

Re: NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car thefts

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I am aware, they do not sell information to advertisers. Doing so would be a bad business move for them, anyway (ditching long term brand trust for short term profit?) On AirTag location privacy, from Apple's site [1]: > Only you can see where your AirTag is. Your location data and history are never stored on the AirTag itself. Devices that relay the location of your AirTag also stay anonymous, and that loc…

Edit: I’m debating deleting this post. It doesn’t have any references to back it up, and I just realized that if the tracking network encrypts the location with the public key such that the private key is required to decrypt the location, it is indeed possible for Apple to not know where devices are because the decryption of the location might be done on your device rather than on Apple’s servers, if they wanted to.…

They really don’t have access to the location or user identity. The technical details are available here:

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/find-my-security-se...

Re: NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car thefts

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

stringent penalties for misuse, including a large fine. How exactly does a non-government entity impose a fine?

It’s a terms of service agreement. We would have to sue

One day some bored and rich person might call you on it. You’d have to sue and win otherwise it will make it harder for others to take the claim seriously.

Re: NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car thefts

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You used Samsung products, that was your problem. Every Samsung I've had or used has been absolute trash

So the largest Android phone manufacturer is “trash”? Who do you recommend?

I had a good several year run with the LG G6. Google Maps navigation got too bogged down to be usable, though. That's more Google's fault than LG. Now I'm on a Pixel 6 and it's mostly non-offensive. The fingerprint reader is a bit unreliable, and the lack of a headphone jack is annoying. Other than that, it is responsive and the UI stays out of my way.

Re: NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car thefts

#358
post #48

This is a terrible suggestion because Apple has effectively removed the anti-theft features of Airtags in favor of protection against stalking. The thief will be notified of the tag in less than an hour usually. I see the alert anytime I mind my friends dog. Typically within 45-60 minutes of my friend leaving, I get an alert which includes a map of where I was tracked and my friends email address. The original Airtag…

[deleted]

Re: NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car thefts

#359

LoJack used to be the go-to company for this. No more. Classic LoJack had good privacy. It's a box hidden somewhere in the car, with a connection to vehicle power. It has a transmitter, but normally doesn't transmit. If your car is stolen, you report this to the police, which report it to LoJack. That broadcasts an ID over a subcarrier of some local FM broadcast station. The receiver in the Lojack unit listens for th…

Just a thought here... Why not just write a simple script that collects GPS location, host it on a private server, point an old Android phone at that page, and wire the phone under the dashboard?

It could be far simpler than that, effectively a stripped basic currently available phone wired into operating power that could be called to send GPS payload via SMS. It would simply power up on start and only ever send the coordinates based on an authenticated call or sms itself.

Re: NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car thefts

#360
post #11

who here can already see clearly the NYPD officer's completely blank stare when you show them exactly where the car thief took your car. "did you see them do it? otherwise it's not our problem"

> who here can already see clearly the NYPD officer's completely blank stare when you show them exactly where the car thief took your car. "did you see them do it? otherwise it's not our problem" With NYPD, it's even worse: "if we didn't see it, we can't do anything about it". This is, of course, entirely false, but good luck trying to argue with a cop and getting them to do their job. Heck, NYPD refuses to even take…

It’s really rather ironic that those types of cops are usually also located among the very same kind of people who demand that we only rely in the police for all things like some kind of parent as if they could be a good parent at that.

It’s always struck me as a kind of underdevelopment, a continuation of the infantilism that so many never get over as the move from being taken care of their parents to Taken care of by school and then Taken care of by universities and then taken care of by Acme corporation that claims to really care about them. Of course that works love being taken care of by big government and its plantation formen called police.

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