321–330 of 332 posts
Will Google give up your location to the feds if they issue a broad area geolocation warrant?
Even Google has to comply with warrants. Even secret ones. You should assume the location of your devices will be disclosed whenever the US gov has a plausible reason for requesting it, regardless of which part of the globe you live in.
Can anyone recommend a similar device small enough for eyeglasses? An elderly person I know loses theirs (and it's a significant problem; they are very limited without them, on top of other difficulties of aging). I can find their phone for them remotely, but not their eyeglasses.
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Excatly right. They switched to USB-C only on certain classes of devices and even then only over a incredibly long period of time when they could have moved all of their devices over to USB-C fairly quickly given their vertical integration advantages. It's interesting how my non-Apple ecosystem has me using USB-C across all devices across multiple manufacturrs but my Apple friends have multiple cables/chargers/etc to…
Perhaps it was EU regulation, or perhaps it was Apple wanting to make good on a ten-year-old promise of connector continuity. When Apple introduced the Lightning connector in 2012, they described it as their iPhone connector "for the next decade".[0] Their switch from Lightning to USB-C on the iPhone came just over ten years after that. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82dwZYw2M00&t=1571s
Honestly I am still blown away that the switch last year to USB-C was met with some positivity (often from tech people) and a bunch of ’meh’. I was expecting tons of screaming and “Apple’s making you buy all your cables again to juice their books!”
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Agreed. I bought a couple Tiles before AirTags were available. They worked fine, but AirTags are just better in every way.
AirTags only come in a single size and shape that only makes sense for larger container objects. Tile makes a flat credit-card sized variant that you can slide in your wallet, and the adapters required to put an AirTag on a keychain is pretty ridiculous in comparison to the tiny variants you can get from Tile with a built-in hole for this purpose. (Also: AFAIK the "large"--not really, in comparison to the AirTag + ad…
There's like three different places I put my phone in different areas of the house, and only one where I put my wallet and keys as soon as I enter.
I would like an airtag to put on my bike or laptop or other high value item to track it if stolen, but I'm not about to buy Apple stuff.
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On Apple's devices, you cannot disable that BLE broadcast. The same is true on the Pixel 8: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/8/24123909/google-pixel-8-pr... . That's the whole point of this design, and fundamentally different than just having some app ping a server once in a while so long as it has network access.
Wow that's a serious privacy concern
The design of this is pretty clever: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet....
I presume somewhere you can turn this off for real, but the defaults seem sensible to me.
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"Out of battery" isn't really what we think it means. The phone shuts down (and refuses to start back up) when it still has quite a bit of battery left. If it truly allowed the battery to go flat, that would damage the battery, and you'd have a really hard time charging it again. The amount of juice your entire phone needs to run for, say, a half hour can probably power just the bluetooth LE chipset for occasional wa…
That's how the iPhone does it as well, btw! As far as I remember there's a separate microcontroller that controls "Find my phone" beacons without having to boot up iOS on the main application processor.
That explaines why my work iPhone has an empty battery after 2 weeks of being turned off. Good job Apple. /s
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I'm all for assuming bad intent when it comes to Google and, but this doesn't really make sense. Google owns the OS; if they want your location, they don't need to care about per-app location permissions.
> Google owns the OS Google is still beholden to consumer privacy laws. I’m sure if you turn off location data in your Google account they won’t track you. The guys in the Room 641A will.
To ignore them or what ? None of the FAANG respect the privacy laws (GDPR for example). They just pay lobby money and insignificant fines from time to time and no government cares about it.
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I had a number of Tiles over the years and really wanted to like them, but really didn't. I lose stuff infrequently enough that the battery in the tiles would die 2-10 times before I was likely to lose my keys/wallet. The TV remote, the tile was something my son (the primary loser) would fiddle with constantly and destroy. I carried a dead Tile Pro on my keys probably 95% of the time I carried it. The one place I'd r…
Do the Pixel Buds not have a Find feature? I have the same experience as you with Tile, but I use the "Find" feature on my iPhone to locate my AirPods all the time.
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But that doesn't use the "find my device" netowrk. I think the parent wasn't saying, "I want an app that continually reports its location to my server so I can monitor my phone's location." Indeed, that's fairly trivial to build, but is useless if, say, your phone doesn't have internet access (like, someone turns it off or it runs out of battery). The thing Google is announcing here is like the Apple "find my" networ…
> your phone doesn't have internet access > simply based on a BLE ping What if they disable Bluetooth? The linked open source find my device app uses cell network to both receive commands and for location.
I'd guess that Bluetooth will never fully shut off, it would just look like it's turned off to other apps that would want to use it.