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How does Apple privately find offline devices?

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#171

Post by Phlarp »

diminoten wrote: post #108
HALtheWise wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they have decided that it's too creepy to use at all, so they don't use it for targeted advertising. Seriously, why does everyone assume that companies are evilly cackling in volcano lairs? They know that violating user trust is really expensive and a bad idea. By the way, I'm pretty sure I've seen that Google's advertising targeting is only allowed to use "neighborhood level" location, which is designed to be coa…

Fiduciary duty to shareholders makes good people do bad things...

Zucks fiduciary responsibility is entirely theoretical. The shareholders have no voting power against him.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#172

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

raxxorrax wrote: post #146
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #16

Total aside, but kinda relevant. I lost my phone like a dufus about a two weeks ago. Battery died and I had no idea where it was. When I pulled the my google location history, it was too coarse to tell me anything other than 'at your house'. However, I was able to pull the raw data from google and post process it by time stamp into a series of rasters that were fine enough for me to see that the phone was definitely…

Probably slower than just keep searching. But way cooler.

Well, I looked for a week-ish, and was fap-all out of ideas where it was. I was at the point where I was looking in ridiculous locations (freezer, garage, washing machine, garden, tool shed).

This took about 20 minutes to hack together, and I found the phone in 10 minutes of looking in the 'right' spot. My phone had fallen behind the bedside stand and found a way to balance itself between the bed and the baseboards. The bed post is ~phone width, so even looking, you just couldnt see it.

That being said, I work in the geospatial sciences doing geospatial data processing, so 20 minutes for me may not be 20 minutes for some one else.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#173

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

gricardo99 wrote: post #82
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I pulled my data in the standard takeout.google.com/ process. The result is a json (? iirc). I parsed the json into x, y, and rasterized it using gdal. https://imgur.com/a/ZhyTsDV See I wasn't sure if I lost it in the couch in the living room, the office, or the bedroom. This got me within a few feet.

This is pretty cool, but I'm still confused on what data you used. By my data, do you mean data from Google Android Device Configuration Service? If you're logged into Chrome or GSuite tools from desktop locations, I just wonder how useful the data from those other products would be, if it even has location data. I'm downloading my data archive to check it out...

I think its https://takeout.google.com/ where I got the data. Then its just a json which is relatively easy to parse.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#174

Post by Izkata »

wongarsu wrote: post #159
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they prefer to focus on bigger cases - why go with a single bike theft if they can investigate an organized bike theft and laundering organization? Why bother with a single phone theft if they find a warehouse full of stolen merchandise? But yeah, that does mean a lot of petty crime goes unpunished. Stealing a bike here has become normalized - as in, "my bike got stolen, I need to get home so I'll just steal…

> why go with a single bike theft because of > Stealing a bike here has become normalized - as in, "my bike got stolen, I need to get home so I'll just steal another" There's three options: 1. We abolish ownership 2. Everyone is responsible for protecting his own stuff, resorting to vigilante justice if he finds the thief after the fact 3. The taxes we pay fund police and courts to bring justice. Option 1 is a versio…

There are capitalistic (albeit not thorough) versions of 1 - rentals [0] and services (Uber/etc)

[0] https://www.divvybikes.com/

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#175

Post by Izkata »

president wrote: post #92
kccqzy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thieves already know that stolen iPhones are usually not operable. Even with the old Find My iPhone, even after the device has been wiped, only the original owner can activate it again. So these stolen phones are usually broken down, with parts sold separately.

They are getting smarter. A family member had their phone stolen and Find My iPhone reported that the phone was off for months and so she gave up searching. One day, she got a text on her new phone saying "Find my iPhone has found your phone, click here to login to Find my iPhone". It turned out to be a phishing page for her AppleID credentials. She fell for it and I'm assuming the thieves were able to finally get in…

> To this day I have no idea how they were able to get her phone number. From the SIM maybe?

Emergency contacts (accessible while the phone is locked) + Facebook?

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#176

Post by wongarsu »

Izkata wrote: post #174
wongarsu wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why go with a single bike theft because of > Stealing a bike here has become normalized - as in, "my bike got stolen, I need to get home so I'll just steal another" There's three options: 1. We abolish ownership 2. Everyone is responsible for protecting his own stuff, resorting to vigilante justice if he finds the thief after the fact 3. The taxes we pay fund police and courts to bring justice. Option 1 is a versio…

There are capitalistic (albeit not thorough) versions of 1 - rentals [0] and services (Uber/etc) [0] https://www.divvybikes.com/

On Rentals I would disagree. Most rentals today depend on 3: to reclaim the money from the original purchase they force every user to pay, using police and court system as the means to enforce that payment and to prevent theft. Maybe in an anarchy rentals would also be quite successful by centralizing the problem of keeping property safe.

Services like Uber are interesting because they essentially strive to eleminate ownership by eleminating the thing to be owned.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#177

Post by xrjn »

kccqzy wrote: post #80
crazygringo wrote: post #74

Can this be used as essentially 100% effective anti-theft? If an Apple device is constantly emitting a BLE beacon code that can't effectively be changed in any way by a thief... ...then unless a thief keeps the device in their basement and never has anybody visit, your stolen device will almost certainly be detected sooner or later, and then you just call the police? Even if the thief has sold it by that point and di…

Thieves already know that stolen iPhones are usually not operable. Even with the old Find My iPhone, even after the device has been wiped, only the original owner can activate it again. So these stolen phones are usually broken down, with parts sold separately.

Whilst I was in China two years ago, someone mentioned that you can swap out the memory of an iPhone with one from another iPhone (e.g. water damaged) to get around an iCloud lock. So although it's quite sophisticated as a method, it's definitely doable.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#178

Post by Grovewe12 »

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Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#179

Post by scarejunba »

crazygringo wrote: post #74

Can this be used as essentially 100% effective anti-theft? If an Apple device is constantly emitting a BLE beacon code that can't effectively be changed in any way by a thief... ...then unless a thief keeps the device in their basement and never has anybody visit, your stolen device will almost certainly be detected sooner or later, and then you just call the police? Even if the thief has sold it by that point and di…

I assure you the police will do nothing.

Re: How does Apple privately find offline devices?

#180

Post by raxxorrax »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #172
raxxorrax wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably slower than just keep searching. But way cooler.

Well, I looked for a week-ish, and was fap-all out of ideas where it was. I was at the point where I was looking in ridiculous locations (freezer, garage, washing machine, garden, tool shed). This took about 20 minutes to hack together, and I found the phone in 10 minutes of looking in the 'right' spot. My phone had fallen behind the bedside stand and found a way to balance itself between the bed and the baseboards.…

> freezer

Yeah, I have these moments too. Could be a good disinfectant for keys, I guess.

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