I always wondered why it is possible to simply switch off a stolen phone. If it would require the PIN to switch it off you have the remaining battery time to find your phone.
Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences
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Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences
#22The "find my" program is interesting to me because, for the first time (as far as I'm aware) it uses your devices to provide utility to Apple (to resell). They remain serious about privacy, but there's still something invasive about it I think they've never done before and always seemed implicitly positioned against.
Does it matter if they now know where my bike is parked, given that they already know where my phone is (i.e. I am) at all times? Meanwhile, I agree with you. It would be nice if Apple (or anyone) didn’t have this type of location information about me. However, it seems that ship has sailed and 5G + mesh networks will make it even more precise.
They don't have that information about you. From the bottom of that page:
"The Find My network extends these capabilities by locating missing devices even if they can’t or don’t connect to the internet. The Find My network is a crowdsourced network of hundreds of millions of Apple devices that use Bluetooth wireless technology to detect missing devices or items nearby, and report their approximate location back to the owner. The entire process is end-to-end encrypted and anonymous, so no one else, not even Apple or the third-party manufacturer, can view a device’s location or information."
Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences
#23I wonder if they’ll integrate with things like Milwaukee’s OneKey
Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences
#24I always wondered why it is possible to simply switch off a stolen phone. If it would require the PIN to switch it off you have the remaining battery time to find your phone.
Even if there were a PIN code to power off regularly, you could always force cut the power (like pressing power for 10s on a computer). I think this has to be possible by law for emergencies.
Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
This ^. Apple is not doing this out of benevolence. They don't to butt up against EU regulators and US courts. These are what I call "lawyer features"
No, this is literally about about locking people even further into a closed ecosystem by increasing its utility. (And I say this as an Apple fan.)
From the business perspective, Apple probably doesn’t care about selling the tags, the real value is in making the iPhone experience better. So if a user buys a tile tracker and it works better on iOS because of the iPhone network, that’s a win for them.
They don’t have to wipe out tile.
Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it matter if they now know where my bike is parked, given that they already know where my phone is (i.e. I am) at all times? Meanwhile, I agree with you. It would be nice if Apple (or anyone) didn’t have this type of location information about me. However, it seems that ship has sailed and 5G + mesh networks will make it even more precise.
They don't have that information about you. From the bottom of that page: "The Find My network extends these capabilities by locating missing devices even if they can’t or don’t connect to the internet. The Find My network is a crowdsourced network of hundreds of millions of Apple devices that use Bluetooth wireless technology to detect missing devices or items nearby, and report their approximate location back to th…
Apple controls the app, the network, and the devices that gather the location information.
It seems like in order to show me where my missing item is, they have to be able to determine my device’s information. They might claim to choose not to do that correlation until I open the app and go looking, but once I do, it seems obvious that Apple can tell where my device is (in order that they can tell me where it is in their Find My app).
Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and your stuff through their devices, privately. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet...
This sounds cool, but does it make sense? “It uses just tiny bits of data that piggyback on existing network traffic so there’s no need to worry about your battery life, your data usage, or your privacy.” How do you piggyback on existing traffic without increasing it?
You can queue and hold the data until your phone was already going to wake up to transfer something which reduces the wake ups. And it’s such a tiny amount of data being sent it probably wouldn’t total 1mb used in a year.
Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences
#28I always wondered why it is possible to simply switch off a stolen phone. If it would require the PIN to switch it off you have the remaining battery time to find your phone.
Requiring a pin to switch it off might just cause someone to invent a device that can be inserted into the Lightning port to cause a shutdown without affecting the for-parts resale value of the phone. (For example, the device could cause a short circuit or apply an unexpected voltage, causing the power controller to shut off power to the device.) If the attacker has physical access, there's not much you can do.
Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences
#29I always wondered why it is possible to simply switch off a stolen phone. If it would require the PIN to switch it off you have the remaining battery time to find your phone.
It would be better if iPhones embedded the airtag tech so on a flat battery, you would still have about a year of tracking time via airtags. Also the power button hold overrides the OS so you can shut down a frozen OS
Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences
#30Why hasn't Google or a large Android manufacturer been doing this for years? BLE is not that young and and the contract tracing thing was executed extremely quickly and on the same technology (afaik, please correct).
Why didn’t they release their version of airdrop for almost a decade after iPhones had it? Google just doesn’t seem to care about these conveniences.