21–30 of 142 posts
All these stalking counter-measures make it useless if your device is stolen rather than mislaid. If my bag is stolen I want it to contain a hard to find device, not one that gives away its position (by warning the thief). I also want an easy mechanism to give the police temporary access to track it, til they catch the thief and get my stuff back.
I like how much they thought about this issue.
Because I found this article that says Tile trackers were used by bad actors
https://blog.malwarebytes.com/stalkerware/2019/07/helping-su...
So, if Airtags have stalking protections, why wouldn't I just use a Tile to track someone? They're sortof in the same ballpark of price and size.
Is it because Apple's scale is so wide that it makes their Airtags significantly better for stalking?
All these stalking counter-measures make it useless if your device is stolen rather than mislaid. If my bag is stolen I want it to contain a hard to find device, not one that gives away its position (by warning the thief). I also want an easy mechanism to give the police temporary access to track it, til they catch the thief and get my stuff back.
I don’t know where you live, but as somebody who previously lived in San Francisco, do you really think the police are going to actively pursue theft claims? It’s why car break-ins and petty theft are out of control in the bay area. The police don’t enforce laws, and certainly don’t actively track down stolen property.
I must have lived a sheltered life because none of these concerns crossed my mind.
So much of that kind of stuff wouldn't be likely to cross my mind either. (What a nice privilege.) Shows how important it is to have a diverse set of listened-to voices when building tech products.
Nobody had asked themselves this question.
Are these domestic abuse activists aware that GPS tracking devices already exist and have existed for a long time? See here for an example [0]. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Real-time-Tracker-Worldwide-Coverage-...
Is the argument really, “Are you aware that malicious actors can just go out and buy explosives, so there’s no point in making it difficult to turn a stove into an explosive device?”
Or maybe I make a device for the home. I work hard to secure it against malicious actors. Is anybody going to say, “Don’t bother, most people have insecure light bulbs in their home, so there’s no point securing this WiFi speaker you’re selling?”
I. Think. Not.
It’s always a good idea to reduce the threat area. Security for most people is not a simple binary “secure or not.”
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Also, what’s with the phrase “domestic abuse activists?” Is that supposed to be some kind of slur? I’m baffled, it adds nothing to your argument, and in fact it hints at some kind of cultural bias on your part, which is irrelevant to the soundness of your reasoning.
All in all, my advice is to drop language like this unless you are specifically trying to make an argument about social activism. Sprinkling arguments with emotional devices like this subtracts from your message, it doesn’t add to it.
All these stalking counter-measures make it useless if your device is stolen rather than mislaid. If my bag is stolen I want it to contain a hard to find device, not one that gives away its position (by warning the thief). I also want an easy mechanism to give the police temporary access to track it, til they catch the thief and get my stuff back.
> give the police temporary access to track it, til they catch the thief and get my stuff back. I don’t know where you live, but as somebody who previously lived in San Francisco, do you really think the police are going to actively pursue theft claims? It’s why car break-ins and petty theft are out of control in the bay area. The police don’t enforce laws, and certainly don’t actively track down stolen property.
If you really want to track someone it's not that hard to just buy an iPhone and turn "find my iPhone" on and slip it somewhere. You could even hardwire it into a car so it remains charged.
The AirTags use a distributed bluetooth connection I think.
I'm curious - does Tile have similar protections for their devices? Because I found this article that says Tile trackers were used by bad actors https://blog.malwarebytes.com/stalkerware/2019/07/helping-su... So, if Airtags have stalking protections, why wouldn't I just use a Tile to track someone? They're sortof in the same ballpark of price and size. Is it because Apple's scale is so wide that it makes their Airtag…
All these stalking counter-measures make it useless if your device is stolen rather than mislaid. If my bag is stolen I want it to contain a hard to find device, not one that gives away its position (by warning the thief). I also want an easy mechanism to give the police temporary access to track it, til they catch the thief and get my stuff back.
I'll definitely look if a easy to use bluetooth scanner/tracker is on fdroid and build one if not.
I also wonder how easy it is to generate random ids / ddos iphones in an area... since by default they listen and forward tags on users data connection.
edit: it beeps after 3 days so its nice enough to prevent a need for countermeasures
From what I understand, when you find an airtag, you connect it to your device and it gives you the owners contact info. Anyone can get your phone number.
When you find an ottotag, you scan it and you contact the owner through ottomon. From here the GPS location is captured and communicated. All interactions are done through the service (ottomon.net). This layer act as a security layer where we filter out spam and possibly stalkers based on past behavior and other heuristics.
The two parties can communicate without revealing any information about themselves. So yeah, Apple could have made it much simpler, but they are my competitors now so let's keep this between us.
Edit: For more info -> https://www.ottomon.net/blog/privately-communicate-on-ottomo...