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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

#31

Post by PurpleFoxy »

sokoloff wrote: post #26
nkellenicki wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

This is of course true but at some point you have to pick your battles. There is no FOSS product which does this and there probably never will be. And it’s not in Apple’s business model to try to collect this data.

Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences

#32

Post by dividedbyzero »

I'd love to chip a bunch of my belongings (camera, keys, ...) with this right away, but it seems there is no way to do that so far. I hope someone will release a product to do this; I doubt it'll get adopted all that widely otherwise. Not that many people are into Van Moof bikes.

Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences

#33

Post by Tsiklon »

solarkraft wrote: post #17

Why 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).

I’m not completely certain if some of the large android OEMs would get the same level of buy in with third parties.

Google would be best placed to present an open standard for android, at the risk of fragmentation or segmentation by the OEMs

Samsung seems the logical candidate to have the capability, on account of their broad broad product lineup.

That said, I’m not certain if Samsung has intentions to foster the association between their products and smaller companies in the eyes of consumers, like Apple does with its MFI program. Additionally Apple is quite happy to present products from companies it likes in their stores, something from my understanding which Samsung doesn’t do.

I see this feature becoming quite a common sight on higher value 3rd party products targeted towards the iOS market, at least initially.

If the “Find My” network, becomes popular among 3rd parties and customers, I suspect that any similar system that an android OEM or Google comes up with will have to be broadly similar in implementation to ease integration. Simply because they may not have the clout to get third parties to keep a special SKU just for your equipment.

Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences

#34

Post by nkellenicki »

sokoloff wrote: post #26
nkellenicki wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The "device information" is likely an opaque ID, and the "location" will likely be encrypted using an asymmetric key-pair set up during the pairing process, so the only thing capable of decrypting the location will be your phone.

The part you're correct about is that as they control the device, there's nothing saying they can't build a backdoor into it that reports the information (ie. location) back to them once it hits your phone. And we're also taking it on trust that it works the way they say it works, as it's not open-source.

But as someone else commented, eventually you have to trust something.

Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences

#35

Post by kalleboo »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #32

I'd love to chip a bunch of my belongings (camera, keys, ...) with this right away, but it seems there is no way to do that so far. I hope someone will release a product to do this; I doubt it'll get adopted all that widely otherwise. Not that many people are into Van Moof bikes.

The linked Apple press release mentions (and links to) the Chipolo One Spot tag https://chipolo.net/en

Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences

#36

Post by kalleboo »

PurpleFoxy wrote: post #25
CharlesW wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, Apple doesn't seem to have much interest in selling little plastic tiles to people.

They've avoided selling their own HomeKit gear, they're licensing AirPlay to be put in TVs so people don't have to buy AppleTVs, and they stopped selling routers long ago. Even when it comes to dongles which everyone thinks Apple loves selling, they have a meager selection and have outsourced many of them (e.g. they don't have a first-party USB-C Ethernet dongle)

With the MFi Program, they still make lots of money on third-party products, without all of that costly R&D and support on their own end.

Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences

#37

Post by kube-system »

kalleboo wrote: post #35
dividedbyzero wrote: post #32

I'd love to chip a bunch of my belongings (camera, keys, ...) with this right away, but it seems there is no way to do that so far. I hope someone will release a product to do this; I doubt it'll get adopted all that widely otherwise. Not that many people are into Van Moof bikes.

The linked Apple press release mentions (and links to) the Chipolo One Spot tag https://chipolo.net/en

I was super excited to buy it, but alas, it is not available yet.

Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences

#38

Post by lathiat »

sokoloff wrote: post #26
nkellenicki wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The way it works is that the location is encrypted with a key that is only on your device, same as iMessage. So they can't directly decrypt that info.

It's possible in theory they could add hooks into the OS to then do that next time you use the key (e.g. effectively a baked in backdoor) or maybe in some cases the key can be extracted from an iCloud backup or similar (I'm not 100% sure how those keys are stored, but it's likely detailed in their security documentation) but in general the service itself cannot see the encrypted device location.

Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences

#39

Post by bigiain »

floatingatoll wrote: post #4
dhritzkiv wrote: post #2

The ability to build on this seems to be limited to those in the MFi certification program. Likely means you can't roll your own, at least until third party chips/components that are certified become available for integrating into small-scale hardware projects. Still, quite excited for new consumer accessories to support this.

Apple’s guidelines for whether or not you need to join MFi: https://mfi.apple.com/en/faqs.html To build on this for other than personal use, you would either need to purchase Find My microchips from someone who is in the MFi program, or you would need to join the program yourself if you intend to produce your own microchip implementation of Find My. For personal use, Apple truly doesn’t care.

I haven't tried this, but I did bookmark it in case I want to some weekend:

https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack

"OpenHaystack is a framework for tracking personal Bluetooth devices via Apple's massive Find My network. Use it to create your own tracking tags that you can append to physical objects (keyrings, backpacks, ...) or integrate it into other Bluetooth-capable devices such as notebooks."

Re: Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences

#40

Post by swiley »

solarkraft wrote: post #17

Why 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).

It's not even that complex, just keep a hash of position fixes and MAC addresses and overwrite it occasionally. I could probably hack something "good enough" on my pinephone in under an hour.

There's the global network where everyone is sharing fixes though... oof I don't really even want to be part of that.

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