321–330 of 439 posts
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21st century "let them eat cake"
If you can afford to park a car in NYC, you can afford Air Tags.
1. NYPD-affiliated material on your car
2. Plate cover
3. Plate holder with strategically placed leaves attached
If you pay for parking in NYC you're a sucker.
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The newer models have replaceable batteries
aside from the batteries, my Tile devices just straight up do not activate most of the time when I actually need them. I'll be a few feet away and they won't make any sound // won't connect when I try to ping them. AirTags have been FAR more reliable, and the direction finding is next-level.
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The Tile app constantly nags me in ugly ways to give it always on location permissions. How is that data used beyond helping people find their items?
We need that for background scanning; Apple just cheats and does the same without really asking. We have never sold Tile user data. We did have a data platform for Life360, which we believe did no harm, but we exited the business as it seemed to cause confusion and was a very small part of our revenue
I'm confused. Life360 was found selling precise user location data to third party data brokers[0]. It doesn't take a creative mind to see the harm (or even potential harm) caused here. I could never trust you or your company.
[0] https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/12/06/the-popular-family-...
> A former X-Mode engineer said the raw location data the company received from Life360 was among X-Mode’s most valuable offerings due to the sheer volume and precision of the data. A former Cuebiq employee joked that the company wouldn’t be able to run its marketing campaigns without Life360’s constant flow of location data.
...
> Two former Life360 employees also told The Markup that the company, while it states it anonymizes the data it sells, fails to take necessary precautions to ensure that location histories cannot be traced back to individuals. They said that while the company removed the most obvious identifying user information, it did not make efforts to “fuzz,” “hash,” aggregate, or reduce the precision of the location data to preserve privacy.
> The former X-Mode engineer said that the company also received raw data from Life360. The company relies on its customers to obfuscate that data based on their specific applications, Hulls added.
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The newer models have replaceable batteries
aside from the batteries, my Tile devices just straight up do not activate most of the time when I actually need them. I'll be a few feet away and they won't make any sound // won't connect when I try to ping them. AirTags have been FAR more reliable, and the direction finding is next-level.
I have one on my dog's collar, in a 3D printed enclosure. He got out a few weekends ago and ran all around town, and there weren't any breadcrumbs on the app. It's one of the mid-range models rather than the high-end ones, though.
I have the high-end ones in our cars, and there's plenty of activity in the app.
While I pay for the premium service, it's too much hassle to deal with the "free" battery replacements. I just buy bulk packs of coin cells on Amazon for $0.10 each.
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I bought a bunch of Tiles, and after a year the non-replaceable batteries failed and I got an offer to replace them at 15% off. Talk about garbage. Your product isn't good for anything if it just stops working after a year and needs a full replacement.
We have updated all models to have either replaceable batteries or a 3-year life. Given how beaten up devices on things like keys get we are getting very good feedback on the 3 year models. We are also giving away free tiles to paid Life360 members, which is probably not as relevant to the hacker news crowd but we do have over 20% of US families using our service. We think tiles should be free with membership, includ…
I wanted to try to understand more context behind the "'Why would anyone have one [an Android phone]?' Mayor Adams responded." quote. Here is the relevant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vuw72THyXsQ&t=949s So, I get that he's making a joke, but given that everyone just laughs and there is no follow up, it's clear to me it's one of those "The reason this joke is funny is because I actually think it's true" joke…
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I have zero issues with running an Android, and I honestly see iPhones as being disadvantaged, personally. There's not a single thing I can't do on an Android that I could on an iPhone.
Then you have never tried to join a group chat where the other members of the group all have iPhones and use iMessage.
Solid point
I'm the CEO of Life360, Tile's parent company. I chimed in on another comment but adding to the conversation directly here. I'm biased, but I am surprised how little pushback this is getting as AirTags explicitly are NOT meant to deter theft - to combat stalking (which is exceedingly rare) Apple notifies you if a tag you do not own is near you. That goes for thieves - they will be told an AirTag is nearby. At Tile we…
Yeah, the point of AirTags was never anti-theft.