This is news just because it's an Apple device being used for something that was already trivially possible.
GPS trackers designed to be magnet-attached to a car which report their location via cell signal cost ~$20 on Amazon. You then tend to need to pay for either a SIM card or a subscription to the device maker's service
-- bringing you up to about the cost of an AirTag. These are much harder to detect, as you might imagine.
The Apple device does try to make itself less useful for abusive purposes. Nearby iPhones will notify you if there's an AirTag following you. Apple released an Android app to scan for them (manually -- it'd probably be nice if they released something that did the same passive scanning as iPhones get, but there's battery trade-offs there, and obviously most people won't have that app). AirTags will also beep if they're separated from their owner.
In fact, this is news we're hearing about because of the steps Apple took to make it harder to use these devices for bad purposes. The tweet author got a warning about the device following them.
It's tricky to make something that lets you find where you dropped your keys while walking the dog that can't also be used for nefarious purposes.
While you're correct, I think there is something to be said about the popularization of the technology. Most people aren't aware of GPS trackers other than movies and think they are much harder to come by. AirTags are also less nefarious by nature. If you get caught with a GPS tracker on your person that's pretty suspicious. If you're caught placing an AirTag on someone's car it's easier to pretend you dropped it and are looking for it. I'd also say that the popularization increases the chance of use in the moment. You already have the AirTag and can decide do that tracking. With the GPS you have to do forward planning. I do think there's a difference here that could lead to more people being tracked. Crimes of opportunity are different than planned crimes, and I assume much more common.
It is good that Apple is notifying users when being followed. But it seems that too many false positives are getting people to ignore the messages. Though this is a hard thing to combat.
> If you're caught placing an AirTag on someone's car it's easier to pretend you dropped it and are looking for it.
That doesn't make any sense. If someone catches me placing an AirTag in the undercarriage of a car, it's pretty difficult to pretend that I dropped it there.
Depends how you were caught. On your back reaching up? No. On your knees? Yeah. Consider that this tag was placed in the wheel well, which doesn't require getting on your back and would only take a few seconds. It isn't like someone is there for a significant period of time. Especially since you can then produce said AirTag after inquiry and people will generally believe the claim even if suspicious. All you have to do is create _reasonable_ doubt. That's different than _certain_ doubt. This is because weird stuff like that is much more common than nefarious acts (though we remember nefarious acts more easily). I think you are likely overly estimating yours and the average person's awareness. Scam artists and magicians exploit these kinds of effects frequently and with an extremely high success rate.
Well if you were caught squatting down, with your hand literally in the wheel well of the car, again, that makes it pretty hard to argue you dropped something there. That's what we're talking about here.
Your hand is in the wheel well for a fraction of a second, just enough for a magnet to stick. You can still say "oh I was just picking up my air tag" and it'll be fairly reasonable. I'd buy it if it were done so you didn't look like you were fiddling with the car too long.
Your argument isn't very convincing. AirTags are one of the few location tracker that the public can recognize by sight and identify its use. This makes AirTags much less effective for use by malicious actors than other generic black-plastic case electronics.
My friend just had someone jack up his car and hack off a catalytic converter with a hacksaw in broad daylight, to steal it. How long does it take to place an airtag, 3 seconds? I think the chances of you being caught placing an airtag are slim to none.
A bit of an off-tangent: does your friend live in Seattle? Because catalytic converter and bike theft in broad daylight have become a staple here, but it is definitely not the norm in other cities.
So I wouldn't judge how easy it is to do something like that in general, based on a city where the prosecution is notorious for letting all kinds of criminals get released the morning after, which leads to the police not bothering with "minor" crimes like this (i.e., what's the point, if they will just get released the morning after and you waste both your time and the department time).
Catalytic converter theft is big everywhere, unfortunately. It's most common in larger cities, but it's worth the effort for thieves to travel out of town as well.
Cat theft, and petty property crime in general, is way worse in the cities that decline to prosecute which basically boils down to "the west coast and a few pinpoints on the east coast."
I hear this opinion (or something like it, basically that property crime is only an issue in the west because city governments are not harsh/violent/punitive enough) repeated often.
My anecdata: I live in a city where cops can and do whatever they want to people without serious oversight. Petty theft is met with both maximum violence and prosecution. it does not seem to have much effect on crime rates.
Washington, DC, does not decline to prosecute, but there was a rash of catalytic converter thefts in my neighborhood not that long ago. I'd have guessed that these thefts are tied to the popularity of hybrid vehicles, in particular Priuses.
I can't make sense of what's going on with prosecutions there, sometimes I hear about people getting away with major crimes, other times some poor sod gets charged for possessing 'material useful to terrorists', The Anarchist Cookbook, which you can buy on Amazon.
It's only less effective if it's somewhere that can be seen. I think most people don't check the insides of their wheel wells more than, well, at all. In which case the device could be neon green and it wouldn't matter for the purposes of visual detection.
You clearly have near 0 relationship with the public. The public can't identify an AirTag; most have hardly heard of the thing. And even if they did, someone's story of dropping a thing would convince 99% of people who want to be doing anything else than running BS detection on some weird person they've happened upon.
> Most people aren't aware of GPS trackers other than movies and think they are much harder to come by. AirTags are also less nefarious by nature. If you get caught with a GPS tracker on your person that's pretty suspicious.
These are used in RC a fair amount, not sure why it'd be anymore suspicious than having an AirTag
Security by obscurity is not security at all. Thinking you were safe because “people didn’t know about it” is not safety at all! Bad people are going to be bad. They don’t need AirTags for that. Knowing it can happen is far better for everyone to know about than living in a false sense of security.
As someone who has been in this field professionally for almost 20 years, my thoughts on this have changed quite a bit. The idea of condemning security through obscurity traces back to cryptography, not security in general. In cryptography, you want the security of your protocol to not depend on the protocol being secret, but the cryptographic keys themselves being secret. There are a lot of good reasons for this, the main one being that the whole point of cryptography is to create protocols that can survive public scrutiny and thus are more easy to implement and more robust.
So for example, without cryptography you'd need to secretly pass a message by courier who might take a secret route, constantly changing his route and delivery time. With cryptography, you can encrypt and sign the message, and then broadcast it over an insecure channel. The second option is much easier than the first. So the whole enterprise of cryptography is based on the principle of abandoning the confidentiality of the protocols themselves.
But there are many situations that require security which are outside of cryptography, because the security of the overall system cannot be reduced to high entropy secrets, and in that case, there is some security benefit that is obtained from obscurity.
For example, we are concerned about username enumeration because we understand users choose weak passwords that might be found in databases, so we do not publish usernames and consider it a vulnerability when usernames are leaked.
As another example, we consider information disclosure consisting of stacktraces leaked to the user to be a vulnerability.
Similarly, there are data centers that cannot just get up and move, and so locations and protocols of these installations are also kept secret.
So while it's true that things which are hard to change should not rely on secrecy in order to maintain their security level, and we should constantly be improving and hardening our protocols so that they can resist public scrutiny, nevertheless it's not the case that all protocols have been or are able to be improved so that their security properties are reducible to high entropy bit strings - in fact most systems don't fall into this category and most will never fall into this category - and for these systems, part of the security will continue to rely on obscurity, even though we are painfully aware of the drawbacks of this approach.
Even in cryptography, there can be value in obscurity.
For instance, suppose you have a system that uses the latest well-known encryption algorithm. You keep the keys secure. Of course.
Now suppose you have an alternative version of the system which super-enciphers all traffic with a fixed and physically protected key. Clearly, if that key is known then the system is no harder to attack than a system without the super-encryption. If the key to the super-encryption is not known, this adds considerable security against, say, successful key interception. Essentially, you are adding diversity of mechanism so that attackers have to multiply and diversify their attacks.
So security-by-obscurity can be a useful adjunct. It just can't be the whole story. Also, it isn't something you should talk about which means that the conversation about such techniques tends to be dominated by people who don't have practical experience with expert and well-financed adversaries.
The intelligence community is very well aware of these factors. That's why they try to protect the integrity of their hardware so much. That also why they don't talk much about the pragmatic aspects of their encryption machines.
Obscurity is not a good primary line of defense. But there's no reason why-- all else being equal-- it can't be part of a more robust setup. The more obstacles the better: like simply not using standard port #s for services so that it takes more than a quick scan of common ports to find something. Simple, and sure easy to defeat, but it takes you off the list for the lowest having fruit of targets.
Security by obscurity is actually pretty good security. Obviously but fool proof, but pretty good. Of course it depends on how good your obscurity is.
Plain text passwords are not very obscure. And thus is mainly where the phrase comes from.
You're surprised a company making a product wants consumers to buy their product?
How does the "slowing down" story keep coming up when it's clear it was the best solution to the problem "what to do when users have the same battery for 3+ years and the device literally cannot sustain itself anymore".
Well, the way I see it is that in the counterfactual world where they didn't downclock, someone who doesn't "trust in Apple's PR" would conclude that the lack of downclocking is so that phones would turn off randomly, nudging people to buy a new phone.
My point is that people without iOS 14.5 (older iPhones), iphone 11 or later will either be forced to upgrade or switch from Android (bad app reviews) to avoid being tracked - a dirty trick by Apple to gain customers.
Some people might brush notifications - either be 3 days as the reporter suggested (self tag) or right away as OP (stranger's tag)
Just a hypothesis, but Apple has a history of doing this as seen in 1,2,3 above. Its PR is genius, always spinning the narrative.
so if you want to track people/pet, are the word that spring to mind "GPS tracker" or "air tag"? What happens when you google "GPS tracker"? NOTHING shows up?
Before AirTag which was only a year ago, did bad actors just sit there thinking to themselves: "man I wish there was a technology to track people, I wish I knew what it's called"?
I thought that too. Google GPS tracker and the first result are trackers for about $30. They come with a SIM Card and and a Online Service for $5 so you can track the tracker. Also comes with an alarm if someone removes the tracker.
This is really trivial...
But still not as trivial as an Airtag. You need an iPhone and an Airtag. That’s it. No extra service. No waiting non-Prime or non-Apple shipping for a tracker to arrive.
The first results in Google for me are $50 and are about 10-20x the size as an Airtag. Also multiple parts.
And, the units off Amazon have to be purchased with a credit card + shipped to your house.
AirTags can be bought with cash much more anonymously. (Though I’m not sure how/if Apple can identify the associated iPhone if presented with a warrant.)
- Would a GPS tracker placed at this position be able to catch the GPS signal? If I understand it correctly, an airtag communicate via bluetooth and would get the location from a phone in range?
- An airtag do not require a SIM card. Are they easily traceable or is it hard to get to the owner?
A GPS tracker in the wheel well would have no problem getting signal, GPS receivers have gotten spookily sensitive in recent years. And that's a genie that won't go back in the bottle.
> An airtag do not require a SIM card. Are they easily traceable or is it hard to get to the owner?
I turned my laptop into a functional airtag one bored day. Not sure how to get the data from apple with a Mac because it requires a bit of hackery due to them not having a public API but it can be done using their email app IIRC.
They store the encrypted location data on their servers so without the private key nobody can read it which also means nobody can determine who owns the tracker — I’d imagine they could use access logs or something to figure out who’s been reading the public key which the tracker broadcasts.
TFA could have not thrown the airtag away, read the serial number off it and used that as a “clue” methinks.
I actually want to get an esp-32 and turn that into a airtag but I’m lazy and would also need to buy a Mac so…though I’m not too lazy to code up a little daemon which will set off the beeper on every airtag in range once I get ahold of one.
I see some parallels here to cases like "Google Glassholes"[1] or the "Sony see through camera" [2]. Both turned to be PR problems, even though technically the companies did not do anything that was not already otherwise possible.
In Australia to activate a sim you need a form of ID, if you were to put a sim card in a GPS tracker you could easily be identified. air tags not so much.
Still, even if not linked through purchase, the device will communicate back to a number controlled by you, fairly directly. A lot of obvious and hard-to-mask effort to emulate something that's provided as a COTS package with far harder tracking back to you.
TL;DR: this was possible previously, for fairly determined and advanced users; now it's available to anyone on a whim.
How is it the wrong solution? An app is required for any of this to work/be detected. Either everyone jumps on the same bandwagon (Google joins Apple or something), or you install the app for the bandwagon that exists.
An app must be installed to detect abuse, who would install that preventively?...
For setup, sure that's possible as an app. But my comment was "where do i see a warning", as in : detect abuse.
A protocol should be implemented, so it can be implemented on a more broad os level.
In reality: no one will install an app for a potential abuse and i can't imagine someone would think otherwise. The people that are getting conned are obviously not the users configuring the AirTag.
> An app must be installed to detect abuse, who would install that preventively?...
> A protocol should be implemented, so it can be implemented on a more broad os level.
I don't understand, this is what I'm saying. "Either everyone jumps on the same bandwagon (Google joins Apple or something), or you install the app for the bandwagon that exists."
You need the software installed. Either everyone jumps on the same bandwagon and everyone provides the app/system service with their phone, for the same protocol, or everyone has to install an app/system service that supports whomever's specific protocol. This has been the case long before apple, with Tile, Samsung, etc.
> who would install that preventively?
With the unfortunate consequence of causality and forward direction of time, everyone that has a phone that doesn't already have it as a system service, until everyone jumps on the same bandwagon and agrees to supporting one specific protocol. What's the alternative here? Regulate all tracking devices so they can't be sold until all phones can detect them?
It's a tricky timing to work out, I guess. You want to warn people about trackers near them, but you don't want someone e.g. leaving their tagged bag in their locker to cause loud beeping after 30 minutes.
"GPS trackers designed to be magnet-attached to a car which report their location via cell signal cost ~$20 on Amazon. You then tend to need to pay for either a SIM card or a subscription to the device maker's service -- bringing you up to about the cost of an AirTag. These are much harder to detect, as you might imagine."
Yes ... but Apple has built a mesh network to report the position of people who don't want to be tracked ... and clearly are being tracked. And it's very possible my own iphone is being used in the service of an evil actor. That feels ... different. Ethically -- if not technically.
"It's tricky to make something that lets you find where you dropped your keys while walking the dog that can't also be used for nefarious purposes." This seems awfully blithe. I suspect you aren't a woman. Or that you don't have daughters old enough to live on their own.
> Yes ... but Apple has built a mesh network to report the position of people who don't want to be tracked ... and clearly are being tracked.
Sure, but you could say the same thing about the cell network. Same argument applies to the cell GPS trackers I mentioned.
> And it's very possible my own iphone is being used in the service of an evil actor.
You can turn if off if you want. `Settings > Apple ID > Find My > Find My iPhone` and uncheck `Find My network`. I do appreciate that the power of defaults means that you personally disabling it doesn't really do much to the overall situation, though.
And both should be simple for the police to link to the owner, if they are reported. Maybe a bit less so for a SIM card, but that AirTag is registered with someone’s phone
Correct. And if you read that carefully, it does not say that Apple doesn't know who the owner is. The owner, in this case, is not whose phone reported the tag.
neither of those statements say anything about identifying who purchased the air tag and what apple account is tied to the air tag.. you do realize that for someone to be able to find the location of the airtag, it has to be tied to their icloud account? the airtags have a serial number. it's trivial for apple to identify what icloud account is associated to the tag by serial number..
> I suspect your estimate of the commonality of such behavior reflects more on you and your social group’s predilections than anything
I said nothing of the commonality, only the relative proportions. You're the one assuming things in absolute terms.
Do you disagree that there's probably more people out there wishing to cause someone to lose sleep vs. steal cars and abduct people? If so, see above quoted text.
>Wanna take a guess as to how many assholes out there just want to make a mouthy cunt from the bar lose sleep
Hey it might be easy to forget we're talking about a real person here, and I'm sure you mean this is how a hypothetical person could be perceived by another hypothetical person, but this kind of language directed at a victim of a stalking attempt feels really icky.
Just emphasizing the reality of how assholes in bars can view and treat people, which is part of the point being made; it's icky, and there's plenty of that to go around. Now there's AirTags at their disposal, for better or worse.
For the record I'm a mouthy cunt in a bar after a few drinks.
> Why exactly is it lower effort than a cellular GPS tracker from Amazon? They're around the same size, and roughly the same cost.
Apple is going out of its way to assist in making AirTags discoverable while physically hidden and anonymous.
Some random cellular GPS tracker from Amazon gives the tracking capability, but how does one make it seem threatening while highly discoverable? You'd have to leave it out where physically visible, making the whole charade substantially less convincing.
When you open a GPS tracker you find a SIM and that's enough to identify the owner in any country that requires an ID to get a SIM. AirTags are anonymous by design AFAIK. Furthermore the owner is spared with the burden of getting a SIM (time and cost), ID or not.
AirTag also has an account linked to it. It’s required to function. In fact, if you find an air tag, you can scan it and it shows the serial and the last four digits of the owners phone number. I’m sure Apple will give the full details to the authorities, if requested.
While I'm sure there are countries that require that, you don't have to provide an ID to get a SIM in the United States. You can go buy one off the shelf (with service included) at Walmart for around $10, in cash.
> that's enough to identify the owner in any country that requires an ID to get a SIM
The process that it takes to identify the owner of a SIM card is no different, and likely more difficult, than the process to identify the owner of an AirTag.
How is a common consumer-grade device not less effort than intentionally purchasing, setting up, and deploying a custom spy gadget? They're totally different levels of effort and investment (dollar-'cost' being a small part of it). With an airtag you can even get plausible deniability in a lot of cases.
> This is news just because it's an Apple device being used for something that was already trivially possible.
> GPS trackers designed to be magnet-attached to a car which report their location via cell signal cost ~$20 on Amazon. You then tend to need to pay for either a SIM card or a subscription to the device maker's service -- bringing you up to about the cost of an AirTag.
So you're saying Apple made it even more trivially possible. Not only does it cost the same, it now requires less effort.
I do recongnize that. Does only the first person selling a dangerous product deserve scorn? "X did it first!" is the excuse of a toddler.
They've also made it easier than gps trackers (no sim card needed), probably safer for stalkers (does Apple have a way to report AirTags used for crime and/or find out who owns it?) and it's more effective than Tile.
It also favors their own ecosystem, because only iphone owners get warned. (no I don't consider beeping enough, finding something that beeps intermittently is notoriously difficult).
Beating up on Apple for making something LESS able to be abused and more transparent/understandable just seems disingenuous though?
The difference in level of abuse for something that will actively draw attention to itself after some period of time vs something of the same cost that was previously widely available and was more subtle and would not, is pretty big. And it is in the favor of Apple not being abusive or favoring abuse.
While it’s theoretically possible that this happened, I think this particular story was made up. For a number of reasons: 1) How did the stalker know that that’s her car? She said she was on a night out. Unless she went back to her car all the time, he must have seen her arrive in it. 2) Sticking an AirTag to the inside of the front wheel well isn’t easy. There is dirt and grime there and the surfaces aren’t flat. The stalker would have had to use a very strong adhesive to make the AirTag stick while the car was moving. 3) While it’d be a smart idea to not drive home while a foreign AirTag tracks you, who is alert enough after a night out AND happens to have friends in the vicinity that you can wake up at what must have been a very late hour? 4) Her friend who found and removed the AirTag took no photo. Really?
While it is possible you could use an Apple AirTag in this way, there are a number of facts that don't add up in the story. Supposedly the AirTag in question was "thrown away" so there would be no hints as to how it was attached. Also, if you are being unknowingly tracked by another person's AirTag you can disable the tracking and notification if you are worried about it: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212227 and additional steps at https://www.macworld.com/article/345863/how-to-find-block-di...
If you are worried enough to drive to someone else's home, why would you go to sleep with the tracker still on the car without disabling the tracker first?
No doubt that this sort of tracking is possible, but there's much here that needs some questions answered. If it was a ploy to get people to be aware of the possibilities of AirTag tracking, then I suppose that should be disclosed.
Read on the news that this kind of tracking with AirTags is used to steal cars. A car thief attaches it to the target vehicle, and then simply arrives to the place where it is parked overnight. The thief removes AirTag and then waits for an opportunity to steal the car.
You can steal the car in a quiet area at night when the odds of being caught are much lower. It allows the criminal to pick the time and place of the crime, rather than it being dictated by luck and coincidence.
Because you’re not guaranteed to find one you’re looking for. If you do a little work up front you get much better odds.
I can think of other reasons:
You can target more vulnerable people (someone you know isn’t likely to come out and confront you).
And, you can observe the usage pattern of the car. For example: you might notice that the victim works nights on Fridays and leaves their car in a more vulnerable location than when at home.
I don’t think this is gone in 60 seconds, man. People aren’t out here trying to steal $1 mil collector cars on the regular.
They steal cheap ass Honda civics and what not because they’re easy to steal. Thieves steal easy to steal things. This is why the AirTag thing doesn’t make sense for tracking a car you’re planning to steal. They’d just steal it on first sight. Otherwise, they’re out like $25+ if that car drives hella far away. Not a wise investment.
I think a stolen car will fetch you a bit more then $25, something tells me that successfully stealing one car will pay for hundreds to thousands of AirTags. So they can afford to lose one or two.
> They steal cheap ass Honda civics and what not because the
Opportunistic thieves steal easy to steal things. Professional criminals steal high value assets and will have good contacts in organised crime to move those assets on, and usually move them over a border, very quickly. It’s these individuals who are using AirTags to steal cars.
Professionals are probably tracking half a dozen high value vehicles (Mercedes, Audi’s, Porsche’s etc), and will grab a number of them in a single night. Don’t assume these thieves are just junkies looking to pay for their next high. There are more cars in this world than just $1mil collectors cars and cheap civics, plenty of $70k-$150k cars worth putting some effort into.
>They steal cheap ass Honda civics and what not because they’re easy to steal. Thieves steal easy to steal things.
You're talking about joy riders. The rest of us are talking about more sophisticated operations. Besides, your logic doesn't follow: Because most thefts are of vehicle X, there are no thefts of vehicle Y?
The police didn't say it was the primary method of stealing cars, only that it was a new phenomenon they hadn't seen before.
Not to disagree with your overall point, but on #2 magnets work well for this and there are a lot of “hide-a-key” type things on the market that are often used in wheel wells by people who have a history of locking their keys in their car.
Good point, but may I add 5) AirTags are a very expensive way of stalking someone. Surely, there may be some creeps willing to put up this sort of money. But some random guy who sees her on a night out and who happens to have an AirTag with attached magnet with him? And if that was indeed the case, wouldn’t there be some pretext to this, like someone hitting on her that night and she turned him away? She doesn’t mention anything in this regard.
So no, this story doesn’t line up and looks more like cheap attention grabbing at the expensive of a real problem with Apple’s AirTags.
> AirTags are a very expensive way of stalking someone
I don't know your frame of reference in terms of what counts as expensive here, but an AirTag just $29 if bought individually or $25 if bought in a 4-pack. $25 would cover 2 drinks on a night out here (a major west coast US city) at best (and that's without accounting for tax+tip+etc.).
Plenty of stalkers out there are definitely willing to spend way more than just the cost of ~2 drinks, when it comes to stalking someone.
I agree overall that plenty of things in the story don't add up, but the AirTag cost imo isn't one of them.
Back in my cab driving days I would occasionally pick up women from a shelter (for medical appointments and whatnot) and some of the stories they told me about their stalker exes make a $30 investment basically nothing.
The amount of effort they would put into stalking is mind blowing.
Apple knows who owns any given tag, even if they don't know who located the tag, and an iPhone is required to set up the tag. If they hadn't thrown the tag away, looking up the associated ID would have been trivial. I'm not sure if Apple's system will let you pair a tag to a phone that isn't on a cellular network, but if not, that's yet another point of identity for a potential thief or stalker.
So the potential thief/stalker is using a cellular handset that can identify them on an account that can identify them to use a $25 tracker that can identify them. Or, they've stolen someone else's phone, assumed that person won't trigger the lost phone kill-switch in time for them to complete whatever task they've set out for themselves, paired a tag to the stolen phone (which I believe requires the account password and phone passcode to do, but it's been a while since I've done it), and then tracked the victim. It seems like a massive risk compared to buying a plain GPS tracker & pre-paid SIM, but then again, criminals don't tend to be the smartest.
I think the problem with saying something was made up is that it becomes blaming. I would hope people don't vote you down because I think that blame is justified, because I questioned how it was presented, on Twitter. I think if it was something related by a friend or close acquaintance to me, then I'd believe it. That it is being disseminated on Twitter in the way it was, I have a tendency to suspect there is more to the story, given I have no idea if I can trust the individual making the claim.
This seems pretty obvious that this will happen and not necessarily something that is surprising or adds to the story, other than them claiming it happened to them and horrible that is...and maybe an indication everyone should make a big deal out of it.
The interesting thing is that I have seen multiple reports of this ( think this is is the third), but in every case, they have destroyed it, lost it, or thrown it away before hand - not given it to the police.
Apple can't tell who the devices is from signals in the wild, but they can figure out who it is if someone gives them the physical device. (Apple tracks the serial number of the device, and from what I understand, can provide purchaser/activator information based on the serial number).
At the very least, a report should be made. If something does happen, at least there's a paper trail and they would be highest on the list of suspects. Could be used as evidence to get a restraining order as well.
If the person does indeed get near to the victim, then the police can actually do something since they are in violation of a court order.
In this situation you should work with a lawyer to have law enforcement discover the owner of the tracker as part of the process to achieve a civil restraining order. It's probably also doable pro se.
There isn't a clean path to obtaining that information merely by filing a police report or having a conversation with an officer. I would think officers would point you to civil court, but if they don't, it wouldn't take much to discover the process.
And to continue on that story, even though I gave them the location: "lack of ressources, we can't dispatch anyone at the moment". They never did anything afterwards.
Maybe that’s because none of these reports were actually true?
Honestly, AirTags invading on people’s privacy are the latest fad. And as with any story about the dangers of “Big Tech”, they make for good headlines. Only that nobody bothers to do some basic due diligence on the truthfulness of these reports in the first place. This one is littered with nonsensical facts that makes me not believe in this story for a second.
Which has nothing to do with the fact that there is indeed abuse potential with Apple’s AirTags.
I will (probably) destroy it too immediately. I have no idea why someone put airtag on my car, maybe they want to know location of my house, or want to know where I live?
There is, it's open source and works. I have have this running on my phone in the background and it has alerted me a few times like when my phone was in the locker at the gym and someones airtags was in a locker close to mine.
If you already knew that there was an app out there, maybe don't use absolutist sounding phrases like "they'll never know" just to come back and make defensive edits about how nobody out there knows about its existence when you yourself obviously knew about it.
Yes, i, android user, have to install an Apple app to know I'm being tracked by their devices. I, average android user, also do this proactively because I know some creep/car thief/angry customer/... might want to track me or my wife.
Nothing to see here, all totally normal and expected and I should be grateful that there is an app to defend myself proactively against such tracking. I should also do the same for Microsoft, Huawei, Samsung, Sony, ... tracking tags. If that eats my phone battery this is just a small price to pay to assure my daughter won't be kidnapped or my house broken in as the attacker conveniently knew I wasn't home.
May I suggest we also all proactively wear tinfoil helmets to ensure Tesla's 'level 5 self-driving cars' don't kill us? You know, totally not the responsibility of the manufacturer to make sure their products are safe for all.
There is at least one android app to list nearby airtags. The one I found requires you to manually start a scan though so it doesn't alert to issues like this one. OTOH your own phone won't be used to track the air tag. OTOH half the people around you have an iPhone that will do it for them.
Care to link the one you found? Going through the play store these days is a nightmare of privacy problems and adware so if you already found a good one, that would be nice to mention.
That's going to be hard to hear when driving on the highway, also, the seems like a long time if someone is following you home from a bar.
I don't think there's any good way for Apple to fix this. On the other hand, it's been possible to do something similar for a long time, just not this easy, and at this price point. You could suggest that the AirTag disable tracking if it move along with the same phone for more than 15mins, but that's would mean you could steal anything with an AirTag and just keep moving for that period of time.
The Android app also isn't helpful, because many don't know that they need to install it, nor should they have to. Nor does it help say elderly people with no smartphone.
It's a product where Apple really didn't consider the real world implications. It's a neat device, and I'm sure it's well intended, but it's not fit for the world we're currently living in.
The only significant differences between AirTags and other devices are the fact that the victim’s phone might be used to transmit their own location and the widespread availability and marketing of AirPods compared to other devices. Apple can’t really do much about the latter (other than discontinuing them), but it seems like they could partially address the former by having each phone only transmit the location of non-owned AirTags a single time. This might not work if the victim’s car if in heavy traffic where phones in other cars can transmit the location, but it could at least help in cases where a single car is driving home alone.
> It's a product where Apple really didn't consider the real world implications. It's a neat device, and I'm sure it's well intended, but it's not fit for the world we're currently living in.
Exactly; it's unfortunate, but this sort of product should really be made illegal, just due to the many ways it can be misused.
This is incredibly inane. The components that make up a GPS tracker are both extremely cheap to produce, too general-purpose to be made illegal themselves, and can be put together to make a GPS tracker with zero technical skill, just by following any of a thousand YouTube videos. (I have one explaining how to make a GPS tracker out of an Arduino on my YouTube home page right now!)
All that making GPS tracking devices illegal would do is to eliminate all the positive-sum uses of the technology, while creating literally no additional barrier for people already willing to break the law.
It’s the “then only criminals will have guns” thing, but much more clear-cut, because while making your own gun from general-purpose input components requires a machine shop and an unethical person with machining skills to run it (and so making guns illegal really does make guns harder to acquire — though not impossible), making a GPS tracker from general-purpose input components can be done in your own living room without even a soldering iron.
I think there's some merit to the argument that making tracking products widely available has risks and downsides.
For one, there are some important differences between AirTags and a GPS tracker. AirTags don't use GPS (at least, on the tag itself). They're tracked by all the Apple devices around them, and they can use lower power (perhaps even passive) methods. A GPS tracker requires some kind of uplink. A tracker using GPS would need to be larger, and have a shorter battery life for a given size. AirTags are also innocuous to buy and not immediately alarming to see in someone's possession.
The argument that anyone is capable of building a GPS tracker in their living room seems unlikely to me. I think this is far beyond the capabilities of 99.9% of people (although it's a fairly straightforward and very fun project for people interested in Arduino).
All this said, I am mostly in agreement that the arguments against AirTags seem fairly weak. Especially because I assume Apple has a way to easily determine who placed the AirTag, and that they would face serious consequences.
Except they clearly did consider it? And made many countermeasures, from beeping loudly after separation, to releasing an open source first party app on the dominant competing platform to show what is going on.
If anyone provides a device? It’s also traceable to the owner/person watching it.
None of these things are possible/done for the myriad of GPS trackers out there. Apple has made it very risky and frankly dumb to use them for this purpose.
Can’t Apple just provide an option that lets you force “stalking” air tags to beep on command? Seems like doing that could essentially solve this whole class of it’s tracking me but I can’t find it stories.
The flip side of this is that if you don’t have an iPhone, you don’t have anything participating in the mesh network that’s required for the AirTag to operate. Of course, someone else’s iPhone could still pick it up and relay the position, but this becomes considerably less likely in a scenario where the adversary is attempting to track a vehicle.
If tracking the vehicle to the destination is the goal it's fairly likely someone with an iPhone will pass by the vehicle at some point. Especially in an apartment complex or public shared parking.
The vast majority of abductions of children are by family. Same with other crimes against children. People they know are far more dangerous than people they don’t.
The predators aren’t hiding in the bushes, they are already in the house.
shark attacks in pools never happen where as abduction by strangers does.
Just because something happens at a lower frequency than something else doesn't mean we shouldn't protect against it or that it is not a danger to a particular person.
The fact that most abductions happen by family members has nothing to do with OPs point.
This is some kind of bias, the reason this is true is because it’s far easier for those people to abduct a child whose habits they know well. Now that the technology to track anyone is far easier to come by, maybe that will change.
No, that is not the reason. Most children are abducted in some kind of custody dispute, by someone who believes that they already have some kind of rights over the child.
Human trafficking is a huge problem even in America. This includes many children sold for sex. They often find and groom victims online now though, so yes, perhaps they aren't hiding in the bushes.
I think they do. It's more, which should you fear more: your bath tub or someone rampaging in the street with a knife? The statistics say you should be far more afraid of your bath tub, there is a decent chance it will be your cause of death. The 'stranger' in the street is about as likely as lottery odds.
So when it comes to children, abuse at home is several (if not many) magnitudes more likely than a stranger trying to track and abduct your children.
At the risk of being offensive, it does not matter if you are in downtown SF - stop being afraid of the homeless and black people and assuming that they are more likely to harm you than someone you know. That statistics are not with you there.
From that, assuming their data is correct, for every one person that falls in a bathtub and then drowns, there are 5 that are killed via assault with sharp object. The latter includes premediated and not, the number of those from a 'rampage' would be a fraction.
So, if you change the side of street you are walking on to avoid walking near someone homeless out of fear they would go on a random stabbing rampage, and if you do not also have traction stickers attached to your bathtub, then you are exhibiting rational irrational fear.
> stop being afraid of the homeless and black people
I'm not afraid of homeless and black people, I'm afraid of clinically insane people. The kind which are not legally responsible for their actions.
And why did you pick "Assault by sharp object: 1,805" instead of "Assault by firearm: 10,801" or just "Assault: 16,765"? Maybe because that changes the odds from 1 vs 5 to 1 vs 50.
Sorry, that was overly provocative and arguably unjustifiably personal. I apologize. The point is that the statistics do not back up many fears.
> And why did you pick "Assault by sharp object: 1,805" instead of "Assault by firearm: 10,801" or just "Assault: 16,765"?
The example was a 'stabbing rampage', that was specifically to try and find the number of knife attacks in the US resulting in fatality, and out of those number where someone is randomly attacking people in public.
Overall, we are still dealing with pretty small numbers whether it's 1 vs 5 or 1 vs 50 (50x improved chance of winning the lottery is still nearly negligible odds). In the case of knife attack, based on these numbers, it would be at most 1 in 5.
The ultimate point is the statistics do not back up many of these fears. For example in response to an actual knife rampage I observed a lot of chatter about getting a concealed carry permit etc.
These same statistics show that assault by firearm is way more likely than by knife, and having more guns around is more likely to have examples where they are used. Hence, the irrational fear of a knife rampage is prompting people to carry a gun, which then dramatically increases the chance of an accidental shooting in their own household, suicide, and/or assault where that person gets into a confrontation they could have walked away from but instead had road rage and shot someone else.
Household, accidental shootings are relatively common, and suicide is exceptionally common, yet all that seems like less risks for firearm possession compared to needing the firearm to actually protect yourself from a knife attack, which is at most 5 times more likely than slipping and drowning in your own bathtub.
In the case of a bathtub, it's common and does not have the same confirmation bias we get from headlines of rampages, yet it poses a fairly similar danger to you as someone going on a knife rampage.
> The point is that the statistics do not back up many fears
There is a saying, Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics. Or "tell me what you want the conclusion to be and I'll tell you what statistical method to apply to the data". Also known as "torturing the data".
In the case of bathtub fatality, the majority of them are either very young or very old (kind of like covid):
> Drowning occurred most often in a bath tub for persons under 1 year of age and for adults aged 85 and over
If you adjust for age, that will make the bathtub/knife odds even worse.
But on a more meta level, how do you feel about Nassim Taleb. My sense is that you don't like him, because he talks a lot about so called "irrational logic of fearing terrorists more than bathtubs", and he calls this behaviour extremely rational.
I do not know much about Nassim Taleb. According to the wiki article on him his main thesis is that societies are more robust when they plan for and can handle black swan events. Please let me know if that is an incorrect impression.
To me that sounds somewhat different from irrational rational fears and also as somewhat reasonable. Irrational rational fear attributes greater danger to an unlikely event due to ignorance of how unlikely that event is. While Nassim Taleb's thesis (AFAIK) acknowledges the events are extremely unlikely but posits a system is more robust if such events can be handled. That seems to make some sense to me, but I would be concerned if such counter measures become prohibitive. For example, I suspect we no longer need to restrict knives on airplanes. No plane is ever again going to be hijacked with just a knife. We should though continue screening for bombs and plastic explosives, an attacker would be more likely and be more interested to depressurize the cabin and try to crash the plane and kill those onboard via a bomb than to hijack it (where everyone now knows they should rush a hijacker no matter the cost).
A good analogy, a computer system that can handle errors that occur in 0.001% of cases is more robust than one that cannot. Particularly with large numbers thrown at it. The contra-point though is that real life is not large numbers, worrying more about a 0.001% probability compared to a 0.1% probability is generally misguided, particularly when a person believes that 0.001% probability is more like 10%.
Though, that is where conditional probability kicks in and here is why I agree regarding "damn lies and statistics". Hence, even if the odds are 1 vs 500 or 1 vs 5000, these are all negligibly frequent events for the average person. Though, if you are over 85, in a bathtub, perhaps on some new medication, recently recovered from a surgery, and there is nobody else at home, then I would suspect odds of dying in that bathtub are far greater than they would be otherwise.
As another example, it's kinda the same for Texas Hold'em, the odds of a 4 of a kind are generally low - but if the first 3 flop cards are all the same rank, the odds of someone having a 4 of a kind suddenly become reasonably quite good.
So, I think the interesting conversation is around conditional odds and when as humans we accurately recognize those conditions. For example, many cyclists ride to the extreme right of roads fearing getting hit from behind. The statistics for that do not support that behavior, it's really rare for a driver to hit a cyclist from behind ("eyes on the road"). It turns out the majority of those kinds of collisions occur at night and when the cyclist has no lights on their bicycle. Meanwhile that misconception of the danger puts the cyclist in a more dangerous location, the further to the edge of the road the less visible from turning traffic (the real danger to cyclists), greater danger from road debris, pot holes, bad pavement, and getting doored and pedestrians popping out from between cars and getting doored (tl;dr, it's much safer for a cyclist to be a couple feet into the lane than immediately adjacent the gutter). Though the irrational rational fear has that person riding next to the gutter, putting them in greater overall danger.
A bathtub you have control over may not be especially risky. The stat itself probably includes unsupervised kids, elderly, etc. Take those out because they don't apply to me.
You don't have as much control over strangers. And any given homeless person may or may not be judged as especially risky - that's up for the person there to decide. There's also little downside to just avoiding them entirely.
To me, it seems like it can be completely rational.
Individual events don't happen with dice like you seem to be implying.
I'm not quite implying that events happen with dice. More that if we knew the true frequency, we would gauge there to be far less risk (because there is actually far less risk).
Meanwhile, you don't fully control if you slip in a bathtub, a person ascribes much less risk to the bathtub than they should (due to lack of confirmation bias and lack of knowledge of the risk stats, bathtubs are surprisingly riskier than you think; but if you put it in the context of what is the chance of a fall, you would start to think the odds are not that bad - and any serious fall with that many hard surfaces around can easily have a very bad outcome. So it's more consider the risk of any fall, now compare that to the statistics of 'stranger danger'. The point is that everyday common events, your car, your bathtub, your daily commute, can pose magnitudes more risk than even the shadiest of homeless person).
Apple's app requires you to scan manually, it doesn't warn you if you're being stalked. You'll need something like Air Guard to get similar notifications.
Did you read the reviews ? Maybe because the bad guys do not want you to use it. You need to underestand that there are a lot of people paid to have an opinion on the internet.
Some of the (dumb) reviews don't change the fact that Apple's app requires you to perform manual scans and doesn't alert you if you're being tracked. Only iPhones do that.
"Of sexual abuse cases reported to law enforcement, 93% of juvenile victims knew the perpetrator: 59% were acquaintances. 34% were family members. 7% were strangers to the victim.
>this morning while I was asleep I had someone close to me check my car and they found it stuck on the underside of my front passenger wheel well. I wish he took pics before he threw it away
throw away individually identifiable piece of evidence instead of calling the police, ok
Trusted figure eliminating evidence of a plot against you while you sleep (and possibly nudging you to not call the police, who knows!) sounds like a villain right out of a detective story, but it would be a very silly move to not clear in advance how AirTags work and whether the victim uses an iPhone (which can be easy even if they are not that close).
Not impossible (e.g., an impulsive boyfriend or familiar admirer with control issues naively wanting to find out where she goes or purposefully scare her as part of larger big-brain ploy), but depending on her car an AirTag-assisted car theft attempt could be more likely: https://www.yrp.ca/en/Modules/News/index.aspx?newsId=167fa5b...
Throw away individually identifiable piece of evidence instead of calling the police, ok
I wouldn't consider it particularly wise to assume the police will automatically be your friend, in this situation. Ask yourself who may have planted the device, after all.
(I don't think law enforcement would use AirTags, actually. But I'm just saying -- on general principle).
So I and my wife both have AirTags. Every time we take a walk together, we both get notifications that there's an unknown AirTag with us (each others'). You can pause these notifications for just one day, which means we get notified every single day.
Does anyone know how to disable this for specific known AirTags?
Yeah, it feels to me that Apple went too far with their anti-stalker provisions. I believe much of the problem could be eliminated if there was some sort of central filter to the alerts. Phone says to the filter "I see an unknown air tag ID# xxxxx". So long as there is another phone that says "I see a known air tag ID# xxxxx" no alert is triggered. Only when no device claims the tag as known would the phone speak up.
So long as somebody nearby knows the tag it's almost certainly either someone with you or someone simply moving in the same direction and nearby. If it has been planted you'll find out when the planter moves away from you.
When an AirTag is assigned to an iCloud account, and a device (say an iPhone) is with you, then you shouldn't get these messages. But if one of you didn't bring their phone but, for example, the keys, you will get these messages, yeah.
You are worried about someone who physically has access to your phone and knows your passcode tracking you? That is not the problem being discussed here.
I know it's not being discussed, I am introducing it as an adjucent attack vector that is already an issue with Google Maps' location sharing. Google counters it by sending periodic emails to remind you that you're sharing your location, and with whom.
Being snooped on by someone with physical access to your device, as well as the opportunity to use it while unlocked (passcode or not) happens more times than one might think! It could be anything from a creepy colleague, or an insecure romantic partner.
Are your Apple accounts in a Family Sharing group? I have no idea if that would affect this feature, but my wife and I also have AirTags on our keys and we travel together plenty and have never received this notification.
Thanks for this suggestion. We are not in a Family Sharing group, so I’ll look into whether this helps. I also might just move her AirTag to my account to track her keys, since if she’s misplaced her keys there’s a good chance she’s misplaced her phone as well.
You can. Disconnect it from one person's iCloud, connect it to the other. We did it with our cat's AirTag when I got a newer iPhone, so we could use the more accurate location.
Especially given the existence of Find My, which makes it easy to set up phone tracking so we can "stalk" each other. Apparently it's okay to track wife's phone but it's not okay to track my wife's backpack.
As someone who has been around message boards and forums since the late 90’s one thing that has really surprised me is the degree to which people have started taking first person online stories seriously.
Reddit of course is full of them, as is Twitter and lots of other places. Meanwhile the incentives to successfully tell a just-so story that goes viral have never been higher. Youtube money, GoFundme, influencer opportunities, etc.
The post we are all responding to is super low effort, not even a photo, and not even a first person account. Her “friend” found an AirTag and threw it away.
Meanwhile there’s a GoFundme link right on the profile.
I stopped when I read that. Terrified woman stays with friend after being alerted to a tracking device on her car. While she sleeps, the friend searches the car and discards a tracking device. Right. And everyone else here treating it like that is fine.
Why does the thief bother to track your car back to your house to steal later? Why not just drive around the residential areas where the cars are parked and just choose one at the time you want to do the theft?
So that the thief can learn your schedule and when you're home or using the car and can plan in advance to avoid being caught. Among other things, information about the exact location of an expensive vehicle over multiple days is very valuable information when you're trying to steal said vehicle.
Not a car thief but it's an interesting question. Maybe given the VIN and a few hours/days you can lookup and make a correct key for that type of car. So the tag is placed when the VIN is collected and the theft is smooth with a valid key.
In Amsterdam I once met an Eastern European career criminal who followed people driving home after work hours and waited for them to get into the shower. Then he'd pick their front door lock and take the keys.
Unrelated, he also had a room in his apartment set up to grow weed, with some serious climate control and artificial lighting. He was dealing this pot.
He had no papers or permit to stay... what crazy folk.
Pretty bold. I don't know much about Amsterdam, but I've heard burglars in the USA are usually very careful not to break into a house when people are home, as the consequences are much more severe compared to burglarizing an unoccupied house.
That was the article where buried in the text it admits that there were 5 cases that police knew about. Just 5. Looks more like clickbait to me. For the price of an airtag I could just use a GPS tracker with LTE uplink, and not worry about Apple being able to tell the police who the tag was activated for.
Surely Apple can use information from their Find My account to figure out who the AirTag was registered to. Even if the tag has been destroyed. That should be trivially easy, right?
>this morning while I was asleep I had someone close to me check my car and they found it stuck on the underside of my front passenger wheel well. I wish he took pics before he threw it away
If I found a tracking device on the car of someone close to me, I certainly wouldn't throw it away without showing them and insisting that they go to the police. Why would they just throw it away?
I'm trying really hard not to come to this conclusion, but the tweet thread doesn't make any sense.
>I didn’t wanna go home, so I spent the night somewhere and just said I’d figure it out in the morning.
So they stayed somewhere and said they would figure it out in the morning. Ok, that's reasonable.
>this morning while I was asleep I had someone close to me check my car
How did they tell someone to search the car while they were asleep? They said they would figure it out "in the morning" when they were awake. Some time between deciding to figure it out in the morning and waking up, they told someone to search their car?
If it didn't happen, being asleep while someone searched your car would be the reason why they threw the device away without your permission. If you were awake when they threw it away, that would be a lot more difficult to believe.
she drives home and gets these notifications, which clearly spook her, which is why she made extra turns etc.
she sends a few messages to friends and/or family, because she's freaking out about it, but goes to sleep because she doesn't know what to do
one of these friends or family comes by in the morning, sees her car and checks it out before ringing her door bell
the given facts are quite believeable, though i doubt there is a human trafficing relation which she seems to think. its more likely a potential stalker, upset boyfriend or similar.
What friend would check the car, find a tracker and then immediately get rid of it and not even take pictures of it instead of showing her or just calling the police themselves though?
What's somewhat plausible is that "the person close to her" put the tag there in the first place. They'd have a good reason to "get rid of it" in that case.
That's believable, but it contradicts "this morning while I was asleep I had someone". Her asking someone to search her car before she went to sleep to "figure it out in the morning" is more believable.
It’s a photo of a generic AirTag, not the actual tag that was found—that one was apparently thrown away, which a few folks here (including me) find a little strange.
"Of sexual abuse cases reported to law enforcement, 93% of juvenile victims knew the perpetrator: 59% were acquaintances. 34% were family members. 7% were strangers to the victim."
A ... a net negative? Okay, like maybe I get that some people abuse this thing and maybe that's bad and maybe ten extra people got their car stolen this year or something although even that is questionable given that Tile already existed. But net negative? All the utility from all the people that found all the things they found this year with AirTags is counteracted, is wiped away by... what?
Well, I'm blind and I use an AirTag to find my cat. I would rather not just buy another cat. I get a lot of utility from knowing if he's inside or outside when I go to bed. This is one trivial example of millions of people every day using millions of AirTags to do small but useful things. That utility aggregates.
Using your logic we should also ban cars because cars create the novel attack vector of being able to transport someone against their will discretely in the trunk, which clearly will increase kidnappings. After all, lowering the bar for kidnapping seems like a bad tradeoff, doesn't it?
So what is your suggestion, just let bad situations happen to you? Regardless of if the police actually do anything, it's important to have a paper trail of things so that you point to them if you ever have to end up in court.
True if further actions can be taken. When my house was burglarized the police came and investigated and shrugged their shoulders, but their police report was instrumental in filing an insurance claim.
I do, and this is an appropriate situation to call them about, regardless of your race. There are problems with the police, to be sure, but this is not a situation where someone is getting beaten up (or worse) over a traffic stop or misidentification during the commission of a crime.
Cops have been known to push stalking, domestic violence, rape and similar cases under the carpet or, even worse, abuse the contact information from the criminal complaint to stalk the victims themselves (see [1], [2] or whatever turns up at Google for "police officers stalking women"). Not to mention the organized denials of service that regularly crop up as "backlog of rape kits discovered" headlines.
Women have all kinds of valid reasons to stay as far away from cops as they can, women of color, queer/nb/trans women even more.
Some PDs have changed procedures and established special, often female-led, teams to deal with cases involving such sensitive scenarios... but they're not many to begin with.
Is this the rule or the exception? No doubt there are reported failures, but is that the average experience for a reporter (even accounting for race, gender, etc.) of a stalking or other similar personal security concern? Stories such as these are useful for motivating the public and our government to fix the problems, but they have a side effect of discouraging people from taking useful action where it would not be harmful.
We should be giving our most helpful advice here; let’s not make people panic unnecessarily.
The fact of the matter is that Apple will only provide the identities of AirTags owners to law enforcement officers in the course of legitimate investigation work; in the interest of privacy, they won’t give them out to just anyone who asks. So if you want to get help, getting LE assistance is practically the only way to go.
> but is that the average experience for the typical reporter of a stalking or other similar personal security concern?
In Germany, it is estimated that 300.000 (!) stalking cases happen each year, not even 20.000 get reported to the police - and only 1 % of these (!!!) ends up in a conviction.
Unfortunately, as with all attempts at estimating why crimes are not reported, data is scarce - the general consensus seems to be a mistrust in police and the court system (either that the case gets ignored, that proof is insufficient or that personal data ends up at the offender - I personally was exposed by incompetent cops at court after filing a criminal complaint for racism against a local Nazi, fwiw), and a fear of attackers escalating their behavior.
No, AirTags/the find my network are designed to make it impossible for apple to track anything about a device on the network. If you actually provide the AirTag to police, then they can get the serial number, from which they can get the associated account.
Assuming that whomever put the AirTags their used their own actual account.
What would police investigators possibly have to gain from making this up?
It’s not even an outlandish claim. Knowing the technology and the region this force covers it sounds perfectly reasonable to me that a least some thieves are experimenting with this technique.
Correct, this is how Apple’s “find my” network works. Devices that don’t have their own GPS can still be on the network because they piggy-back off of nearby Apple devices.
Apple devices do notify users if there’s an unknown AirTag following them around.
It works like Tile and other previous Bluetooth trackers - it relies on a network of devices that can pick up the signal from the tracker and phone it back to the owner/Apple to know the location.
With the major difference that taking part in the Tile network is opt-in (you have to install an app) while taking part in Apple's Find My network is forced on iOS users (there is a way to opt-out, but 99.9% of iOS users are unaware of it).
The feature set definition of airtag = "tracking the airtag" and this requires a phone home which is done by using any iPhone (or is is any apple) device.
The find my network is designed to ensure that apple - or any malicious actor will complete access to apple's internal networks - cannot track any device
Can someone just put any random AirTag on someone's car and have it trigger alerts on nearby iphones? Does one have to do something to activate it first?
Curious if all one needs to do is get one and stick it on a randos car to cause psychological distress without even pairing with a phone or otherwise registering/activating the thing.
I'm pretty sure it needs to be activated to an Apple account.
But seriously, people here way overthink things. If a random sicko wants to cause someone psychological distress there are a million ways that they can unfortunately do so that don't involve elaborate technology.
> If a random sicko wants to cause someone psychological distress there are a million ways that they can unfortunately do so that don't involve elaborate technology
This doesn't strike me as elaborate at all.
The fact is the largest generation living today is more engaged with the world via their smartphones than their physical surroundings. AirTags seem uniquely well suited to that reality, with Apple delivering notifications on the attackers' behalf and all.
It strikes me as dependent on the person being griefed being in the Apple ecosystem and the person doing the griefing using a device that is at least potentially tied to their IRL identity. Not saying it's not possible but seems at least an edge case.
And if they want to track, that ability was already available, for the same price as an AirTag, and without the annoying habit beeping loudly or notifying the victim that they are being tracked.
Between reports of AirTags being used to enable auto theft and stalk targets, it is pretty obviously a very handy criminal tool. Apple definitely needs to do something about this for both ethical and reputational reasons.
the beeping if separated from owner after 8-24hrs is a bit helpful, but likely not noticeable if attached to the outside of a car. This is also a pretty big window in which to pull off your crime.
I'd suggest that all tracking come with logging of the original owner's Apple device and it's location. The handy general use case would be to find your phone with an airtag (e.g., on your keys) and another phone (e.g., friend in the group). The obvious deterrent to criminals is that their target and the police will have their device ID and location. They might still get away with it, but would need effectively a burner Apple phone & location history separate from their real device.
I think this reverse tracking would also raise concerns
- keys with airtag attached are lost, thief (perhaps opportunist) can find the home/car they belong to
- stalker types can steal an airtag from a water bottle, handbag, or whatever, and find the owner's home
Not an iPhone user but AFAIK the lost phone scenario was already covered with even pre-airtag "Find my..." since you could log into iCloud web interface on any other device and use that
Perhaps it is just announced that it is logged and subject to police search.
IDK, just trying to think of ideas for a tough situation, but when a primary use case becomes enabling property and violent sex crimes ...
Heck, I was earlier wishing for tags like this that worked better, more trackable and a lot smaller for a variety of uses, including embedding in products. Which would make them all better crime tools. Ugh. Sociopaths really do ruin it for everyone.
Reading that, it sounds like a situation to call/drive to/or otherwise get the attention of the police. Attaching a tracking device to your vehicle is a significant indication of malicious intent. It's a potentially life threatening situation and should be treated as such.
Sounds nice but how it would be possible to prove that owner of the device attached it to vehicle? You would need to have video recording with clearly identifiable person, otherwise owner can simply say that she lost AirTag and someone did a dumb joke and attached it to the car.
Arguably AirTags raised the awareness that you can pretty trivially plant a tracker on someone's bag or car. But given that the technology exists, I'm not sure what everyone outraged expects to happen. Being able to track things and people (with their permission of course) is actually genuinely useful. So it's not reasonable (and of course ultimately unworkable with respect to nefarious purposes) to block this technology.
It’s about the logo on the device. It drives clicks and ad impressions when you write about apple so people are influenced to feel more outrage about them.
Smaller than a car keyfobAbsolutely tiny at just 56 x 37 x 12.9mm, it can fit almost anywherePlus it weighs almost nothing! (35g)
And the battery lasts a month.
On the Apple help site, it says you can disable an AirTag that is following you:
> To disable the AirTag and stop sharing your location, tap Instructions to Disable AirTag and follow the onscreen steps.
If I’m understanding this correctly, this means you can defeat this type of stalking easily. On the other hand, this makes AirTags less useful for tracking stolen items, as presumably the thief will disable it.
Or if the thief has an iPhone they will be notified that the AirTag is tracking them. This is not an anti-theft device and anyone who thinks so will be disappointed. It is a device for finding your own stuff that you have misplaced or forgotten about.
The impression most people have is that this is highly available, small, easy to use, cheap, and there is plausible deniability in the intention of purchasing one.
Now, there may be other solutions with some or all of those qualities to varying degrees, but the simple fact that the impression is popular necessarily means that it will see usage in cases where the perpetrator would otherwise not have committed the act.
In other words, "this isn't new technology" is a true but not terribly relevant sentiment.
It is indeed an impression problem. Doing this with LoRa for a lower price has been possible for a very long time and you don't even need a large network for that due to the significant range. Basic triangulation built in to friendly software using existing radios and then simply getting closer with a hand-held transceiver isn't exactly hardcore hacking either. And with the low entry cost and non-detectability by practically any target it's a way worse issue than AirTags or Tiles could ever be.
What I was writing about isn't theory, but is used in the form of pet and wildlife trackers. Networks already exist. Most of the older ones are usable as well using UHF trackers. None of this is new, it's just that 'the bad guys' mostly get caught using bulky SMS-based GPS location transmitters and now AirTags.
What is probably true, at least based on the few anecdotal stories that have made the rounds, is that the introduction of AirTags may well have planted the thought in some people that "Oh, it's pretty easy to track someone/something with this cheap device." One can also imagine people making up stories (not saying that's the case here though it's very possible) and people planting a tracker for the lulz to see what would happen.
To what? A point of sale? AirTags can be tracked to where they were sold as well in the same way.
Some countries might have some sort of construction where you need to provide some form of identification but that only applies to the most obvious avenues to buy a SIM-card for the public. It's not like the shady MFA-farms with the 100-modem appliances are fed by a person actually buying 100 SIM-cards without getting caught or something like that... (and then there is false identification which often is a crime by itself but misbehaving persons might not really care about that)
AirTags in this case are just blamed because they are actually detectable by normal users, and that makes it an 'impression' problem, not a new problem.
Good to know. We don't have burner phones over here, and can't verify, however I thought their SIM cards were locked so that they couldn't be used on other devices.
The burner phone would be a better option IMO. Phones can be traced with their IMEI so if before or after using it with an anonymous SIM it's/was used with a personal SIM, it will be easy to associate the phone owner's name with the anonymous SIM.
That app requires you to click a button every time you think you're being followed. Then it'll scan and report any results.
It won't warn you of an AirTag someone attached to your car, unless you make it a habit to constantly press "scan" all day.
AirGuard (https://github.com/seemoo-lab/AirGuard) can do this for you, at the cost of battery life for having something scan for Bluetooth signals in the background all day. It's silly and honestly kind of sad that Apple's app doesn't provide this functionality.
Perhaps Google should add this functionality to Play Services. They already have an API capable of running Bluetooth background scans constantly in the form of the COVID contact tracing API, so the technology is nearly there already.
I may have been too terse. In more detail, if you want to know if someone tagged your car there is no point in running the scanner when you are out of range of your car. You only need to start scanning when you get in range.
If you start scanning then and find that there are no tags, you only need to keep scanning if there are people around who might be able to sneak a tag on while you are there without you noticing.
Once you get in and start driving you can stop scanning unless your threat model includes people tagging your car in the middle of your trip.
Sure, but this is clearly better than the situation for other existing technologies which are cheaper and can be used to the same ends.
I don’t deny that this behavior is bad, but the anti-Apple sentiment here is a bit strange given they provide mitigations unlike traditional gps tracking companies
There is now an app called „Tracker Detect“ from Apple (for Android) to search for AirTags around you. It hasn’t the ability to use AirTags like on the iPhone but at least you can find one that has been left around you.
That app, which isn't available everywhere (why?), requires users to perform manual scans. It doesn't warn users that they're being tracked like iPhones do.
They actually do start an audible alarm after being separated from their owner, starting sometime between 8 and 24h after separation. I don’t know the interval though.
Has anyone got the same kind of alerts with AirPods 3/Pro? This is a recurrent issue while hanging out with SO, friends and family and the only devices that we believe carrying are those AirPods.
I think so, it depends on the firmware version and if you activated it as a 'thing' I think. I have one pair that does it and my significant other has one that doesn't but it's not being used as actively and not in Find My either.
I suspect this has a lot to do with apple raising awareness of tracking capabilities. I'd love to know if other forms of this attack increase as a result.
When tweets or news articles like this get popular, I can't help thinking this has a Streisand effect. Crazy stalker people who didn't know they could do this now know they can.
Number of times I've had a true positive alert from Apple's new device tracking notifications: 0
Number of times I've had false positives due to intermittent connectivity issues with my airpods or from my partner using mine: over a dozen. I'm this close to disabling all of these features
Everything else? I had my iPad in the backpack I was wearing get left behind. Same with my AirPods. I’ve turned those things off and just put an AirTag in my backpack.
That said, I already had two extra air tags since I got a four-pack instead of buying two separately.
This is a general problem with proactive alerts related to rare events. How many "OMG, you're separated from $X" alerts am I willing to put up with for the one legitimate "You just left $X in the restaurant!" alert.
Help an ignorant person. Wouldn’t this kind of alert let a thief know that whatever they stole has an airtag attached to it? I know it’s probably not marketed as an anti-theft device, but isn’t this anti-stalking measure also a ”pro-theft” measure?
It is a much more likely and sensible (for the bad guy) outcome though.
There are so many more people out there that want to rob someone than want to rape someone. Especially when the target is a stranger.
it might have been law enforcement. they might be using this to track potential drunk drivers (i am not saying you were drunk driving or anything) but i do know there was a few articles on it this year, here is one i found
or it could be worse and you could have a unhinged stalker on your hands. both are intrusive.
but it’s hard to say, is there a way to find out the owner or look at log files to see what op or which provider is accessing the location details of a tag? i know about these tags but i’ve never used one before so understanding is fairly fresh
It's baffling how Apple on the one hand claims that user privacy is the most important thing to them, but on the other hand they built an anonymous tracking network that can be abused for many nefarious purposes, and everyone who has an iPhone was made a part of the network whether they like it or not.
There are so many things that are questionable about Airtags. Another way to abuse it would be for example, you could place an Airtag somewhere on an iPhone users driveway, and use it to determine when they arrive home by checking for pings. The victim won't even see a notification, since the Airtag is stationary.
Preventing attacks like this would require the victim to know where to opt-out of Apple's tracking network, a setting that Apple hid by giving it a confusing name ("Network & Wireless") and shows a warning that your phone won't work properly anymore if you try to turn it off.
(Also, turning that setting off presumably also turns off the Airtag warning? So you are trading one risk against another?)
The police could get a subpoena for Apple to divulge the iCloud account, credit card, and phone number of the owner of this AirTag. Using air tags to conduct illegal activity is stupid.
Huh, right, with all the talk about the privacy preserving location sharing, I missed that Airtags have a serial number that Apple can look up.
However, my main criticism (that Apple customers were not asked whether they want to participate in a network that may indirectly reveal their location) still stands.
But anytime it sends a ping, it reveals the fact that an iOS device is near. If it's a public place where lots of different people pass by, then that information doesn't identify anyone. But if you place an Airtag at a private location, eg. near someones home, you can use it to detect when the people living there get home.
Now maybe you don't worry about side channels like this, but I really think that it should be up to the individual user to decide whether they want to risk something like this or not.
It's quite telling that Apple does not ask people to opt-in to the Find My network, while every third party app needs explicit user permission for any kind of Bluetooth access.
> Another way to abuse it would be for example, you could place an Airtag somewhere on an iPhone users driveway, and use it to determine when they arrive home by checking for pings. The victim won't even see a notification, since the Airtag is stationary.
You can hide an arbitrary device near a victim's driveway and your choice of surveillance device is an Airtag? Come on.
GPS trackers designed to be magnet-attached to a car which report their location via cell signal cost ~$20 on Amazon. You then tend to need to pay for either a SIM card or a subscription to the device maker's service -- bringing you up to about the cost of an AirTag. These are much harder to detect, as you might imagine.
The Apple device does try to make itself less useful for abusive purposes. Nearby iPhones will notify you if there's an AirTag following you. Apple released an Android app to scan for them (manually -- it'd probably be nice if they released something that did the same passive scanning as iPhones get, but there's battery trade-offs there, and obviously most people won't have that app). AirTags will also beep if they're separated from their owner.
In fact, this is news we're hearing about because of the steps Apple took to make it harder to use these devices for bad purposes. The tweet author got a warning about the device following them.
It's tricky to make something that lets you find where you dropped your keys while walking the dog that can't also be used for nefarious purposes.