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Apple’s Find My network now offers new third-party finding experiences
- dhritzkiv 5y agoThe 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.
- floatingatoll 5y agoApple’s guidelines for whether or not you need to join MFi: https://mfi.apple.com/en/faqs.html 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.
- dhritzkiv 5y agoThanks for clarifying. That's good. Btw, your link didn't work for me, but I was able to find the page here: https://mfi.apple.com/en/faqs.html https://mfi.apple.com/en/faqs.html
- floatingatoll 5y agoFixed
- bigiain 5y agoI haven't tried this, but I did bookmark it in case I want to some weekend: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack 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."
- floatingatoll 5y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342504
- bigiain 5y agoYeah - probably where I bookmarked it form...
- Tsiklon 5y agoThis platform expansion looks like it’s laying the groundwork for the launch of Apple’s own long rumoured Tile competitor
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fireeyed 5y agoThis ^. Apple is not doing this out of benevolence. They don't to butt up against EU regulators and US courts. These are what I call "lawyer features"
- CharlesW 5y agoNo, 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.)
- stayaway4u 5y agoIt's a bit baffling that people are aware of anti consumer practices yet are fans. From the book "The Element", I imagine you(or anyone buying Apple) think you are a unique individual? Is it possible to snap out of it by using your rational, thinking part of your brain?
- gowld 5y agoThe rational thinking part of my brain says Apple provides more values for money than competing options, in the real world I live in.
- drcongo 5y agoThis comment is so confused that I'm really not sure what point you're trying to make beyond trying and failing to insult people. But just in case this wasn't just the cat walking across your keyboard: yes, it's possible to be a fan of something that provides infinitely more value than the alternative while simultaneously not being perfect. I can't think of anything that _is_ perfect and has fans.
- arprocter 5y agoReminded me of this recent HN submission - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342504
- m463 5y agoWhat I'm unclear about - does find my find and relay info about other people's stuff with your phone?
- CharlesW 5y agoYes, and your stuff through their devices, privately. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluetooth/ https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet...
- thitcanh 5y agoThis sounds cool, but does it make sense? “It uses just tiny bits of data that piggyback on existing network traffic so there’s no need to worry about your battery life, your data usage, or your privacy.” How do you piggyback on existing traffic without increasing it?
- ganoushoreilly 5y agoThere could be segments of the packet that are sending null data that can be leveraged.
- oneplane 5y agoFor example, by having a queue that only gets sent when you were going to send something anyway. When you have tiny bits of information, you're getting into the space where setting up the connection, starting the radios or getting them to an active power level is more taxing on the system than the actual sending of the payload. "No need to worry" doesn't equal 'zero bits transferred', but more like 'so little the impact is immeasurable to you'.
- PurpleFoxy 5y agoYou can queue and hold the data until your phone was already going to wake up to transfer something which reduces the wake ups. And it’s such a tiny amount of data being sent it probably wouldn’t total 1mb used in a year.
- 5y ago
- solarkraft 5y agoThe "find my" program is interesting to me because, for the first time (as far as I'm aware) it uses your devices to provide utility to Apple (to resell). They remain serious about privacy, but there's still something invasive about it I think they've never done before and always seemed implicitly positioned against.
- PurpleFoxy 5y agoIt provides value to Apple by providing value to users. As a user I want to find my lost stuff, Apple now lets me find my stuff without any real cost to me to do some passive scanning.
- solarkraft 5y agoAnd it does so using devices it does not own. In a hypothetical case I might be receiving value that is created using your device. I think that's okay, but fairly new ground for Apple (besides perhaps Wifi mapping?).
- yazaddaruvala 5y agoDoes it matter if they now know where my bike is parked, given that they already know where my phone is (i.e. I am) at all times? Meanwhile, I agree with you. It would be nice if Apple (or anyone) didn’t have this type of location information about me. However, it seems that ship has sailed and 5G + mesh networks will make it even more precise.
- nkellenicki 5y agoThey don't have that information about you. From the bottom of that page: "The Find My network extends these capabilities by locating missing devices even if they can’t or don’t connect to the internet. The Find My network is a crowdsourced network of hundreds of millions of Apple devices that use Bluetooth wireless technology to detect missing devices or items nearby, and report their approximate location back to the owner. The entire process is end-to-end encrypted and anonymous, so no one else, not even Apple or the third-party manufacturer, can view a device’s location or information."
- solarkraft 5y agoWhy 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).
- PurpleFoxy 5y agoWhy didn’t they release their version of airdrop for almost a decade after iPhones had it? Google just doesn’t seem to care about these conveniences.
- thitcanh 5y agoAren’t most android phones still able to share files via Bluetooth? I thought that was the whole shtick of android back when people actually compared the two platforms.
- pjmlp 5y agoYes they are.
- PurpleFoxy 5y agoComparing Bluetooth file share to airdrop might sound right on paper but the real world experience is very different. BT file share never worked consistently, was super slow, requires pairing the 2 devices together and a whole bunch of other annoyances. Android beam attempted to make the initial setup more convenient but I found it hard to get the phones lined up to initiate the transfer. Android now apparently has a direct airdrop clone which should work well
- Tsiklon 5y agoI’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.
- Raphaellll 5y agoI always wondered why it is possible to simply switch off a stolen phone. If it would require the PIN to switch it off you have the remaining battery time to find your phone.
- jaflo 5y agoEven if there were a PIN code to power off regularly, you could always force cut the power (like pressing power for 10s on a computer). I think this has to be possible by law for emergencies.
- szhu 5y agoRequiring a pin to switch it off might just cause someone to invent a device that can be inserted into the Lightning port to cause a shutdown without affecting the for-parts resale value of the phone. (For example, the device could cause a short circuit or apply an unexpected voltage, causing the power controller to shut off power to the device.) If the attacker has physical access, there's not much you can do.
- paxys 5y agoHere's an easier way - dump the phone in a freezer or ice pack.
- PurpleFoxy 5y agoIt would be better if iPhones embedded the airtag tech so on a flat battery, you would still have about a year of tracking time via airtags. Also the power button hold overrides the OS so you can shut down a frozen OS
- spideymans 5y agoWould love this on AirPods too
- bombcar 5y agoI wonder if they’ll integrate with things like Milwaukee’s OneKey
- dividedbyzero 5y agoI'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.
- kalleboo 5y agoThe linked Apple press release mentions (and links to) the Chipolo One Spot tag https://chipolo.net/en https://chipolo.net/en
- kube-system 5y agoI was super excited to buy it, but alas, it is not available yet.
- yazaddaruvala 5y agoSeems unlikely but I’m very hopeful about Apple sneakily creating the world's largest mesh network. Slowly, but surely adding functionality to the mesh. First, tiny packets piggy- backed through wifi/wireless carriers. Seamlessly sharing wifi passwords with friends. Next, peer-peer downloads without any network. Specifically for sharing public, location sensitive, and cacheable data through UWB without any network involved. e.g. Apple Maps, Weather, News, Offline Translations, Stocks. It seems even less likely Apple would expand the capability further, but maybe. I hope they don’t open up the API though, or do a crazy good job to bake in privacy. It’ll be too easy to track people near each other. I’d be ok with an app permissions model of Wifi/Data XOR Mesh Data Transfer.
- sitkack 5y agoI forget, does Apple and SpaceX get along? Seems obvious.
- mrkramer 5y agoThey have total control over their OS they can do whatever they want until they cross the line and someone sues them.
- joshka 5y ago> Seems unlikely but I’m very hopeful about Apple sneakily creating the world's largest mesh network. Slowly, but surely adding functionality to the mesh. In your hypothetical, I'm curious how you'd see this comparing to Amazon Sidewalk in size?
- Klwohu 5y agoI just don’t trust this type of thing. I know that supposedly there’s privacy and such. But I don’t trust big tech any more.
- paxys 5y agoOnce these tracking devices become small and cheap enough, secretly putting them on people is the next logical use case. This will be a stalker's dream come true.
- kondro 5y agoOne of the advantages of these being in Apple's ecosystem is that Apple will warn you if a tracking device that doesn't belong to you appears to be on your person.
- gnicholas 5y agoWow, just learned this has an anti-stalking feature, which notifies you if a tag has been found in your vicinity and appears to be following you around. [1] However, you only get a notification if you have an Apple device...so it's still possible to stalk someone using this technology if they're on Android. 1: https://youtu.be/kEhtM7YGSQc?t=656 https://youtu.be/kEhtM7YGSQc?t=656
- tamade 5y agoLooks like Tile is toast... Google/Nest acquisition perhaps