4 ms·
It's wishful thinking to believe that we'll be able to prevent anyone from tracking our car's movements. It's just too easy; even without devices like AirTags.
by riskable 5y ago
It's wishful thinking to believe that we'll be able to prevent anyone from tracking our car's movements. It's just too easy; even without devices like AirTags.
GPS trackers cost like $50 and are smaller than a cell phone (thicker though because they usually have a big battery/lots of batteries). They're weather/waterproof for the most part and have strong magnets to attach to the underside of a car where no normal person would ever look. They usually come with hard-wire options as well so you can tie into a car's 12V system (depending on the car this is either trivial/fast with a vampire tap or a time consuming activity).
These devices can't be easily detected from a cell phone; it's easier to physically look for them than to try to capture their wireless emissions (unless you have special equipment). Some of them just record their locations over time and don't even emit anything at all but there's probably some that can communicate these logs via Bluetooth but I'm not sure how common that is.
Using an AirTag to track someone's car is basically ridiculously lazy and risky... Too easy for the target to notice IMHO.
For reference, most of the folks on HN could probably make their own GPS tracker with their microcontroller of choice and a ~$5 GPS breakout. Could even get super fancy to have it transmit coordinates via LoRa and whatnot. You could even 3D print an enclosure for it that precisely matches the contours of the underside of a (specific) car so that it wouldn't be found unless you were super duper familiar with what the underside of your car looked like.
- nieve 5y agoAirTags are cheap, easy to acquire (the user may already own some), and come with a shiny app already integrated into a stalker or abuser's iPhone. They may not be as good as the real thing, but that won't stop them increasing the amount of tracking going on.