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‘I was just scared’: Apple AirTags lead to stalking complaints
- MBCook 5y agoThe scary thing about all this is people only know because Apple told them. How many have this problem and have no way of knowing?
- maxerickson 5y agoIt's one of those things where having mitigations on the widely used ones doesn't necessarily address the problem, and banning them entirely would probably only stop the casual use of them. I installed the Android app mentioned in the link a while ago and have never detected one (but it only detects them when actively running, and I have no reason to think anyone would be stalking me).
- MBCook 5y agoI agree it doesn’t really address the problem. But it brings visibility. And what that little bit of visibility shows is kind of terrifying.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoA simple concept with an incredibly difficult UX experience due to the existence of bad actors…
- Schiendelman 5y agoThis is excellent news; Apple designed these to be difficult to use to stalk someone, and those features are working. Hopefully this makes enough noise that Tile and GPS trackers are forced to implement similar features.
- sschueller 5y agoHow are airtags difficult to use to stalk someone with an android phone? Most don't know about it and don't install anything to prevent it.
- johnnypangs 5y agoIs the beeping not enough? I understand you don’t get a phone notification but it would be obvious as long as you’re near the tag.
- CubsFan1060 5y agoI believe the assertion was that someone could disable the beeping. However, I don't think a speaker is a requirement for Find My (I could be wrong). I don't think this has one: https://chipolo.net/en-us/products/chipolo-card-spot?cl=header https://chipolo.net/en-us/products/chipolo-card-spot?cl=head...
- maxerickson 5y agoOne of the listed features is that it reaches 105 dB.
- CubsFan1060 5y agoYou are right. I searched for 'speaker', which didn't work :(
- yeetaccount4 5y agoIt shouldn’t be too difficult to remove the beeper from the device, or disable it somehow.
- banana_giraffe 5y agoOnce you figure out how to open the thing (there are videos of how to do this online, it's not that hard to do it destructively, and once you know where to pry, pretty easy to do it without breaking any of the plastic that holds it closed), you can remove the speaker without even needing to break anything, it's just held in place with glue.
- kgwxd 5y agoI don't think any of this is excellent news. I'm sure the beep can be easily dismantled, we've been through that with the required camera sound nonsense. And security/privacy conscious people keep Bluetooth and NFC off for security/privacy reasons.
- herio 5y agoThere's articles all over the Internet on how to remove/disable the speaker on airtags. Doesn't look to hard to do either, no hardware sensing if this is the case so it just keeps on working.
- josephcsible 5y ago> no hardware sensing if this is the case so it just keeps on working. Even if there were, you could defeat it with just a resistor across the old speaker terminals.
- howNic3 5y ago
- everdrive 5y agoIt merely announces stalking, rather than preventing it, yes?
- vmception 5y agoIts not an ideal experience and I don't have the imagination to say what that is. 4 hours before notification if you have an iphone or the app on an android, which was lowered from the original plan
- aomix 5y agoI found the beep on lost (in this case, "lost" but not in a malicious way) tags to be pretty quiet or just not distinctive. While taking care of a friends cat with an airtag in the collar I kept thinking I was hearing a car down the block or maybe my PC was making a strange sound. Even knowing about the behavior and expecting to hear a beep I didn't pick up on it for several days.
- dhosek 5y agoWe have an AirTag in our dog's collar which is registered to my wife's AppleID¹ The first walk I took with the dog after she put it on the dog, I got a notification about an unidentified AirTag (which included her email address and I think phone number) following me. ⸻⸻⸻ 1. My single big complaint about AirTags is that they can't be shared between Apple IDs. Presumably that will be changed in a future software upgrade. Right now, only my devices can be used to find my things and her devices her things even though we can use Find My to find each others devices.
- conk 5y agoThis is my complaint too. There needs to be a way to share airtags with family members so they can also located missing items and they don’t get spammed with alerts. Without this option it’s just creating alert fatigue and will make users discredit real alerts.
- dhosek 5y agoThere is the ability to mute notifications from particular items so I don't get an alert every time I walk the dog.
- cptskippy 5y agoHow far/long does the owner have to be away from the AirTag before it can be detected by others? I noticed my neighbor had an AirTag on his dog one day and so we tried to detect it with my Android Phone using the App and never could. To the stalking concerns, if the AirTag doesn't think it's lost then it doesn't chirp. It also seems to remain undetectable to others. Does that mean someone could put an AirTag on someone and as long as they are close by it won't alert others?
- alkonaut 5y agoI’m stalking my whole family - with daily warnings to everyone - because apparently Apple hasn’t realized it can be useful to have keys shared within a family. We do all have iPhones connected to the same family account. This is a glaring omission.
- _g5q8 5y agoIf you're in the same family account there's a button to turn off those alerts. It worked for my family.
- matwood 5y agoThat must be new because it want there a few months ago.
- _g5q8 5y agoIt appears when you get the first alert - click to silence it, and choose "indefinitely." That option only appears for Family devices.
- alkonaut 5y agoTurning off the alarms would be a great start (they already added that?). What I really want is shared tags though, i.e that my wife can search our house keys and not just me. They are our house keys and everything else is extremely integrated in iOS so it feels weird to not be able to share the AirTag.
- olliej 5y agoThis is the most confounding thing for me as well. There are plenty of times having a single shared tag is what you want. But you either have one person able to find the item and one person getting stalker alerts, or both people getting both. [edit: expand “both” as necessary to include the entire family :) ]
- seanalltogether 5y agoSurely this means google needs to react to this and add native Airtag support to Android to detect this behavior?
- romanzubenko 5y agoA month ago, almost everyone in my family received "unknown accessory detected with you" alert on our iPhones. It was scary, and we spent hours looking for an Airtag in every crevice of the car, and checking every bag we had. Couldn't find anything. After extensive googling, we found numerous reports online about AirPods Pro most likely having a bug alerting their owners about "unknown accessory". If it's true, and firmware had a bug, Apple was probably in a weird position of not being able to publicly acknowledge it, to avoid potentially giving a false sense of security to folks who actually had the real alerts. For us the alert never reoccured, and FindMy was erroring out when we clicked on "get more info about the device", so most likely it was a bug. [edit] Reddit thread with other similar possible bug reports: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphonehelp/comments/q3n1e5/dont_own_airtag_got_unknown_accessory_detected/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iphonehelp/comments/q3n1e5/dont_own...
- jmkb 5y agoIt sounds like carrying Apple hardware may be the only decent way to detect an unwelcome Airtag. Are there any Android apps that monitor bluetooth traffic for possible stowaways?
- mrpf1ster 5y agoFrom the article: > Near the end of 2021, the company released a new Android app called Tracker Detect, which was designed to help people who own Androids discover suspicious AirTags near them
- AlexandrB 5y agoThis is as bad as (or worse than) having to stick _nomap onto your WiFi SSID to stop Google from collecting WiFi location data. A silent, passive "feature" that can violate your privacy unless you take specific, active steps to stop it. I wonder how many people are aware this even exists. I doubt Apple will be running a flashy marketing campaign for this app any time soon.
- dhosek 5y agoHow many people were being stalked before AirTags with no way of realizing that it was happening?
- cptskippy 5y agoAre you suggested that the number of people being stalked has remained constant but the now a subset of those people now know they're being stalked? I would expect the number of people being stalked to starkly rise. I'd be more curious about the number of people being stalked with AirTags who don't realized it.
- olliej 5y agoI suspect it hasn’t changed too much. Maybe there were some people on the edge and the ease pushes them over it, but stalker behaviour isn’t a sudden rush. It seems more likely that someone who is already a stalker adopts something that makes it easier. There was an article a few weeks/months back where a mother was unhappy that her daughter was angry when she found that the mother has planted an AirTag. The mother was point blank saying stuff like “I’m not stalking her I just want to know where she is”. Iirc the daughter was an adult who didn’t live at home. In other words stalker/possessive behavior isn’t a trivial thing, and like most behaviors of this sort isn’t something that can appear out of nowhere. That said, I do think it would be nice if apple could provide a mechanism for other manufacturers to integrate stalker protection directly, because the current app based solution is far from ideal.
- probably_wrong 5y ago> “If you really are nefarious and evil and you really want to find someone, there are things that are much better than an AirTag” (...) While it's true that there are better ways to stalk people, I think an AirTag brings something to the table that wasn't there before: the normalization of having stalking hardware at hand. Buying a "stalker kit" requires me to think long and hard about stalking someone. I need to make the decision, buy the hardware, wait for it to be delivered (or, alternatively, walk into the kind of store that sells spy equipment), create an opportunity, and go for it. Most well-adjusted people wouldn't go so far. But once AirTags normalize having these things in your keychain all the time, the "entry barrier" for stalking is lowered. All it takes is one beer too much and a split-second decision.
- alex_duf 5y agoAlso it makes the justification of buying such a product much easier. "I need to track my backpack" is better accepted than "I need a GPS tracker to follow my ex partner". I do believe Apple opened a can of worms they shouldn't have, and that it's going to cause great distress to many people.
- diffeomorphism 5y agoApple opened? Weren't these trackers popular long before that, e.g. tile?
- syrrim 5y agoApple integrates it into their network of phones, such that they can reliably track someone everywhere they go. I don't think other market players are capable of that.
- Jtsummers 5y agoTile has "Tile Network" which is similar: https://www.thetileapp.com/en-us/blog/what-is-tile-network-community-find-lost-stolen-far-away https://www.thetileapp.com/en-us/blog/what-is-tile-network-c... That blog is from 2020, prior to the release (maybe not the announcement, though) of AirTags. It's also probably nowhere near as widespread as Apple's device network, but it does exist.
- forgingahead 5y agoIt's insane to me that technology that is very likely used for stalkerware or other dystopian purposes, like AirTags, Google Homes, Alexas, Ring Cameras, Boston Dynamics Spot and related models, and the like, have been embraced unquestioningly by the vast majority of people because of flimsy weak reasons of "convenience" or whatever. Maybe I've just been in our industry for too long....
- notyourday 5y agoSpare me the "embraced unquestioningly by the vast majority of people because of flimsy weak reasons" There were hundreds of engineers at Apple that worked on AirTags. Not a single one of them stood up and said "No". Not a single one of them went to the press and screamed about it before the launch. Not a single one said that Cook and his high up lackeys and their wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, whoever they have one night stands with, their children should be forced to be carrying publicly accessible airtags just to ensure that they still think they still think it is a great idea when then and their their wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, whoever they have one night stands with, their children are the targets. Oh no, the enlightened technorati prefers $$$ just like Joe who knows exactly nothing about what this can be used for.
- olliej 5y agoThe “hundreds” of engineers who designed a “find my missing item” feature that people clearly want, and made it so that it could be: * accurate - to a few feet over arbitrary distance * private - no one other than the owner can track it * anti-stalker - despite the privacy it’s possible to know when you’re being stalked AirTags are useful, there was a market of similar, less private, devices before hand. And unlike the existing non-private solutions this one does actually warn people if they’re being stalked. If you think that’s “engineers not caring about misuse” I don’t know what to say?
- cu6dvytfur 5y ago
- SavantIdiot 5y agoI gave my partner an airtag as a test to see how accurate it was. After three days of daily driving around going to work errands etc, they received no warning whatsoever but I could still track. Don't know why, but it scared both of us.
- olliej 5y agoWeird, I tried exactly the same thing - for exactly the same reason I assume - and it complained in less than 6 hours. I wonder if they’ve been fiddling with how soon the notifications happen?
- yeetaccount4 5y agoAirtags are creepy as fuck. Even if Android has built in airtag detection, it doesn’t solve the problem of people without up to date smartphones, or people that don’t know what any of those messages/warnings mean.
- tinalumfoil 5y agoI wonder how much of this problem is of Apple’s own making. As far as I know AirTag competitors, find my phone, etc never included these “anti-stalking” features. Hell, if you have an Android Google has probably tricked you into letting them stalk you by the hour for years. Yet Apple makes it really easy to tell if there’s an AirTag close by and now anyone with that notification thinks they’re the hapless victim in a Liam Neeson film.
- multjoy 5y agoBecause the cost and ease of use means that even the most hapless DV offender can reach hitherto unrealisable levels of accuracy. While an AirTag isn't going to beat 'lumping' your missus' car, the level of entry to this sort of stalking behaviour has suddenly plummeted with their introduction.
- tinalumfoil 5y agoThe fact that these things beep and notify you make it just about impossible to use to track someone's movements without their knowledge, which isn't true with prior location tracking. Anybody using this nefariously would choose a device that doesn't make such tracking impossible. What's craziest about this outrage to me is, if the anti-stalking feature weren't there, the most an average Joe would be able to use this for is to collect a fraction of the data about you that tech companies already collect. You're yelling at your fellow peasants because you suspect they're stealing meanwhile the King is openly pilfering everything.
- multjoy 5y agoThe reason apple have made it really easy to know if one's about is precisely to avoid the stalking issue. That's a deliberate design feature which actually removes some of the utility as a covert device to keep hold of your own stuff.
- tinalumfoil 5y ago> The reason apple have made it really easy to know if one's about is precisely to avoid the stalking issue. I agree. My point is that the only reason people are reading 'stalking' and 'AirTag' in the same sentence is a failure of Apple's marketing. If they just had those features and didn't try to paint a world where your neighbors are out to get you they wouldn't be having this problem.
- JadoJodo 5y agoIn thinking aloud about this issue, I'm uncertain whether there's a solution other than to make AirTags costly or single-use: A. I lose my AirTag-equipped item in/on your bag/car/person. B. I “lose” my AirTag-equipped item in/on your bag/car/person. These are indistinguishable from one another without outside intervention. By making them expensive, Apple could raise the barrier to entry but would not stop someone from pursuing a “high value” stalking subject. Conversely, by making them single-use (e.g., I can only activate “lost mode” once and when I do, both Apple and the person who finds it are given my information to facilitate a return), it might deter would-be stalkers.
- alphabettsy 5y agoDoesn’t making them expensive just move them closer to the price of trackers that are already available and have no mitigations in place while also making them less useful for the target audience?
- Wistar 5y agoMaybe I am in the minority but I keep bluetooth turned off on my iPhone (battery life and I never pair anything) and suspect that the unknown AirTag alert won't work without bluetooth enabled.
- KingMachiavelli 5y agoIf you want to be able to check for Airtags being used to stalk you there is the great 'AirGuard' Android app on Fdroid.