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My comment isn’t specific to AirTags, but there’s a much larger conversation that needs to be had about this gray area of stalking capabilities that are now bui

by kbos87 5y ago

My comment isn’t specific to AirTags, but there’s a much larger conversation that needs to be had about this gray area of stalking capabilities that are now built into many mainstream products. Here’s a pattern I’ve seen play out more than once among friends and family - they share their location willingly and for seemingly benign reasons. It’s helpful to know when you’ll be getting home so I can start dinner! Just in case something happens to you! This is the innocent end of the spectrum; subtle or outright coercion in a controlling relationship is the darker end of the spectrum. How it starts really doesn’t matter, because the truth is that even among otherwise well meaning and well intentioned people, tracking tech can turn them obsessive. Checking in constantly. Wondering and/or quizzing their child, partner or friend about what they were doing at location X. The truth is that most people aren’t immune to being on either end of a situation like this, and the negative outcomes can range from feeling like your everyday movements are under a microscope, to outright abusive behavior more easily taken to the extreme. I don’t claim that there are simple solutions here, but a starting point would be tech companies making it easier to see an audit of how this “innocent” tracking tech is being used on the trackee. For example, I bet my grandpa would think twice about checking in on my cousins location as often as he probably does if he knew that my cousin got a notification every time he checked in.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
> For example, I bet my grandpa would think twice about checking in on my cousins location as often as he probably does if he knew that my cousin got a notification every time he checked in. I think this is a partial solution to keep honest people honest. Like door locks. They keep the temptation at bay for the average person. In abusive relationships it likely wouldn't accomplish much, but notifying might at least create known windows of "escape" when the tracking isn't being actively monitored. Maybe it could even draw someone's attention to abusive situations... if you're out with a friend and her phone "pings" that someone is tracking her 10 times over an hour maybe that's enough for someone to ask "hey is everything ok?"
- kbos87 5y ago
  Exactly. Being held accountable, and knowing you are being held accountable, could likely stem some amount of bad behavior from the start, and at the very least it makes bad behavior harder to conceal.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    It could also amusingly have people asking “why didn’t you check where I was” heh.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      Already there. I've said that to my wife before when she asks where I'm at. "You could have just, you know, looked..."
toomuchtodo 5y ago
You can’t fix a lack of emotional fortitude and insecurities with technology. These are mental health challenges exacerbated by the tools available.
- oarsinsync 5y ago
  > You can’t fix a lack of emotional fortitude and insecurities with technology. These are mental health challenges exacerbated by the tools available. I dont think the GP is suggesting that there's no technological changes required, just lamenting the root cause of the problem. Similarly, technology can exacerbate gambling addictions, and we have measures we've put in place there. It'll probably take some time to work that out though.
- kbos87 5y ago
  I don’t disagree with you. I would say that these are mental health challenges that can not only be exacerbated, but caused in the first place in some cases by having this technology so readily available. The other commenters’ point about gambling tech is a good one.
- advisedwang 5y ago
  How do you fix a "lack of emotional fortitude"? Can everyone succeed at that? How long does it take to fix? The reality is that some people are emotionally vulnerable and our we should keep that in mind as we develop products. Most new products (and indeed all changes in society) have some kind of negative impact to someone, and we can't get that to zero, but we should strive to minimize the harm we do.
- draw_down 5y ago
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  We live in a society with total propaganda immersion designed to keep you insecure so you consume consume consume. So basically everyone is like this in some way, or will be.
- nicbou 5y ago
pluc 5y ago
The road to authoritarian technology is paved with convenience
- heinternets 5y ago
  I always knew pizza delivery would end up in total loss of freedoms
  - schwap 5y ago
    Skynet was really just the Domino's pizza tracker all along.
  - inopinatus 5y ago
    Hiro Protagonist wants to subscribe to your newsletter.
  - superluserdo 5y ago
    Indeed https://memeslayerx.github.io/nonfree-pizza/ https://memeslayerx.github.io/nonfree-pizza/
- andrewia 5y ago
  Most technology is a double-edged sword. Front-facing cameras on phone are immensely useful for video calls and impromptu portraits, but in event of software compromise, can disclose a lot of info. Cell networks revolutionized communication and network availability, but make all other tech omnipresent and allow rough tracking of users by signal strength. The existence of technologies are fine, but we need to set strong social norms, laws (and resilient enforcing institutions), and smart design limitations to protect against abuse.
trinovantes 5y ago
Only a matter of time before we start seeing news of couples fixing their marriage by sharing AirTags with each other. I say this with sarcasm but recent years have made me wonder what is reality anymore.
- not2b 5y ago
  A marriage that can only be "fixed" if each member is continuously surveilling the other is not "fixed".
- outworlder 5y ago
  We should get them ankle bracelets while we are at it.
  - akomtu 5y ago
    We already have rings. Just embed a tracking chip there, add a monthly subscription service "loyal partner 365" and change laws to allow subpoena your partner if she/he "accidentally" forgets to wear the ring.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  You could have location shared with Find My for a long time now.
dylan604 5y ago
Essentially, this is why we can't have nice things. Human nature will always have someone take something to the dark places. Does that mean the rest of us can't use the things in non-creepy ways just because some will? After all, if you don't build it, someone else will, so why not you? These are all valid questions. Some people choose to do violence with weapons, so nobody should have weapons? These questions are always polarizing.
- adambyrtek 5y ago
  I'm not sure this is a good metaphor since weapons are designed for violence, regardless of whether that violence is legally justified or not. Just to be clear, I'm not trying to make a political stand, this is simply the dictionary definition: "weapon /ˈwɛp(ə)n/ a thing designed or used for inflicting bodily harm or physical damage".
  - dylan604 5y ago
    I'm not trying to do politics either, so I don't know how to respond without straying too far off topic. I will cede that I probably could have picked a less polarizing example. Just first to come to mind. The example was meant to highlight that not everyone uses a product/device the same way as others. If one's use of an item does not bring harm, infringe upon, etc of anyone else, then why should they not be allowed to use it? Obviously, once you use an item to infringe upon, bring harm, etc, you should be the one punished NOT the others by trying to banish the item.
acomjean 5y ago
Yeah. I took my partners dog for the afternoon. It has an airtag (not an official supported use). I knew the dog had it but there was some comment made about our walk. Monitoring by proxy. When I worked at a power monitoring startup (we monitored home power use, by individual circuit) this passive monitoring came up. And our CEO mentioned to his wife that she was home early.. "how did you know?" He saw the garage door circuit draw power... He was told he could keep his toys, but not to talk about them. Our sales guy had a potential partners remote door installed. He noted one time the dog walker did a pretty short walk (the door opens where x minutes apart), and was wondering if he could mention it.. Passive monitoring is everywhere. Not just cell phones.
- hnrodey 5y ago
  Care to share the competitors in the power monitoring space? I could really use a solution to this because my home electric bill is crazy high. We moved in to a new house about eight months ago and this electric bill is like 30% higher than my previous home. Not just the raw total of the bill - my consumption is higher in this house. I know of sense.com but perhaps there are others?
  - secabeen 5y ago
    I've used The Energy Detective for a long time, but it is challenging to install the hardware in your breaker box. For an easier approach, there are a bunch of wifi plugs that can report energy usage: https://www.androidcentral.com/which-smart-plugs-are-best-monitoring-energy-usage https://www.androidcentral.com/which-smart-plugs-are-best-mo...
  - acomjean 5y ago
    Our product was "site sage". Its subscription based and you have to install a current transformer around each circuit coming out of you electric box (you'd install in the circuit breaker box). But you did get circuit by circuit listings. Its also subscription based. The company has moved on to monitoring kitchen equipment, though they still sell them. I've been out of the space for a while, but the "sense" power monitor was new when I left. It claims to use AI so you can just monitor the mains and it will suss out what is using power. There were a lot of our home customers who were very obsessed with power use (trying to get to net 0 with solar). There have to be forums for this... If you are looking for the manual way. getting a kill-o-watt and attaching it to your outlet is one way to see one of the things that takes a lot of power. I have the "Belkin" version which I like because the display isn't near the outlet. I'd suggest fridge... In my case my fridge was a large % of my power bill. Any electric heat. https://www.belkin.com/au/support-article?articleNum=5381 https://www.belkin.com/au/support-article?articleNum=5381
rootusrootus 5y ago
I would think that the problem isn't just auditing, it is control. Reasonable people using the technology for good do not want to be bombarded with notifications. Better that we focus on control, making it more difficult to coerce someone into accepting tracking against their will, and making it easy to disable.
underwater 5y ago
Facebook Messenger implements this as "send location" which lets the other party track you for the next hour. I've found this useful without being creepy. I can share my location contextually, like if I'm picking someone up or meeting them somewhere.
- stronglikedan 5y ago
  Google maps too. I've used it with friends on camping trips.
- greiskul 5y ago
  I've used this in whatsapp so much. You can set it to 15 minutes, 1 hour, or 8 hours. Great way to meet up with someone, for Carnival me and some friends used to share our location in a group chat, so we could find each other if we wanted to, without the risk of accidentally forgetting to remove the location sharing, and having to constantly check our phones to respond to messages of people asking where we are.
sleepybrett 5y ago
yeah, concerning the feature in the apple ecosystem to share your location with someone else is great, i just wish it had a feature that alerted the you whenever someone used it to locate one of your devices. That way if say i went to the big state fair with my friend and we shared our locations with each other in case we got separated but then forgot to shut it off. If a few days later i got notified that my friend had just located me i could shut it off and/or have a conversation with them about boundries. The airtag/tile makes this much harder, perhaps the airtag should loudly beep or notify nearby devices whenever it's being actively located.
- eigen 5y ago
  > That way if say i went to the big state fair with my friend and we shared our locations with each other in case we got separated but then forgot to shut it off. you can share location for 1 hour or until end of day rather than Indefinitely. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210514 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210514
  - munchenphile 5y ago
    Yeah, but what if I want indefinite sharing (like with my wife) but would also like to be notified when I’m being tracked? That should definitely be an option. It should really be the default… Right now it’s way too damn easy to ask to borrow someone’s phone, then share their location with you indefinitely, and have that person not notice that you’re able to track them until the next time they use FindMy. There are probably a huge percentage of users that almost NEVER open the FindMy app. It’s a glaring security and safety omission from Apple.
- verve_rat 5y ago
  >The airtag/tile makes this much harder, perhaps the airtag should loudly beep or notify nearby devices whenever it's being actively located. They absolutely should. It boggles my mind a bit that they don't do this. It would even help you find them. Is there any downside to making noise?
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
technothrasher 5y ago
> Checking in constantly. Wondering and/or quizzing their child This behavior is rampant in my peer group. Most of my friends/neighbors are constantly monitoring their teen age children's location, reading their recent calls, texts, and emails, looking at internet usage logs, etc. One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she's driving over the speed limit and yells at her. It all seems so creepy to me, and I give my kid way more privacy than that, but it looks like I'm in the minority of parents.
- toxik 5y ago
  How do they see their texts calls emails etc? Surely that’s illegal.
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    Parents can monitor their children's email. Phone call records are in your monthly billing statement. As long as you're up front with your child about the level of monitoring, I don't think this is unethical, let alone illegal.
    - technothrasher 5y ago
      Yeah, none of the surveillance I'm talking about with the other parents I know is secretive. The kids seem to have been groomed to accept it from very young ages, so they all know it is happening.
  - astura 5y ago
    Children do not have any legal right to privacy. Especially not when the parents are paying for the cell phone and service.
    - alasdair_ 5y ago
      > Children do not have any legal right to privacy. Sadly, neither do most people.
    - 5y ago
djrogers 5y ago
> The truth is that most people aren’t immune to being on either end of a situation like this Hard disagree here - most people are not going to go all obsessive on their spouses, kids, etc.
BrandoElFollito 5y ago
There is also the special case of my wife who has my position on Google maps, and an automation where she gets it when sending me a special SMS. Yet she always calls to ask where I am (in your first scenario: because dinner or that she will kill the children if I am not back quickly).
everforward 5y ago
I think there needs to be a delineation between anti-theft devices and anti-loss devices. The sticking point now is that you want to let innocent people know if they're being tracked, but you don't want to let thieves know that they're being tracked. It seems an intractable problem, because there's no way that I can think of for a device to tell the difference between the two. Anti-loss devices should be portable and detachable, but required to be able to be easily found via some kind of standard tooling. Maybe like the Bluetooth equivalent of pinging the broadcast IP. They should also make an audible noise when the owner tracks them. Anti-theft devices should be silent, but required to be semi-permanently installed into the device to be tracked. Something annoying to remove, but not impossible. The ownership of the tracker should also be required to be registered with someone; logically the police, since that's who you would call anyways if your stuff was stolen. Anyone who finds an anti-theft device on their person or property that they didn't place there should automatically qualify for a restraining order against the device's owner (that they could opt not to pursue if they wanted). The restraining order should also prevent the device's owner from owning or registering any other anti-theft devices for the duration of the restraining order. There would also need to be some kind of penalties for unregistered anti-theft devices, and for anti-loss devices that have been tampered with to not make noise or respond to the standard signal. Also likely some kind of contract two people can enter into that says "I acknowledge that person X has tracker Y in thing Z, and I absolve my right to pursue a restraining order for it" for people who share a car or bike or whatever. I haven't fully fleshed out the ideas, but I think something like the above reinforces that it's okay to track your own stuff but that's it not OK to track other people.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  I agree completely. No mater what Apple and Tile can only do so much to prevent these kinds of things - at some point it is really down to criminals being criminals. We are perfectly fine with selling anyone with a license a motor vehicle but as we have seen many times in the wrong hands they can easily be dangerous killing machines. I like that Apple is making changes to how they work to discourage Air Tags used for this but to fully stop it would just mean not selling the product at all. And even though I am DEFINITELY not an Apple fan I think that is a poor solution to the problem. Instead of making anti-theft devices semi permanent I think it makes much more sense to just discourage using them for stalking in the first place at the time of purchase. If you make a device that is semi permanent people will just find a way to hack it and repackage it into something else. And realistically people may want smaller anti theft devices for small but very valuable items. What I think would probably be the best solution is to do something along the lines of what you said about registering with the police. Instead of manually having to do that though it would probably be easier if at the time of sale you had to sign a terms of service and the vendor automatically registered the serial number to your name in some kind of semi-public registry that law enforcement and others have access to. Even if would be thieves find ways around this it is going to discourage a ton of stalking in the first place. I am hoping we get a fully open airtag platform out of this with Android apps, devices, windows, linux, etc. In addition I think a setting on your phone that you could manually activate that told any airtags within a close vicinity to NOT track you could also be interesting - there may be many false positives but someone explicitly worried about someone stalking them could activate this feature for at least some piece of mind.
riversflow 5y ago
> Checking in constantly. Wondering and/or quizzing their child, partner or friend about what they were doing at location X. Fwiw, I’m a pretty big fan of FindMy and share my location with friends and family, I haven’t experienced this at all. My experience is that its convenient and cuts down on the number of “whats up” type messages I get when busy. All of these people are fairly well-adjusted adults though. I don’t care if people I trust track me, or even ask about someplace they saw me — why would I? There’s a pretty bright line between controlling/judgmental/suspicious behavior related to tracking, and just curiosity. If your grandpa tracks your cousin because he’s old and bored and wants to live vicariously, to me thats fine, if he grills your cousin about where he saw him thats wrong. I think a lot of this has to do with how open/accepting the group is. I can say confidently that all the people in my findMy group share the attitude of live and let live, and would tell me what they were up to, honestly, when asked “whats up?”. Its the anti-social network, lol.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> For example, I bet my grandpa would think twice about checking in on my cousins location as often as he probably does if he knew that my cousin got a notification every time he checked in. That depends. If that's a way to start up a conversation, it might lead to a lot more location-checking.
pengaru 5y ago
Totally. A decade ago I setup an RPi Zero W garage camera for my sister, using the GPIO for driving a relay to move the garage door remotely. Ostensibly the specific use case for this thing was so the fam. could check the garage door status and close it remotely if it was forgotten open. Innocent enough, totally sane. Except I setup the MotionEye software to not be too sensitive about people walking around in the garage or quick open-close cycles like returning home so it wouldn't wear out the SD card with writing irrelevant minutiae. Years later I get an email from my sister asking if the garage camera I set up was failing to capture her son coming and going via the garage door keypad. I had to explain that the thing was setup to detect just the garage door being left in a changed state for an extended period, not if it opens and closes in a short window of time. But that it could be reconfigured to be more sensitive if needed. Turned out she'd been abusing what was supposed to be a simple "did you forget the garage door open again? close it" facility as a surveillance tool from literally the moment I'd set it up, unbeknownst to me. Sigh.

by kbos87 5y ago

micromacrofoot 5y ago

> For example, I bet my grandpa would think twice about checking in on my cousins location as often as he probably does if he knew that my cousin got a notification every time he checked in. I think this is a partial solution to keep honest people honest. Like door locks. They keep the temptation at bay for the average person. In abusive relationships it likely wouldn't accomplish much, but notifying might at least create known windows of "escape" when the tracking isn't being actively monitored. Maybe it could even draw someone's attention to abusive situations... if you're out with a friend and her phone "pings" that someone is tracking her 10 times over an hour maybe that's enough for someone to ask "hey is everything ok?"

kbos87 5y ago
Exactly. Being held accountable, and knowing you are being held accountable, could likely stem some amount of bad behavior from the start, and at the very least it makes bad behavior harder to conceal.
- bombcar 5y ago
  It could also amusingly have people asking “why didn’t you check where I was” heh.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    Already there. I've said that to my wife before when she asks where I'm at. "You could have just, you know, looked..."

toomuchtodo 5y ago

You can’t fix a lack of emotional fortitude and insecurities with technology. These are mental health challenges exacerbated by the tools available.

oarsinsync 5y ago
> You can’t fix a lack of emotional fortitude and insecurities with technology. These are mental health challenges exacerbated by the tools available. I dont think the GP is suggesting that there's no technological changes required, just lamenting the root cause of the problem. Similarly, technology can exacerbate gambling addictions, and we have measures we've put in place there. It'll probably take some time to work that out though.
kbos87 5y ago
I don’t disagree with you. I would say that these are mental health challenges that can not only be exacerbated, but caused in the first place in some cases by having this technology so readily available. The other commenters’ point about gambling tech is a good one.
advisedwang 5y ago
How do you fix a "lack of emotional fortitude"? Can everyone succeed at that? How long does it take to fix? The reality is that some people are emotionally vulnerable and our we should keep that in mind as we develop products. Most new products (and indeed all changes in society) have some kind of negative impact to someone, and we can't get that to zero, but we should strive to minimize the harm we do.
draw_down 5y ago
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
We live in a society with total propaganda immersion designed to keep you insecure so you consume consume consume. So basically everyone is like this in some way, or will be.
nicbou 5y ago

pluc 5y ago

The road to authoritarian technology is paved with convenience

heinternets 5y ago
I always knew pizza delivery would end up in total loss of freedoms
- schwap 5y ago
  Skynet was really just the Domino's pizza tracker all along.
- inopinatus 5y ago
  Hiro Protagonist wants to subscribe to your newsletter.
- superluserdo 5y ago
  Indeed https://memeslayerx.github.io/nonfree-pizza/ https://memeslayerx.github.io/nonfree-pizza/
andrewia 5y ago
Most technology is a double-edged sword. Front-facing cameras on phone are immensely useful for video calls and impromptu portraits, but in event of software compromise, can disclose a lot of info. Cell networks revolutionized communication and network availability, but make all other tech omnipresent and allow rough tracking of users by signal strength. The existence of technologies are fine, but we need to set strong social norms, laws (and resilient enforcing institutions), and smart design limitations to protect against abuse.

trinovantes 5y ago

Only a matter of time before we start seeing news of couples fixing their marriage by sharing AirTags with each other. I say this with sarcasm but recent years have made me wonder what is reality anymore.

not2b 5y ago
A marriage that can only be "fixed" if each member is continuously surveilling the other is not "fixed".
outworlder 5y ago
We should get them ankle bracelets while we are at it.
- akomtu 5y ago
  We already have rings. Just embed a tracking chip there, add a monthly subscription service "loyal partner 365" and change laws to allow subpoena your partner if she/he "accidentally" forgets to wear the ring.
Gigachad 5y ago
You could have location shared with Find My for a long time now.

dylan604 5y ago

Essentially, this is why we can't have nice things. Human nature will always have someone take something to the dark places. Does that mean the rest of us can't use the things in non-creepy ways just because some will? After all, if you don't build it, someone else will, so why not you? These are all valid questions. Some people choose to do violence with weapons, so nobody should have weapons? These questions are always polarizing.

adambyrtek 5y ago
I'm not sure this is a good metaphor since weapons are designed for violence, regardless of whether that violence is legally justified or not. Just to be clear, I'm not trying to make a political stand, this is simply the dictionary definition: "weapon /ˈwɛp(ə)n/ a thing designed or used for inflicting bodily harm or physical damage".
- dylan604 5y ago
  I'm not trying to do politics either, so I don't know how to respond without straying too far off topic. I will cede that I probably could have picked a less polarizing example. Just first to come to mind. The example was meant to highlight that not everyone uses a product/device the same way as others. If one's use of an item does not bring harm, infringe upon, etc of anyone else, then why should they not be allowed to use it? Obviously, once you use an item to infringe upon, bring harm, etc, you should be the one punished NOT the others by trying to banish the item.

acomjean 5y ago

Yeah. I took my partners dog for the afternoon. It has an airtag (not an official supported use). I knew the dog had it but there was some comment made about our walk. Monitoring by proxy. When I worked at a power monitoring startup (we monitored home power use, by individual circuit) this passive monitoring came up. And our CEO mentioned to his wife that she was home early.. "how did you know?" He saw the garage door circuit draw power... He was told he could keep his toys, but not to talk about them. Our sales guy had a potential partners remote door installed. He noted one time the dog walker did a pretty short walk (the door opens where x minutes apart), and was wondering if he could mention it.. Passive monitoring is everywhere. Not just cell phones.

hnrodey 5y ago
Care to share the competitors in the power monitoring space? I could really use a solution to this because my home electric bill is crazy high. We moved in to a new house about eight months ago and this electric bill is like 30% higher than my previous home. Not just the raw total of the bill - my consumption is higher in this house. I know of sense.com but perhaps there are others?
- secabeen 5y ago
  I've used The Energy Detective for a long time, but it is challenging to install the hardware in your breaker box. For an easier approach, there are a bunch of wifi plugs that can report energy usage: https://www.androidcentral.com/which-smart-plugs-are-best-monitoring-energy-usage https://www.androidcentral.com/which-smart-plugs-are-best-mo...
- acomjean 5y ago
  Our product was "site sage". Its subscription based and you have to install a current transformer around each circuit coming out of you electric box (you'd install in the circuit breaker box). But you did get circuit by circuit listings. Its also subscription based. The company has moved on to monitoring kitchen equipment, though they still sell them. I've been out of the space for a while, but the "sense" power monitor was new when I left. It claims to use AI so you can just monitor the mains and it will suss out what is using power. There were a lot of our home customers who were very obsessed with power use (trying to get to net 0 with solar). There have to be forums for this... If you are looking for the manual way. getting a kill-o-watt and attaching it to your outlet is one way to see one of the things that takes a lot of power. I have the "Belkin" version which I like because the display isn't near the outlet. I'd suggest fridge... In my case my fridge was a large % of my power bill. Any electric heat. https://www.belkin.com/au/support-article?articleNum=5381 https://www.belkin.com/au/support-article?articleNum=5381

rootusrootus 5y ago

I would think that the problem isn't just auditing, it is control. Reasonable people using the technology for good do not want to be bombarded with notifications. Better that we focus on control, making it more difficult to coerce someone into accepting tracking against their will, and making it easy to disable.

underwater 5y ago

Facebook Messenger implements this as "send location" which lets the other party track you for the next hour. I've found this useful without being creepy. I can share my location contextually, like if I'm picking someone up or meeting them somewhere.

stronglikedan 5y ago
Google maps too. I've used it with friends on camping trips.
greiskul 5y ago
I've used this in whatsapp so much. You can set it to 15 minutes, 1 hour, or 8 hours. Great way to meet up with someone, for Carnival me and some friends used to share our location in a group chat, so we could find each other if we wanted to, without the risk of accidentally forgetting to remove the location sharing, and having to constantly check our phones to respond to messages of people asking where we are.

sleepybrett 5y ago

yeah, concerning the feature in the apple ecosystem to share your location with someone else is great, i just wish it had a feature that alerted the you whenever someone used it to locate one of your devices. That way if say i went to the big state fair with my friend and we shared our locations with each other in case we got separated but then forgot to shut it off. If a few days later i got notified that my friend had just located me i could shut it off and/or have a conversation with them about boundries. The airtag/tile makes this much harder, perhaps the airtag should loudly beep or notify nearby devices whenever it's being actively located.

eigen 5y ago
> That way if say i went to the big state fair with my friend and we shared our locations with each other in case we got separated but then forgot to shut it off. you can share location for 1 hour or until end of day rather than Indefinitely. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210514 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210514
- munchenphile 5y ago
  Yeah, but what if I want indefinite sharing (like with my wife) but would also like to be notified when I’m being tracked? That should definitely be an option. It should really be the default… Right now it’s way too damn easy to ask to borrow someone’s phone, then share their location with you indefinitely, and have that person not notice that you’re able to track them until the next time they use FindMy. There are probably a huge percentage of users that almost NEVER open the FindMy app. It’s a glaring security and safety omission from Apple.
verve_rat 5y ago
>The airtag/tile makes this much harder, perhaps the airtag should loudly beep or notify nearby devices whenever it's being actively located. They absolutely should. It boggles my mind a bit that they don't do this. It would even help you find them. Is there any downside to making noise?
hackerfromthefu 5y ago

technothrasher 5y ago

> Checking in constantly. Wondering and/or quizzing their child This behavior is rampant in my peer group. Most of my friends/neighbors are constantly monitoring their teen age children's location, reading their recent calls, texts, and emails, looking at internet usage logs, etc. One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she's driving over the speed limit and yells at her. It all seems so creepy to me, and I give my kid way more privacy than that, but it looks like I'm in the minority of parents.

toxik 5y ago
How do they see their texts calls emails etc? Surely that’s illegal.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  Parents can monitor their children's email. Phone call records are in your monthly billing statement. As long as you're up front with your child about the level of monitoring, I don't think this is unethical, let alone illegal.
  - technothrasher 5y ago
    Yeah, none of the surveillance I'm talking about with the other parents I know is secretive. The kids seem to have been groomed to accept it from very young ages, so they all know it is happening.
- astura 5y ago
  Children do not have any legal right to privacy. Especially not when the parents are paying for the cell phone and service.
  - alasdair_ 5y ago
    > Children do not have any legal right to privacy. Sadly, neither do most people.
  - 5y ago

djrogers 5y ago

> The truth is that most people aren’t immune to being on either end of a situation like this Hard disagree here - most people are not going to go all obsessive on their spouses, kids, etc.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago

There is also the special case of my wife who has my position on Google maps, and an automation where she gets it when sending me a special SMS. Yet she always calls to ask where I am (in your first scenario: because dinner or that she will kill the children if I am not back quickly).

everforward 5y ago

I think there needs to be a delineation between anti-theft devices and anti-loss devices. The sticking point now is that you want to let innocent people know if they're being tracked, but you don't want to let thieves know that they're being tracked. It seems an intractable problem, because there's no way that I can think of for a device to tell the difference between the two. Anti-loss devices should be portable and detachable, but required to be able to be easily found via some kind of standard tooling. Maybe like the Bluetooth equivalent of pinging the broadcast IP. They should also make an audible noise when the owner tracks them. Anti-theft devices should be silent, but required to be semi-permanently installed into the device to be tracked. Something annoying to remove, but not impossible. The ownership of the tracker should also be required to be registered with someone; logically the police, since that's who you would call anyways if your stuff was stolen. Anyone who finds an anti-theft device on their person or property that they didn't place there should automatically qualify for a restraining order against the device's owner (that they could opt not to pursue if they wanted). The restraining order should also prevent the device's owner from owning or registering any other anti-theft devices for the duration of the restraining order. There would also need to be some kind of penalties for unregistered anti-theft devices, and for anti-loss devices that have been tampered with to not make noise or respond to the standard signal. Also likely some kind of contract two people can enter into that says "I acknowledge that person X has tracker Y in thing Z, and I absolve my right to pursue a restraining order for it" for people who share a car or bike or whatever. I haven't fully fleshed out the ideas, but I think something like the above reinforces that it's okay to track your own stuff but that's it not OK to track other people.

Melatonic 5y ago
I agree completely. No mater what Apple and Tile can only do so much to prevent these kinds of things - at some point it is really down to criminals being criminals. We are perfectly fine with selling anyone with a license a motor vehicle but as we have seen many times in the wrong hands they can easily be dangerous killing machines. I like that Apple is making changes to how they work to discourage Air Tags used for this but to fully stop it would just mean not selling the product at all. And even though I am DEFINITELY not an Apple fan I think that is a poor solution to the problem. Instead of making anti-theft devices semi permanent I think it makes much more sense to just discourage using them for stalking in the first place at the time of purchase. If you make a device that is semi permanent people will just find a way to hack it and repackage it into something else. And realistically people may want smaller anti theft devices for small but very valuable items. What I think would probably be the best solution is to do something along the lines of what you said about registering with the police. Instead of manually having to do that though it would probably be easier if at the time of sale you had to sign a terms of service and the vendor automatically registered the serial number to your name in some kind of semi-public registry that law enforcement and others have access to. Even if would be thieves find ways around this it is going to discourage a ton of stalking in the first place. I am hoping we get a fully open airtag platform out of this with Android apps, devices, windows, linux, etc. In addition I think a setting on your phone that you could manually activate that told any airtags within a close vicinity to NOT track you could also be interesting - there may be many false positives but someone explicitly worried about someone stalking them could activate this feature for at least some piece of mind.

riversflow 5y ago

> Checking in constantly. Wondering and/or quizzing their child, partner or friend about what they were doing at location X. Fwiw, I’m a pretty big fan of FindMy and share my location with friends and family, I haven’t experienced this at all. My experience is that its convenient and cuts down on the number of “whats up” type messages I get when busy. All of these people are fairly well-adjusted adults though. I don’t care if people I trust track me, or even ask about someplace they saw me — why would I? There’s a pretty bright line between controlling/judgmental/suspicious behavior related to tracking, and just curiosity. If your grandpa tracks your cousin because he’s old and bored and wants to live vicariously, to me thats fine, if he grills your cousin about where he saw him thats wrong. I think a lot of this has to do with how open/accepting the group is. I can say confidently that all the people in my findMy group share the attitude of live and let live, and would tell me what they were up to, honestly, when asked “whats up?”. Its the anti-social network, lol.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

pengaru 5y ago

Totally. A decade ago I setup an RPi Zero W garage camera for my sister, using the GPIO for driving a relay to move the garage door remotely. Ostensibly the specific use case for this thing was so the fam. could check the garage door status and close it remotely if it was forgotten open. Innocent enough, totally sane. Except I setup the MotionEye software to not be too sensitive about people walking around in the garage or quick open-close cycles like returning home so it wouldn't wear out the SD card with writing irrelevant minutiae. Years later I get an email from my sister asking if the garage camera I set up was failing to capture her son coming and going via the garage door keypad. I had to explain that the thing was setup to detect just the garage door being left in a changed state for an extended period, not if it opens and closes in a short window of time. But that it could be reconfigured to be more sensitive if needed. Turned out she'd been abusing what was supposed to be a simple "did you forget the garage door open again? close it" facility as a surveillance tool from literally the moment I'd set it up, unbeknownst to me. Sigh.