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Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
- HstryrsrBttn 5y ago
- racl101 5y agoI have not heard one positive bit of feedback about these things. Maybe I'd have to talk to a stalker.
- jounker 5y agoI suggest doing a quick search on “airtag found stolen X” where X is small valuable item that a person might want back.
- peppertree 5y agoIt's an energy vampire.
- bostonsre 5y agoDoes having more airtags around cause the battery to drain faster? It would be absolutely hilarious to walk around with a pocket full of airtags and be a legit iphone energy vampire.
- klysm 5y agoThat reminds me of the guy who walked around with an absurd of phones on google maps to trick its traffic algorithm.
- olliej 5y agoThis seems annoying, especially as you don't get to control whether other people nearby have AirTags. OTOH you could use it to detect stealthy fake AirTags? :D
- Nextgrid 5y agoThere could be a DoS attack vector - presumably a BLE-enabled microcontroller could technically emulate an infinite number of AirTags and drain the battery even more if not cause more serious problems. I wonder how quickly this would be fixed if someone were to sprinkle a few such microcontrollers around Apple Stores or offices.
- olliej 5y agoSomeone already reversed the exact protocol and proof of concepted a arduino (or pi?) device that could happily use the network and would roll the keys regardless of whether it was in the owners vicinity, defeating the anti-tracking stuff. Of course at that point you’ve probably spent more than regular gps stalkerware
- Gigachad 5y agoYou are possibly at risk of Apple detecting this and locking your account. But at some point, if the attacker is determined enough to build custom hardware like this, there is not a lot you can do. None of the competitors managed any better or even got close to the protections Apple provided. At some point we need to put the burden on law enforcement. It's impossible to make abuse of technology impossible but we can criminalize misuse.
- londons_explore 5y agoAll wireless protocols can be fairly trivially DoS'ed, due to the nature of finite bandwidth and power limits.
- Nextgrid 5y agoHowever, do most wireless protocols cause listening devices to start using significantly more CPU and thus battery power? I'd expect DoS in most authenticated protocols to be impossible and essentially rejected at the hardware level (just like interference would be) with very minimal power impact.
- Nextgrid 5y agoAn annoyance that is driving me away from the Apple ecosystem is the lack of choice when it comes to these new features - they are forced onto you with no way to disable them and sometimes radically modify the behavior of the device you purchased and may make it unsuitable for the original purpose you bought it for. I'm still using an iPhone and plan to get the new SE (and only because of Touch ID is back - Face ID was a dealbreaker) but for work I got myself a Thinkpad. Some things are worse, but at the very least I can be confident that once I do get a setup that works it'll likely stay working for years without breaking overnight because someone at Apple wanted to earn a promotion with a feature that's completely useless to me. In my case, the audio devices menu on Mac/iOS displays nearby AirPlay targets, including those not on the LAN. My neighbors got their misconfigured so it always pollutes my menus with no way to disable this even though I never use AirPlay and don't have any compatible hardware (nor intend to get any). Every time there's a risk of misclicking and accidentally broadcasting a meeting's audio or (if they have auth enabled) annoying the neighbor by waking up their Apple TV (or taking over whatever they've been watching), and yet I have to faff around with that menu constantly because of the next point: The AirPods auto-switching/roaming introduced in Big Sur made mine completely unusable due to some edge-case bug (even disabling the auto-switching doesn't make them as reliable as they used to be back when they were released, and it takes me 30 seconds of connecting/disconnecting/switching between audio sources upon joining a meeting to actually get it working) forcing me to buy a USB headset. My AirPods are still OK for music on iPhone but became completely useless for meetings even though I bought a second pair just for that reason. - I just can't afford to waste 30 seconds of every meeting gesturing like an idiot while screwing with my audio settings just to get people to finally hear me. The new "hide my email" feature in Safari now pollutes every email form field with a dropdown that I'll never use, and yet again no way to disable this.
- askura 5y agoReminds me of the "Songs of Innocence" U2 debacle. You get less and less control over what you can do with Apple. They run a good PR game but they really like to micro manage so much.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Asan1 5y agoAirtags are fucking terrible anyway. Great idea, awful execution. Why do my car keys have to start beeping every couple of hours?
- MilaM 5y agoAFAIK you don't participate in the network when Find My is disabled. Not the best solution, but maybe feasible for devices that are only used at home.
- lancesells 5y agoYou can still find your device but only if it's turned on. So turning off the Find My network doesn't stop you from finding devices that aren't at home but it does stop you from finding ones that are turned off or run out of battery.
- duxup 5y agoCurious, none of my devices seem to be suffering like this with my air tags all over the house. I even have some very rarely used devices where “find my” doesn't show that much usage. Is this tied to a setting or bug?
- endisneigh 5y agodon't air tags use the same tech as Find My phone? Whether or not you have an air tag or are near one, I'd expect the same reduction if that feature is on.
- kmfrk 5y agoOne possible explanation could be that the fallback for U1/UWB chips in devices without them sucks? iPhones >=11 have UWB, iPads don't afaict. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec1e6108efd/web https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec1e6108efd/...
- pugworthy 5y agoThere are some battery draining tricks you can do with Bluetooth apps on a phone to drain the device batteries. Essentially if you did a ton of device queries to every BLE device visible, you could drain the batteries of every device in range. Transmission is probably a heavier battery drain so just making them talk to your phone creates drain. It’s a single device example, but in a bar once I was showing a co-worker once how you could see and interrogate a lot of BLE devices. I pinged someone’s Fitbit, and read that it only had 3% battery left. Then it vanished. I’m pretty sure in the process of asking it to give me the info, it drained the battery.
- picture 5y agoThat seems like a neat demo. Out of curiosity, what software/hardware did you use to see and ping nearby BLE devices?
- redleader55 5y agoYou can do this easily with an Android phone. These are the apps I use: Lightblue nRFConnect BLE Scanner
- sokoloff 5y agoI’ve found nRFConnect to be far and away the easiest to get started with.
- RVRX 5y agoLightBlue is available for iOS users as well.
- pugworthy 5y agoYes many of those are available for the iPhone too. It's crazy how many devices you can find with those apps.
- RF_Savage 5y agoThanks! nRFConnect looks like a legitimately usefull tool for debugging and fiddling with BLE devices. The nRF51 and nRF52 OTA firmware upgrades also look usefull, has anybody done something arduino like with this?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Krasnol 5y agoHow far are we from the moment where everybody admits that those things were a bad idea?
- _g5q8 5y agoThere's no reason to believe these are a bad idea beyond lowering entry cost to GPS trackers. It seems like there's a bug going on here - otherwise everyone would have the same issue. This is something that can be fixed and isn't really related to these existing overall.
- Krasnol 5y agoThis isn't the only "bug" though. The use of it as a stalking device should be widely known already.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tedunangst 5y agoI must spend time near hundreds of AirTags each day, yet my battery doesn't seem to be affected. Is it possible somebody is exaggerating? Or omitting relevant info?
- knolan 5y agoMy iPhone barely registers any battery usage by Find My but it hammers my iPad drawing the battery anywhere from 20 to 50% overnight. It’s a very real and very annoying problem.
- stavros 5y agoMaybe the author is talking about devices that are asleep/off? They mention "weeks" at one point, making me think that the AirTags wake the devices from sleep often, which you'll notice in an iPad that dies after one week instead of a month while sleeping, but not in a phone that you charge every day.
- squeaky-clean 5y agoI've actually had exactly this problem with a really old iPad recently. It would last 2-3 months if I never touched it, now it's always dead when I go to reach for it, which is maybe every 2 weeks-ish. Just assumed the battery hit some sort of cliff but now this article has me wondering if my neighbors got an airtag.
- LordDragonfang 5y agoAirtags are based off of Apple's existing BLE Find My network, so it might not necessarily have to be an airtag. Off the top of my head, I know that airpods had a similar functionality enabled a while back.
- rootusrootus 5y agoAnd we still wonder why misinformation moves so much faster than truth. It has to be some kind of emotional thing. How many people just saw the headline, immediately decided it must be true, and will now be sure to mention it any time someone mentions AirTags in the future. I doubt this is exactly a new phenomenon, but it sure seems surprising the human race has made it as far as we have successfully.
- Aerroon 5y agoI was under the impression that having Bluetooth enabled at all was a security risk. Do people actually use Bluetooth?
- humanistbot 5y agoThis seems like a very out of touch question. Bluetooth is ubiquitous. Flagship smartphones can't even listen to headphones without bluetooth. Smartwatches use bluetooth. Hell, my herbal vaporizer has a BLE connection for setting the temperature and checking battery.
- Aerroon 5y agoThe reason I ask is because I find Bluetooth to be a detractor from every product you mentioned. I would consider not using them because they use Bluetooth.
- _jal 5y agoDepends on your threat model. Generally probably not, but there's always a risk, and network stacks are not becoming simpler. There are disclosure risks - bluetooth trackers are common in retail stores. I disable Bluetooth on almost everything, not so much for "security" as because I don't need it, so there's no reason for it. I don't like things in my ears, so it is of no benefit to me on my phone, and I don't feel a burning desire to provide real-world unique identifiers to in-store surveillance, so I don't. I also don't use a wireless keyboard or other toys like that, so my other machines don't need it either. Last use I had for Bluetooth was getting data from a battery charger. That lasted long enough for me to discover I didn't care about the data.
- throwawayboise 5y agoFirst thing I disable on any device.
- K7PJP 5y agoApple along has sold over well over 100 million AirPods, and there's a large market of other Bluetooth accessories. So, yes, Bluetooth is a very widely used popular wireless technology. I'm typing this on a Bluetooth keyboard, while wearing an Bluetooth-connected Watch. Apple's Handoff and Continuity features across devices are of great benefit to me every day.
- tapoxi 5y agoCould you theoretically fill a backpack with a few hundred of these and piss off everyone around you? Asking for a friend.
- tomcam 5y agoAt about $3000 (tax included) per 100 you could probably do more interesting things with say $10,000. Like giving stacks of 100 $1 bills to everyone around you except the people you want to piss off.
- aaron695 5y ago
- flatiron 5y agoWould be much easier to script that all out and have a single Bluetooth device. https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack#how-to-track-other-bluetooth-devices https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack#how-to-track-othe...
- mcdonje 5y agoMisleading headline. It's not just devices close by. It's devices paired with airtags.
- ratg13 5y agoIf you are enrolled with the find my device service, your device is communicating to all airtags in range. It's the foundation of how the system works.
- dymk 5y agoThere appears to be no proof that this is the case. It might be, but the action by which it would be draining the battery isn’t described (or even hinted at).
- knolan 5y agoMy AirTags, via the Find My app are draining my iPad’s battery. It’s very annoying.
- rootusrootus 5y agoMaybe an update would help? I haven't had any problem with Find My on my iPad draining the battery, and we have a half dozen AirTags. But, I also have auto update turned on for iOS.
- knolan 5y agoI’ve updated, reset, repaired… The drain can be either slow or aggressive but it doesn’t go away.
- andrewia 5y agoI've seen this issue in a slightly different context. A few years ago, my Android phone began dying much more quickly than before. Looking at the built-in battery stats, nothing was amiss and there were no apps causing excessive wakeups. It was only when I used Android Battery Historian that I saw there was a ton of bluetooth wakeups caused by Google Play Services. But why would it be waking up so much? Usually the wake requests originate from some other app, but I didn't see any associated wakeups in the stats dump. After a while I remembered that I installed GasBuddy recently, and a Google search revealed that other people had Bluetooth battery drain issues after installing it. Apparently GasBuddy had an ads SDK that aggressively scanned for Bluetooth beacons. Removing the app stopped the drain. I was shocked that no battery stats screen showed GasBuddy was the culprit. Even the Battery Historian tool (which requires the user to run a Docker image and dump a bugreport) only hinted that there was some Bluetooth wakeups, but didn't show which app they originated from. This AirTag seems to be a similar issue, especially if a less experienced user doesn't realized all the "Find My" wakeups are caused by nearby AirTags. I think Apple needs to make the "deep sleep" states of their devices more strict so they can minimize drain when sitting (both when sitting overnight on a nightstand, or for a week in a living room). Notifications (besides calls) can usually afford to be batched since users are asleep or not nearby. As for AirTags, if one is being carried through an area, there's probably other iDevices that are being actively used nearby. They're already awake and using RF, so they can handle the AirTag ping with virtually no additional power consumption.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- devoutsalsa 5y agoThat could also just be a bug. I remember installing an energy sucking application in 2014 on my Android; I think it was Expensify. I had noticed my battery was draining pretty fast, but then I noticed it took forever to even charge the phone. Upon closer examination, the app was consuming like 65% of all the energy being used. It must have been a bug, as there's no way they would make an app drain the battery that fast on purpose.
- 5y ago
- lizardactivist 5y agoThese AirTags keep looking like a really bad idea. Wasn't there a story recently where someone managed to use one of these as a tracking device for a person and their car, because any nearby iphone and ipad would respond to the tag or something?
- homelessdino 5y agoYeah there's been a bunch of cases of people getting stalked by air tags which has produced the need for these types of articles: https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-tell-if-airtag-stalking-you https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-tell-if-airtag-stalk...
- rootusrootus 5y agoAnd here I thought it was the need for clicks that produced the need for such articles.
- rootusrootus 5y agoGiven that they announce their presence, perhaps it is a net positive. Real stalkers will be using old phones, GPS trackers, or some other solution that doesn't tell the victim what's happening.
- FireBeyond 5y agoYou can pretty easily buy AirTags on eBay etc., with the speaker drilled out. Apple only very recently added a notification that an "AirTag may be traveling with you that is not yours", which definitely helps... IF you have an Apple device yourself.
- gorbypark 5y agoAs far as I know that notification has been there since day one, Apple has just adjusted the amount of time until it is shown. They are also adjusting the frequency and/or volume of the beeping to make it easier to hear.
- Lamad123 5y agoThis Orwellian shit is coming faster than most of us thought!
- stakkur 5y agoNow that’s an interesting black hat technique waiting to be exploited.
- supernova87a 5y agoWithout more detail, I find the author's observation hard to accept at face value. The iPad battery usage being shown doesn't account for just the normal "asleep" battery drain, which, if it's not broken out specifically, could be just misleadingly assigning the Find My usage as the main part of it. (as the only thing that had active functions) It would be better to show what the battery usage/drain is without any airtags nearby and make sure he/she isn't just measuring the normal sleeping usage and inaccurately saying that Airtags caused it.
- kayodelycaon 5y agoThings broadcasting on WiFi can drain an iPad. I have some WiFi light bulbs and they are pretty noisy. I had to put my iPads on a separate vlan to keep them from draining in a few days of standby. My Mac laptops don’t have this issue. I think it’s because they are configured to not awake up on standby unless plugged in.
- rootusrootus 5y agoNow that's an interesting one. I'm glad I haven't run into that. I've got ~50 noisy little wifi switches in my house, but it hasn't affected my iPad battery life. -knock on wood-
- kayodelycaon 5y agoI'm 90% sure Home Assistant is waking up the bulbs more than necessary. (Yay random open source plugins!) It's not a problem for anything else on the network.
- lcmatt 5y agoI've had this issue too. My iPad pro is generally within 4 foot of an airtag which is attached to my keys. During the day I don't see any real battery drain however during the night it seems to be draining the battery at an accelerated rate. I'd wake up and check it within the battery info section to see Find My using 90%+ of the battery over the last 24hrs. I now have a shortcut setup to disable bluetooth on the iPad from midnight > 7am. Find my usage drops all the way down to <2% and battery drain is very minimal - if I leave bluetooth on overnight it jumps all the way back up and drains approx 40-60% of the battery overnight.
- sattar1 5y ago
- mkr-hn 5y agoThey keep turning Bluetooth back on with every update, so you can't even avoid this if you don't use Bluetooth unless you're vigilant.
- bgro 5y agoThis was a concern I had since day 0. I have been asking about things like this and been talked down to constantly as if I don't know how bluetooth works... My other concern was if these are hijacking your data plan. Maybe it's not that significant amount if you have a huge plan but like Ting for example gives you 100MB of data usage each month on their basic plan. That's MEGAbytes. I checked my system clock app for example, and it's using like 500 MB a year of cell data. So the cumulative data it uses per year is about half of that plan's budget. Settings uses like 1/5 of a month of data. What does settings even use cell data for? Every random app has data usage like this. Sure, you can turn it off but why should that be the user's problem in the first place? We don't live in an opt-out society. If you're a cargo delivery guy and someone decides to ship 500 airtags for fun that you walk by, are you now just screwed in over charges because Apple decided it was OK to use your cell data for whatever purposes that have no benefit to you?
- scrollaway 5y ago> If you're a cargo delivery guy and someone decides to ship 500 airtags for fun that you walk by, are you now just screwed in over charges No because AirTags have to be enabled and registered before they become part of the network. At shipping time their battery is not plugged in.
- bgro 5y agoI meant shipping activated AirTags as a “prank” or to otherwise cause chaos. People are already shipping individual activated ones to see where they end up. Or if 500 separate people saw those news stories and each did it individually for legitimate package tracking, perhaps that would be a more believable situation.
- scrollaway 5y agoThat's a $50k prank to … use up some data and battery? For 50k you can do a lot more damage "as a prank".
- 5y ago
- ezconnect 5y agoSo this is the reason my phone doesn't last the whole day anymore. The phenomenon just happened overnight and I can't find the culprit app.
- anyaya 5y agoTest
- lewisjoe 5y agoWow, now I know why my car's remote key ran out of battery so soon! This is absurd.
- heavyset_go 5y agoI dislike how companies are not only pushing proprietary mesh networks, but also making them automatically enabled for their users and opt-out. It feels like the companies are piggybacking on my internet connection, hardware and electricity for free to literally power their closed network. I don't get paid a penny for it, but their shareholders sure do. Open mesh networks could be really cool, but instead of open networks, we get mesh networks that only allow Alexa to pump ads into your home, while excluding you, me and everyone else except Amazon and their partners from doing amazing things with the meshnets.
- z3ncyberpunk 5y ago> it feels like they are using my internet connection, hardware and electricity for free That's exactly what they're doing
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- walrus01 5y agoThe day that I install any amazon sidewalk enabled device in my home is the day I hang up my hat and resign in shame, as a network engineer who's been building internet infrastructure since 1999. It's so gross and wrong. amazon doesn't get a free ride on my residential internet service or arbitrary use of radio spectrum in my home. note: I also have no smart doorbells, cloud connected security cameras, internet enabled lightbulbs, etc. They're nothing but riddled with bugs, incompatibilities, security holes, disgusting configuration options, obsolescence in less than a few years, etc. just you wait until manufacturers of "internet of shit" things go really evil, and integrate low cost LTE radios into them with their own billing/centralized management/VPN system. it's already been proven that giving your smart tv the wifi password is a bad idea, because it'll just retrieve and display ads, and/or submit all your usage history to its manufacturer for resale to unknown 3rd parties. Now what if random items of electrical consumer technology phone home whether you want them to or not...
- implements 5y ago> note: I also have no smart doorbells, cloud connected security cameras, ... If you want a CCTV camera you can still get 'old school' commercial grade IP cameras from eBay. Mercifully free of cloud attachment, but with ftp, email and http notification. Probably will have dynamic DNS, but that can be useful.
- sharken 5y agoThe title is rather inaccurate, a better and less attention seeking title would be: "Apple AirTags draining battery of your Apple devices close by". And then you can talk about Apple AirTags draining your Apple devices, e.g. in order to locate the Apple device of someone else your devices will use of a lot of battery in the process. My hunch is that users want to be able to locate their lost Apple device at all times and AirTags improve that capability. But most users will not pay the price of increased battery drain to help others locate their Apple device. So Apple decides to make the feature opt-out, otherwise very few would actually enable the feature.
- berkes 5y agoIf people were that reluctant to switch a feature on, it is not a feature people want.
- mojzu 5y agoIsn't it more likely that 90%+ of people leave their devices on factory settings and don't want/care to understand or change them? I'd guess if you asked most of those people whether they'd want to be more likely to find their lost devices they'd answer yes, but you'd still have a tough time convincing many of them to actually go into settings to change anything
- kderbyma 5y agoapple is a disease....having bought an M1...I feel like I am now sick...it's Been a general failure.....
- Asmod4n 5y agoSteve Jobs vision for the original iPhone was to only have mesh networking to connect you to the internet and keep mobile carriers out. Looks like someone picked that up once enough iDevices had been sold.
- Traster 5y agoI'm still waiting for Apple to mail me the check for my participation in the network. /s Seriously, in what world is it reasonable that tech companies think they can come along and be like "Oh hey, you know that THOUSAND dollar phone we sold you? Oh, well we're going to stick some of our own software on it so we can use it as infrastructure for a totally different product that we sell."
- tommit 5y agoyou can disable it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- itronitron 5y agoand 'recently deleted apps' used up 11% of their battery