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I recently bought an ebike that doesn't include GPS tracking. I was thinking of hiding an Apple AirTag under the seat, but then I read this: "AirTag is design
by anonymousiam 4y ago
I recently bought an ebike that doesn't include GPS tracking. I was thinking of hiding an Apple AirTag under the seat, but then I read this:
"AirTag is designed to discourage unwanted tracking. If someone else’s AirTag finds its way into your stuff, your iPhone will notice it’s traveling with you and send you an alert. After a while, if you still haven’t found it, the AirTag will start playing a sound to let you know it’s there.
Of course, if you happen to be with a friend who has an AirTag, or on a train with a whole bunch of people with AirTag, don’t worry. These alerts are triggered only when an AirTag is separated from its owner."
(https://www.apple.com/airtag/ https://www.apple.com/airtag/)
So in an effort to prevent stalkers from tagging victims, the AirTag beeps to give away the fact that it's tracking something "separated from its owner." This makes it useless for my use case because if my bike is stolen, it will be "separated from its owner."
- gruez 4y agoIt's super easy to disable the speaker though.
- Nextgrid 4y agoIt won't disable the alert on the thief's phone (if they use an iPhone or an Android with the tracker app), however it doesn't really need to as the alert could actually be beneficial in convincing the thief to simply abandon the bike then take time to find & disable the tracker all while they are being tracked and the owner (or ideally the police - though in practice they are useless) can show up at any moment. Even better if they get the alert once they've already brought it home as they're definitely better off moving the bike away from there rather than having the trail stop at their place.
- asdff 4y agoA lot of thieves just part the stolen bike out too and sell what they can for scrap value. They'd probably find the tracker and throw it aside.
- woleium 4y agoyou can buy ones with disabled speakers on eBay or Craigslist, should you not want to 'fix' your own.
- bigiain 4y agoI saw a project a while back where someone hacked up a fake AirTag (or perhaps flashed hacked firmware onto a real one?) that switched it's private key out in a deterministic pseudo-random way, so the stalker tracking sees it as a different AirTag every 6 or so hours and never triggers the alerts, but the owner still could query the FindMy service to see the locations for all the pseudo-random keys...
- Hamuko 4y agoAFAIK, the AirTags will only alert the thief once they bring the bike back to their "home" location. I definitely have an AirTag hidden in my bike since it's only like 25€ for additional peace of mind.