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How we built the Find My Device network with user security and privacy in mind
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- JohnMakin 3y ago"We made it secure by making all of our android devices poll for your location constantly." (paraphrasing) Sorry, I appreciate the writeup - I absolutely do not want my devices doing this. And of course it's on by default.
- 0xbadc0de5 3y agoAlways-on location tracking isn't about finding your lost devices - it's about the tracking data. The "feature" is just the hook to trick us into adopting it.
- dangus 3y agoAs a user of the feature on the Apple side I find the feature to be incredibly useful. It’s saved me from waiting in hour-long lost luggage lines at the airport on multiple occasions because I know not to bother waiting when my bag is in another country. My location was already being used for Find My for devices/theft protection and your cellular provider has access in a way that you can’t really limit. I think most users are basically getting an extra feature without much different to their privacy landscape (not to say that it’s an incredibly good privacy landscape…but really, someone concerned with corporations collecting their location data is already leaving their cell phone at home).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jsnell 3y agoThat doesn't seem like an accurate paraphrase at all. The article says nothing about polling constantly, nor does it make any kind of suggestion that polling constantly is what makes it secure.
- JohnMakin 3y agoWhat do you think this means? > "The Find My Device network locates devices by harnessing the Bluetooth proximity of surrounding Android devices. Imagine you drop your keys at a cafe. The keys themselves have no location capabilities, but they may have a Bluetooth tag attached. Nearby Android devices participating in the Find My Device network report the location of the Bluetooth tag."
- jnwatson 3y agoIt means that Bluetooth is doing its normal thing.
- bootloop 3y agoThat has nothing to do with bluetooth. It's scans for tags, but the location is still reported constantly by the phone.
- mecsred 3y agoBluetooth is a wireless protocol. It's "normal thing" is to connect two devices. It CAN identify and locate devices by abusing beacons, but saying "that's what Bluetooth does" is crazy. That's like a falcon x rocket destroying my house and someone tells me "that's just what a rocket does". No, someone flew it there.
- shuckles 3y agoBluetooth is passively looking for devices to connect to all the time. The alternative would be to require users to actively initiate connections, which would be a horrible experience.
- recursive 3y agoI've been using Bluetooth for at least a decade and I really believed this active connection was actually needed.
- IncreasePosts 3y ago> These end-to-end encrypted locations are contributed to the Find My Device network in a manner that does not allow Google to identify the owners of the nearby Android devices that provided the location data.
- adamomada 3y agoThere is for sure another manner that would allow google to identity the device owners though, but they left that part out
- jsnell 3y agoOh, do tell! What is the method?
- JohnMakin 3y agoAggregation of different data points in conjunction with whether a user used find my device recently. Really a bazillion methods. The fact they allegedly encrypted (their word there’s no break glass mechanism or backdoor) a single piece of location data doesn’t really matter when the other data they have in aggregate tells them precisely where you are, and this can only really help. It’s entirely reasonable at this point in history not to trust google marketing-speak that dances around stuff like this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jgalt212 3y agoBecause of this Apple and Google (and maybe tiktok) can infer a large percent of CIA employees.
- M95D 3y agoNot only that your device will poll for your location, but even if you have your location turned off (or no functional GPS at all), with BT enabled, Google will have your location from all the other people's phones around you. Basically, you can't listen to music and have your location hidden from Google at the same time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- taldo 3y agoAnd yet they couldn't agree with Apple on a protocol that could be implemented by both. Imagine how much better tracking you'd get with tags that could be picked up by either Android or iPhones. Especially in the _third world_ where Android phones are way more prevalent.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoIn Europe too, no need to go to third world. It's a US specific thing
- AndrewDucker 3y agoYup. I'm on Android, my wife is on Apple, and we can't get a device that we can both track.
- xs83 3y agoSo secure that my Galaxy device refuses to use it. Is there something in the Samsung Ecosystem that disables the use of the core android one? I know I can use Samsung Smart things but the rest of my life is in the Google Ecosystem and I would prefer to be able to track my phone through that, especially as last time I needed it Samsung required me to 2FA with my phone to use find my device
- kayson 3y agoIs there a more technical writeup? How is the aggregation implemented?
- kevincox 3y agoFrom the newer announcement https://developers.google.com/nearby/fast-pair/specifications/extensions/fmdn https://developers.google.com/nearby/fast-pair/specification...
- kevincox 3y agoIt's a shame that the report server is hard-coded (well implied). Imagine if the device could advertise a report URL and then you could receive reports without a Google account. The only thing that may be hard is forcing aggregation. However that could be accomplished with a Google "buffer" that holds messages until some threshold of reports for a given device is hit. Then it flushes them to the device owner's reporting server. This would also allow more use cases such as logging device location over time as a server owned by me may be trusted enough to decrypt and index the location reports.