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.

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.

It’s easy to imagine that this higher level of easy surveillance is going to efficiently send others down the same path.

Search engines get given all sorts of data by people who give away medical data, financial data, crimes, both as victim and as perpetrator, past and present.

Social media interests give away data about people as well.

The internet is one giant intelligence tool and your every move, your every click gives away stuff.

In the 90's I had a Visual Basic addon AI which could work out who was typing at the keyboard. There was no need to have login screens and passwords, your typing pattern identified you.

Today smart phone's can tell if its you from the pressure of your finger, the surface area and shapes made by your finger as it moves around the screen. Again no need for login screens, but some people do know just how often women go through their partners smart phones! I'm surprised more women dont play poker!

This information wont be made known for a very long time if at all because not everyone on the planet is using the tech. If the true scale of surveillance was known, it would have to be broken to them gently as it could cause civil unrest.

Carte blanche access to peoples computers has been going on since the internet appeared.

How exactly does one know of one's phone is being snooped on?

You will definitely know when they tell you.

I know of sense.com but perhaps there are others?

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-mo...

- amazon page (even if you buy from their website, they just order it to you off amazon): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CJGPHL9/

- install instructions: https://gist.github.com/flaviut/93a1212c7b165c7674693a45ad52...

- source code: https://github.com/flaviut/esphome/tree/emporia-vue

You can also get any of a variety of temperature sensors (I like SensorPush) and stick one in the fridge to get a pretty good idea of how much it's running the compressor.

Another thing to look at if there's central forced-air heating/cooling may be whether it's set to have the fan always running. That can be useful in balancing temperatures between floors, but it's still a fan using electricity to move air.

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

When the monthly cost gets up to a certain level, we clean the coils and it drops back down.

I ordered the additional sensor that I'll use for the heat pump and one more circuit and see if it does any better, if not, the Emporia seems reasonably priced for as many sensors as it has.

https://circuitsetup.us/

> It has an airtag (not an official supported use)

I'm surprised. That sounds like a great use for it, especially for a larger breed that runs fast.

Young Husky. Medium breed that can run far and sometimes doesn't listen (like a cat... but bigger)

They have pet trackers.. But I'm not sure if its because its transmitting a lot and its close to them on their collar.. In this case in on her going outside harness..

I often wonder about these services and if we can wrap them in enough privacy to make them feel safe to advanced users?

Which is fine by me. I'm just excited to have a way to get my cat back if she ever escapes outside.

We have a tracking collar for our dog. The actual tracker is around 1" x 2", and gives realtime reports via the cell network. it would be easy to use it to track a spouse or car or whatever.

Now, for tracking your cats around the house, I think that’s a better use of AirTags.

Obviously depends on how granular the smart metering is, but it sent chills down my spine.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/01/08/28c3-smart-meter...

Or perhaps they could correlate a person's anonymous internet activity with their use of electricity.

I think such things should be enshrined in law, however we've not reached that state with the law yet in most places - I don't think?

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.

So what happened? Crime rates are down, kinds these days do drugs and drink at lower rates than back then, I can't remember the last time I heard of a kid go missing... We now have many privacy-preserving options for emergency tracking so there's less of a reason for total control than ever. Even monitoring Internet usage - there are fewer "predators" out there and kids are better at recognising and avoiding them than ever. I don't get it.

I'll be very blunt: Do they really want to read text messages from their teenage daughter/son? They might regret that decision really fast.

> One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she's driving over the speed limit and yells at her

If he doesn’t trust her why is she driving his car?

People monitor their kids so their kids do and are exactly what they've been told to be, and nothing else.

I'm sorry, are you serious or is this a joke?

I think GP is trying to find ways to feel like they're giving their child freedom without actually giving them any at all. But it's hard to think of anything worse for freedom than attaching a camera to to someone. Yes, technically they wouldn't be directly prohibiting the child from anything, but the presence of a camera means the child is forced to assume that everything they do will be judged by the parent even when the parent has no present physical control over the child.

honestly it just sounds nuts that your you are even considering any of this but maybe things are that bad in the US these days i dunno

Or, you could ignore the overprotective parents and just let you kid run around. Maybe wait a few more years to align with your second grade goal, I don't know.

But it amazes me you live in a neighborhood where most parents don't trust their 10 year olds to take the bus.

Dealing with drug users is difficult. I'm not sure fare enforcement is the panacea you seem to think it is. But then again, I don't really know a solution.

When they decided to stop enforcing fares is just when the problem got really bad. I’m not sure what would happen if they started back to the old normal, but the current changing point is probably not a coincidence.

So why should I, or do I have a right to, keep my kids from doing the same?

We aren't only the product of our positive lessons. A lot of life is learned through burning yourself on the hot stove. And by and large, it usually doesn't kill you.

IMHO, no humans are self-actualized enough to possess omniscience and act ethically. We have too many neuroses.

And, at the more obvious end of the spectrum, all of the suburban crowd complaining about how their children fail to launch, lack initiative in life, and aren't independent.

After their entire childhood was spent being monitored and constantly corrected by the parent.

The mind boggles.

So I think a claim that "controlling parents" -> "adrift young adults" would be hard to support.

Kids need to learn from mistakes, but if not monitored, you can hit the opposite end where the lesson isn't learned because there are no real consequences. For instance, goofing off in high school won't give you consequences until you graduate high school at the earliest, and possibly not until you graduate collect (still goofing off) and suddenly hit a wall in terms of what you can get employment-wise.

And yes, sometimes kids get away with things if they aren't monitored 24/7. They're supposed to. Figuring out the boundaries of attempting that, and dealing with the consequences when you fail, is a very important lesson for children.

And frankly, the kids have the upper hand. Monitor texts and they'll switch to "Finsta"—or whatever came after that.

All it's going to do is mess up their ability to understand trust or cause them to avoid taking any sort of basic social risks.

Those are learning experiences too.

- These two girls were speeding to make it home by curfew, ran off the road, and died in a car fire over the side of this hill - don't speed if you're running late. Let me know, and get home safely.

- This is where a guy was on drugs and ran into a telephone pole. - don't do drugs. If you do drink and no longer feel comfortable in the situation, call me and I will pick you up to get you home. Don't try to drive.

- Here's the parking lot where my friend OD'd on Heroin. Don't try it. Not even once. There is a huge difference between weed and harder drugs, even though weed and harder drugs are sold by the same people. Stay clear of all of them if you can.

- Here's the cliff where my friend fell 60 feet and died trying to showboat his climbing skills. So many things today have been made extremely safe (car driving assistance, etc.) - you need to know which activities have real consequences and treat them accordingly.

- Here's the parking lot where my friend and I almost flipped his truck trying to do slides on snow at 60 mph. Don't do that.

It will be a rough day, but driving is a serious responsibility and learning from others' mistakes is better than making your own.

I don’t have kids but my parents were like this and I valued it immensely. They never wanted us to be in a position where we needed help but thought we couldn’t ask.

My father was an EMT for 20 years, overlapping most of my childhood. My memories (particularly of car trips) are peppered with stories like you describe. The "being there to help" part is the part I'd recommend you emphasize (and is something I try to do with my daughter). I carry some mental "scars" from my father's stories 30+ years later. Beyond a point the stories didn't offer any more lessons and were just disturbing.

(I don't hold any of this against my father. I think his heart was in the right place. I count myself lucky to have had the best parents in the world.)

Drinking is “doing drugs” and it sounds like you’re advocating for her to decide if she’s too drunk to drive based on how she feels, which is terrible advice.

God damn, alcohol is so endemic in society that sometimes people miss really obvious problems with how they think about it “because it’s not like ‘real’ drugs”.

And the drinking part, to clarify - preferably my daughter doesn’t drink until she’s in college and legal (“don’t do drugs”). But if she is at a place and has even one drink, she should call me to get home, rather than try to drive because she is no longer comfortable staying at the party.

I was at parties at age 13 and 14 that had drinking. I was never pressured into drinking and didn’t until I was older, but others could be peer pressured. A 16 year old at a party with alcohol or weed is not unrealistic, and if she makes a mistake and accepts a drink or a hit, I don’t want her to compound the mistake and end up with a DUI or putting her or someone else’s life in danger.

Or, as the classic Brass Eye segment put it: https://youtu.be/MIAJemmO-bg?t=238

> How do you approach that, without heavy surveillance? Did you just get lucky with good kids?

I think partly I got lucky that my son is somewhat risk averse, which rules out a lot of bad stuff he could do. But I also am not fooling myself into thinking he isn't doing dumb things and not telling me about it. I certainly understand the desire to heavily surveil your kids to protect them, but it just doesn't sit right with me. I think it sends the wrong message that he doesn't have to take responsibility and can always just rely on me to bail him out. So I'm willing to take the risk in order to give him a sense of personal responsibility. I don't know that I'm making the right choice, parenting seems to be mostly doing the best you can and having your kids usually turn out ok in spite of you.

Black Mirror is great in exposing how ideas which look good on the first look can have very dark side. I even thought some of these things would be great (e.g. recording everything you see) before watching BM, I didn't think at all about all the negative consequences. It's sobering.

That said, I share location with my wife and also monitoring our children. If you have full mutual trust with other person, there are no drawbacks but there are positive sides. Full trust implies that one doesn't monitor location constantly, that there's no jealousy or stalking, that's it's used basically when you're worried that something bad happened. If someone is late from school or work it's a relief if you see they're moving towards home or that they are at known location.

We had an ios family group set up with location sharing enabled, which was great when they were 12 and losing things all the time (using a phone as backpack lojack isn't necessarily cost efficient, but it was a nice accidental outcome). When they got a little older, they figured out how not to share with us. I was peeved, but proud. Privacy respected.

Of course it's pretty rare for children to actually press charges against their parent for that, but it has happened. Using computer software "designed or modified to" violate the law is also specifically mentioned to make it an aggravated offense, with maximum penalty of 3 years in prison.

Sadly, neither do most people.

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.

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.

You would have to regulate this at the integrated circuit supplier level.

Oops, China; good luck.

Note that a tracking device does not have to transmit any information in real time. Suppose someone wants to find out where you live. If they know that they will run into you again somewhere they could stick a device onto you that just records your movements into flash storage. Then next time they run into you, they retrieve it somehow over some close range wireless or maybe physically. Such a device won't be detected by the presence of signals: it doesn't connect to any mobile network or Wi-Fi or anything.

Or, such a device could just sporadically connect to a network to send a small packet of information, e.g. once every few days.

I don't know. Why AirTag work for a year by a CR2032 is because usually it only uses BLE to connect near Apple devices. GPS+LTE tracker drains much battery so it can't be practically run on CR2032. Only Apple (or Google) make it very usable this kind of device.

I don't even think you have to go to China. Any sufficiently motivated person can strap a GPS hat on a Raspberry Pi and make their own tracker, or do the same out of pedestrian electronic parts.

My goal is merely to try to drastically cut down on the more casual "I'd pay $20 to track my wife/SO/friend/whatever" style stalking that AirTags and the like enable, as well as giving victims an easier recourse in the event that a more knowledgeable or motivated adversary targets them. Tracking someone without their knowledge would give a restraining order, and tracking them after that would violate the restraining order which is a crime in all states afaik, and a felony in some of them. It won't outright stop people, but it at least gives victims some teeth to fight back with.

It boils down to the age old question about why make regulations that only ever effect people who are law abiding to begin with. Which isn't an argument against all regulation, but more of a question about what regulation actually hits the desired goal.

Right now any actually nefarious stalker will just get the $25 GPS tracker, put a decent battery on it, and stick it to the bottom of the car. They're not going to use an AirTag that is easily traced back to them and stands a good chance of notifying their target of the tracking. The kinds of stalkers who use AirTags are the low effort losers.

My thought process was discouraging some kind of "sure, we'll sell you a piece of paper with a tracker stapled to it. Don't take out the staples, wink wink nudge nudge". It's a tradeoff between making sure that people can swap them out if their provider goes out of business, but also deterring people from casually trying to repurpose them. I was thinking something like rivets. They're totally removable, but not something you'd do without motivation.

> 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.

Yeah, this is exactly what I was thinking! It should absolutely be point of sale based. Both to prevent casual stalking, but also to protect normal people that just forget to register them. I'm a scatterbrain; I could totally see myself forgetting that I need to register it if they leave that up to me.

> 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.

Currently, I believe you can tell your phone to not report the AirTag (or similar for the other similar devices). That works well, but it doesn't stop other people's devices from reporting your location. So your phone would have to be able to broadcast a message that stops everyone else's phones from reporting the location of the tracker. Even if only 10% of the population enables it, I spend a lot of time in Bluetooth range of at least 10 other people. It seems like a platform killer to allow that.

I want such a thing to exist, but I can't find a technical way for people to stop a random tracker in their vicinity without just killing trackers as a whole. I'm not an expert on the topic, and I'm a little buzzed as it is, so there might be a solution I'm not seeing here.

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?"

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.

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.

So basically everyone is like this in some way, or will be.

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.

The airtag/tile makes this much harder, perhaps the airtag should loudly beep or notify nearby devices whenever it's being actively located.

you can share location for 1 hour or until end of day rather than Indefinitely.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210514

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.

I’m shocked that the very security-minded Apple doesn’t do this. I shared my location indefinitely with my wife and was shocked that I didn’t get a notification when she was tracking me. How is this not an option for the indefinite location share?

> The airtag/tile makes this much harder, perhaps the airtag should loudly beep or notify nearby devices whenever it's being actively located.

AirTags do have a feature like this. If an AirTag is detected on your person, it will make an alarm sound. Basically they can’t be carried near a device that isn’t their owner’s device for long without sounding an alarm.

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?

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.

Hard disagree here - most people are not going to go all obsessive on their spouses, kids, etc.

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.

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.

That depends. If that's a way to start up a conversation, it might lead to a lot more location-checking.

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).

Woman puts Airtags in a car. Her husband isn't able to find them, even using Apple's "anti-stalk" features. Ergo, Apple needs to do more.

I ask - what new insight did this article offer on Airtags? I don't think anyone can conclude either way on the effectiveness of Apple's "safety measures" when it comes to Airtags, from this small anecdote.

In my mind, the article buries the Lede on the real discussion - should Apple be doing these measures at all? I find that issue far from settled when this article takes it for granted that not only should Apple take these safety measures, they should do more!

The author also seems to be somewhat deceptive - "I sound like a terrible wife, but it's for journalism!" No, it seems like the author played a prank on her husband a while back and used that to neuroticaly follow him, then tried to excuse that behavior by writing this fluff piece.

Anyways, I do think there is interesting discussion to be had about Airtags and if/what Apple should be doing to prevent unwanted tracking. However, this article didn't have that discussion or contribute to it in a meaningful way.

"My husband, of course, had agreed to this in principle, but didn’t realize just how many devices I had planted on him. Of the seven trackers, he found only two: a Tile he felt in the breast pocket of his coat and an AirTag in his backpack when he was looking for something else. “It is impossible to find a device that makes no noise and gives no warning,” he said, when I showed him the ones he missed."

which I read as "Apple needs to improve, but still drastically better than everything else out there"

I am not in the market for AirTags, but if you are completely scatterbrained and this provides you a helpful way to manage your stuff, AirTags seem to be least bad way of doing this.

"Apple needs to improve, but still drastically better than everything else out there"

Where does the article talk about this class of device? Nowhere is a competing product mentioned or compared against. Even a Bluetooth keyfob, used to track keys by emitting a sound (and widely available) could have been used there.

I like and agree with what you said, I just don't think the article makes those points, to its detriment.

I mean if you're paranoid, I'm sure there's detectors that can find bluetooth signals and whichever other technologies they use (I'm fairly sure GPS is passive, that is, they only need to receive satellite signals, not send anything).

Anecdote: I used to work for a company that did a lot of wireless wearable stuff and early on in COVID lockdown I had a Linux tool: bluetoothctl, running while I was testing some code down in the basement of my house. The first indication I had that my wife was home was the appearance of a Fitbit device in the scan, followed by a couple of unknown phones as she and a friend walked up to the house.

Not unexpected, but it was that sudden appearance of devices (I live far outside the city) that really drove home how much data we're throwing off all the time without thinking about it.

While I understand where you're coming from, I think there's value in adding to the chorus when it comes to putting pressure on a company to rethink a strategy.

Certainly, while articles such as this may not be news to you or I, they are likely to be news to a number of people on HN, their friends & family, etc.

> The author also seems to be somewhat deceptive - "I sound like a terrible wife, but it's for journalism!" No, it seems like the author played a prank on her husband a while back and used that to neuroticaly follow him, then tried to excuse that behavior by writing this fluff piece.

This point misses the mark IMO. The issue with AirTags at their core is that they permit people who are deceptive and shady to do bad things much easier than they could before.

I think the cat's out of the bag now on this type of tech though. Tile's been around for a while, AirTags are now everywhere, the goal now should be developing detection systems (which shouldn't be too hard).

But that's just not true. Seriously, right now, go to Amazon and type in "GPS Tracker" and look at the results:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=gps+tracker

Literally $30 gets you a 1oz cellular magnetized tracker you put a SIM into for real time tracking anywhere with cell coverage with voice monitoring included! Literally for tracking and they proudly advertise it. No warnings or nags about "a device is following you", no noises. Comes with Prime shipping, get it as soon as Sunday February 13!

Apple being Apple may well have brought more publicity to the issue but no, AirTags do not do what you say they do. If anything there are reasonable arguments that Apple has been too careful to the extent of making them pretty irritating in family/friends usage where everyone gets nagged for normal shared item activity and cannot use them in a shared way (despite being able to do so for devices!).

Because needing to also get a working SIM card is a pretty substantial “oh, you’ll also need…”

At a quick glance, the cheapest T-Mobile plan is $60/mo, or $45/mo if you're adding a second line to an existing plan.

You can also get a SIM card intended for IoT usage, but this is probably not something your average non-technical person would know how to do. I also expect that most Americans are unfamiliar with buying a SIM card in a way that is not direct from a mobile carrier.

In your circles.

There are entire industries which rely on 'burners', wisely or not, for various logistics tasks involved in deriving tax free income from controlled substances.

Buying a SIM card with cash is as easy as wanting to and doing some searching, or just driving around and looking for dollar stores: the phone provider you want is in the same parking lot.

https://prepaid.t-mobile.com/plan-detail/t-mobile-connect

  Best Seller in Cell Phone SIM Cards
  SpeedTalk Mobile $5 Prepaid GSM Sim Card for GPS Tracking Pet Senior Kid Child Car Smart Watch Devices Locators 30-Day Wireless Service
  3 4 out of 5 stars 8,954
  $5.00 
  Today 2 PM - 6 PM

As of early 2021, 157 governments required some form of proof of identity before a person could purchase a SIM card, but what form of ID and what other information may be required varies.

https://www.privacyinternational.org/long-read/3018/timeline...

Bringing more attention and publicity to it, and claiming to have actually solved the privacy problems when in fact they haven't has actually made it easier for stalkers. The proof is in the pudding: Similarly google search guides on disabling the speaker on AirTags, you'll find hundreds just for the one product. Likewise, compare sales of AirTags to the GPS Trackers on Amazon.

Whenever a big trusted company makes a product more accessible to the average person, they're making it easier as a whole.

Even in a strict technical sense, having it visible in the Find My App that people already are familiar with and use to locate their airpods, apple watches, etc., that alone gives the infrastructure benefit to make it simpler.

You know one has a convenience factor to it, right? And it’s a known brand and has an ecosystem built up around it… These misc trackers on Amazon don’t have that… why would you ever consider comparing the sales as an argument?

The only thing you could theoretically attribute to Apple is that it is now much more known that this can happen. That is both good (you can now look for it) and bad (dumb people will try to use this to stalk/steal, not realising that they are tied to their AppleID, and thus to their SIM, IMEI, MAC, and device serial number and thus to them).

You need to read more of the article.

> Some states, including New York, where we live, have laws criminalizing this sort of thing. Not wanting to break the law, or my husband’s trust, I had asked him for permission.

It may be fluff, but it wasn't deceptive.

Great if criticizing them sets a baseline for all other vendors, but given how the US government decided Apple was price-fixing ebooks while ignoring Amazon's monopsony (2012), I'm not really confident that they'll do something that isn't essentially a bill-of-retainer to limit Apple while not solving the tracker privacy problem at all.

Coming out with "Apple is doing a poor job" just once isn't going to move the needle. People have to hear it over and over in a relatable way.

Maybe it hits different for other people, but I don't appreciate being given a conclusion without any good discussion

I imagine, however, that there are readers for whom this information is novel, and for whom the first-person journalistic style is insightful. In this case, the value here is obvious.

You can, or, alternatively, you can simply acknowledge you’re not the intended audience for the article, and that you may have over-stepped rhetorically in declaring a complete absence of value with respect to insight or novelty in the article; which is there, and obviously so.

For example, I found this comment section much more enlightening than the article, because commenters here made better discussion than I found in the article.

Not to be crude, but that seems like a personal deficiency, not a demerit of the article. The "commenters here" who "made better discussion than I found in the article," are discussing the implications of the article's information and presenting interesting perspectives. If you didn't find anything of value, perhaps you could try thinking a bit harder or for a bit longer. Others have done so successfully.

For example, this is actually a story about a mother worried about her child. I really appreciate that! What I don't appreciate is someone using that to present unsupported positions.

I am attacking the piece that she wrote and it's because I don't think it was a good piece.

She planted the tracking devices on him with his permission, after discussing with him that she wanted to write a piece on the experience. This information is right in the article.

>[LandAirSea] which sells about 15,000 devices per month... tells these callers they should go to the police, because they will need a subpoena to determine who owns the device they discovered.

>My husband, of course, had agreed to this in principle, but didn’t realize just how many devices I had planted on him. Of the seven trackers, he found only two..It is impossible to find a device that makes no noise and gives no warning

>For all the bad press the AirTags have gotten...at least I was consistently getting notifications they were following me...The privacy dangers of the other trackers were way worse

> “I’m worried,” I told my husband. “I want you to take her to the hospital.”

> “Doctors always tell us to take the baby to the E.R. whenever we call about anything,” he replied, exasperated. (This was true.) “She is fine. She is eating and playing and happy. This is not an emergency.”

> He eventually caved and set out for the hospital a half-hour away. Knowing he was already annoyed by me, I did not want to pepper him with questions about how it was going.

> Instead, I turned to the location-monitoring devices that I had secretly stashed in our car a week earlier.

> “Doctors always tell us to take the baby to the E.R. whenever we call about anything,” he replied, exasperated. (This was true.) “She is fine. She is eating and playing and happy. This is not an emergency.”

> He eventually caved and set out for the hospital a half-hour away.

The next article writes itself doesn't it?

In 2018, the United States spent about $3.6 trillion on healthcare, which averages to about $11,000 per person. Relative to the size of the economy, healthcare costs have increased over the past few decades, from 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1960 to 18 percent in 2018. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) project that by 2028, such costs will climb to $6.2 trillion, or about $18,000 per person, and will represent about 20 percent of GDP.

https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2020/04/why-are-americans-paying-m...

Recently during a bout of covid my son's tongue was blue and he couldn't figure out what was up. My wife wanted to the go to ER, the doctor said to go to the ER. I said, "no, there's another explanation for this and nobody is losing a night of sleep over this". The next day we noticed the blue tongue happened after taking some blue-colored vitamin gummies.

Add to that that depending on your health-care plan, it could cost you thousands of dollars!

"Here, let me convince my husband that he needs to go take the baby to the hospital. Now, let's stalk him to see if he actually did it!"

Anyways, this turned me off. It could have been "forgiven" (if this word even applies) had it contributed something meaningful. Sadly, it didn't, so it just comes off as neurotic stalking.

> It could have been "forgiven" (if this word even applies) had it contributed something meaningful

Just because you are aware of the dangers of tracking and how these devices work it doesn't mean others are equally aware.

However, what seems to have happened in reality, is that they had previously played a harmless game of "find the Airtags". Then, some time later, possibly a large period, she uses those Airtags to track the husband. It's hard to say in either direction if the husband knew and expected to be tracked to the hospital. I think that was a deliberate choice - but it still comes off deceptive, if this is just happenstance.

If any of this had contributed meaningfully to the main points, I would tolerate it a lot more - that's my biggest contention. The fact that the author isnt a perfect person is just a side gripe that I have with plenty other articles.

Articles don't normally highlight the virtues of the journalist where that's not relevant to the subject of the article.

Not just "let's find airtags today" and then "boohoo I've been tracking you without permission". Wouldn't make sense. He was not surprised when his phone notified him that a tag was tracking him after a day in Manhattan.

Also, this is an opinion/editorial piece, so whether the author watched their spouse the entire time or if the author pieced the evening together after the fact while writing this article is up for speculation.

Ask the author: https://mobile.twitter.com/kashhill

Let us know what she says.

The author also seems to be somewhat deceptive

Let us know what she has to say about that, too.

Or are you going to make up another excuse to hide behind the anonymity of HN so you can throw around a bunch of insulting questions in public without bothering to speak directly to the person you're criticizing?

“I drove over my husband with an F150 for journalism. Ford clearly needs to do more.”

Furthermore, there's a place for journalism that grounds a hypothetical experience in descriptive prose / photography in order to transform abstract facts to something closer to lived experience. In that aforementioned HN post I learned about using those devices for stalking as a hypothetical, but this article's actual photographs did make me uncomfortable and drove home the ramifications.

Apple no, but law makers should require a licence to use those. This is not a tech that anybody should be able to use on a whim. Too much potential for abuses.

Not to mention the more there are, the bigger the cake for a nation that want to get control of the biggest offline spying network of all time. Somebody is going to crack that thing sooner or later. There will be an NSO for airtags.

But, you know they are here.

They can be turned off.

They require an internet connection.

They are not meant for tracking, and intent is important.

They provide other features than tracking.

They are expensive, and battery don't last. People won't use them to track their ex wife for months.

It's like comparing a gun and a knife. Sure, you can kill with a knife, but it's harder, and initially the knife is made for cutting carrots.

But as a forgetful person, I got a pack of four on the day they were released. I used one when shipping an important, time sensitive and expensive item to a client. It was a huge value compared to the usual tracking of packages. I could see exactly when it moved from customs to an airplane, and surprisingly the location even updated in flight! I used and am still using this data, many times to confirm when the item was actually on the way or not, and if related travel and work can be done or not. It's saved thousands of dollars.

Another time, I was just about to board a train from Paris to Luxembourg when my iphone notified me that I left my bag behind (at a cafe in the station). I bought 8 more after that and put them in anything of value I have the experience to leave behind somewhere. Bags, ski boots, glasses case, inside the ear cup of my good headphones. Come to think of it, I should put one in my work notebook. Early in my career I had a work trip to sketch all of the dimensions of some heavy machinery so I could automate it (replace actuators and control them with an added PLC). I lost the notebook and had to go back, which was probably a $20k mistake in travel costs + not working on other projects.

I mostly accept it because I'm aware of how trivial it is to get a cheap GPS+SIM tracker that's even better for nefarious purposes, so worrying about AirTags seems a bit overblown.

Imagine this included as part of shipping. Vendor puts an airtag (or equivalent commercial item) and once you receive, you "turn off" this tracking device (with a code or NFC) confirming receipt of the package, either disabling the device or enabling it for another (return?) shipping request.

Ideally, eventually legislation will exist to constrain the capabilities of such trackers. With the current state of Congress I'm not sure this will happen at a federal level in the US.

If more people knew about the piggybacking feature of Airtags, I think few would opt in.

We have a number of initiatives in the works to help allay concerns. I would be curious if the community here has any suggestions. I know our very existence is controversial - so please be kind - I'm here to listen.

"We see data as an important part of our business model that allows us to keep the core Life360 services free for the majority of our users, including features that have improved driver safety and saved numerous lives." — You

"In 2020, the company made $16 million—nearly 20 percent of its revenue that year—from selling location data, plus an additional $6 million from its partnership with Arity." — The Markup

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/12/06/the-popular-family-...

This is the part where you respond how you're sharing surveillance data to the CDC for people's own good, and that you've stopped selling "precise location data".

I'll make a few points:

1) Stalking is completely different than a data platform used for targeted advertising and research.

2) Good minds can disagree on how user data should be used. We decided to shut down our data business because it wasn't worth the distraction - we have over $200m of revenue and it is not core to our business so we decided to move on. It should be noted we have always been extremely transparent with our customer and allowed anyone, whether a free or paying user, to have fine grain control over how we use data.

3) I am not positioning us as a more-private alternative to Apple. If this is a real problem that is emerging, I'd like to understand how we can address it. There are a lot of smart minds here.

4) Our user base is largely middle American moms - this is not the place we go to do PR!

I'm now going on record as saying pink unicorns eat the cotton candy shed by the fairies which will NEVER stop.

Why should you being on record about data from your users be treated any differently to mine about pink unicorns? What consequence is there for you personally if you decide to flip that and say "Lol, I believed that at the time too but then we got an offer..." Would you personally go to prison for fraud, for example? Would you personally go bankrupt - against your will, like it or not?

How would you know?

AirTags has a much broader network than us as of now. Part of why we bought Tile is because we can expand their network. We aren't as big as Apple but we have about 10% of devices so it will get us way up the S curve.

So I could see it becoming more of an issue, which is why I'm looking for ideas. One thought would be to rate limit updates - at some frequency you get 90% of the benefit for lost items (since they don't move unless it was lost on say a train) but it dramatically hampers more nefarious use cases. That is just one thought. Or perhaps requiring ID verification and registering each device to a real human.

ID verification is the way to go IMO. So much stalking isn't like in movies, it's just seemingly normal people seeing how far they can push things and get away with it. And potentially some way to get people to register what it's being used for, as well as a way to register it missing. That would be very useful in a stalking case to cross-reference with how a the alledged stalker claims the tracker ended up in someone's bag/car/etc and could potentially be the break through that gets the conviction

I think we will end up with ID verification - I bet Apple could do that too. Then you'd be risking a felony if you use the product illegally.

I'm confused, now you're admitting that stalking is an active part of the product and this has gone on for years.

I'm talking about Tile devices - that is where we've yet to see anything concrete, and as mentioned we don't yet have a network that rivals AirTags. But we want to get ahead of it.

You can't convince the police or a judge that you dropped the tag in someone's car if you're supposed to be using it on your cat's collar for example.

Or at the expense of making it a little bigger, superglue something like a usb stick and you've always got an excuse to have it in your pocket until you "lose" it. Hell, isn't not wanting to lose a coat that you claim to often leave places a good enough reason to have one in your pocket?

1. If I was stalked by someone using your product, would I contact your customer support?

2. If I was doing the stalking, would I contact your customer support?

Pretty sure the answer would be no in both cases. In 1), I wouldn't necessarily even know it is your product. In 2), what am I going to say to customer support? "I'm trying to stalk my husband and your product isn't working well."?

Subpoenas might reveal a percentage of stalking activities, but if the OPs post is true, then I don't even think police would be involved here.

I only want to enable Bluetooth on my Android when I am searching for keys - and I am happy with the admittedly large compromise that I need to be near the keys to find them. I do wish to be able to scan for keys, but only as I demand. For that purpose the App does not need any location information at all.

I don’t want to have any location information shared with your company at any point in time, and I never want to be scanning for other people’s Tile devices either (I only have Bluetooth on when I am actively using it for speakers, which is rare). The App nags for many more permission’s than I wish to share.

When Life360 sold Couple in 2016, did it sell all the data that users had stored up to that point as well? As best I can tell it was announced via tweet and sold to what looked like a 1-person dev shop.

Myself and a number of others who used to use the app have often wondered this[1]. If I’m incorrect on anything in this article I would be happy to edit it, but I’d really like to know.

https://rymc.io/blog/2019/decoupling/

Would you also be comfortable with me linking to this discussion/comment on that post as a 2022 edit? I still get people emailing me asking if anything was ever determined on it.

I'm most excited for the upcoming UWB tracker, and especially for the work that Google and Tile are apparently doing to ensure devices with UWB support are all compatible. I was wondering if you could give a quick update on the status of UWB tracking on Android? As far as I know, there's only two devices that support it (Samsung's S21 Ultra and S22 Ultra), but it hasn't been confirmed whether Tile's UWB tracker is compatible. As mentioned in the article, BLE tracking isn't as accurate as UWB, so I assume that UWB support would be necessary for most of these tracking concerns to materialize with Tile's trackers.

One thing to note - UWB is very short range now. Even now AirTags and Tile are primarily BLE. Upcoming chips and standards updates will be dramatically increasing range. I think that is when the magic happens.

> 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.

Doesn't solve the Tile problem, of course. A solution there might be counter-intuitive: make the battery worse. Its a lot harder to stalk someone if you need to re-seed a device every few days. Of course, i can barely remember to charge my phone, nevermind keys, so that might kill tile's utility all together.

Or, maybe you could have some sort of "did someone else's tile follow me home" sort of feature. You set your home location, and if any tile that isn't yours is at home, you get notified. (unless the owner is with it, or you white-list one for eg. partner's, children, etc). This tells you if someone planted you with it to stalk (you'd have to have tile app even if you don't have one i guess). Don't tiles support findmy? That means that any apple device will already warn people, so you just need to cover android users. Maybe the alexa/sidewalk partnership can impl similar features for when you come home? Maybe partner with google for built-in tracking warning standards? If they're open to it.

I think > half the use of tile is "ring my X at home" where x is probably mostly keys, or "did i leave X at Y place". Based on this, you might be able to not track tiles everywhere, but just at pre-set locations. Only if you set it to a "lost mode" can you track it everywhere outside of certain pre-set locations, but then it'll beep and have annoying antistalking features like airtags - where you notify people nearby. Maybe orphaned tiles could try to collect to random bluetooth devices after a period of time to make their presence known? It would help people who didnt set up an app to listen ahead of time. That could be annoying though if the balance isn't right. Can probs still be abused, but should make it a complex task, and you can never stop everyone anyways.

----

aside, I'm surprised tile never tried to build any static infra in major urban areas to supplement their phone-based network (which seemed lacking when i used it compared to airtags). Do you see the use of Alexa/Sidewalk as a significant boost or advantage? Have you considered things like LoRaWAN based networks (thing network etc) as a supplement? A lot of that is built in major areas, and would just need a mapping step which may be able to be collected by existing users phones+tags in day to day use.

--

Aside again: this seems like a fun problem to work on, are you hiring?

What made it funny one time was when I was between jobs, and she went to her gynecologist after work. Even though she told me, I forgot, and the map only showed that there was a divorce lawyer's office in the parking lot. I really needed a hug when she walked in the door.

A fine example of why pervasive tracking is terrible for relationships. I'm assuming based on your tone that you were calm and collected and didn't fly off the handle with accusations when she got home. But I think there are many people who would give into their insecurities (we all have them) and create a big mess with this sort of knowledge. The "accidental" nature of it just makes it worse.

I'm getting a new car soon, and I'm weighing losing the utility of the things in the app vs. my desire not to be tracked. It's really annoying that I have to make that trade off.

This notably allow one to easily create a tracker that is silent and potentially smaller than an AirTag. Also easier to hid in a daily object since all you need is basically a nRF51822 and a battery.

People who don't own an iPhone, or in general a recent iPhone might be tracked without their knowledge (and, obviously, their consent).

The potential of misuse of this kind of tool is so great, we should really regulate against those.

So why is it most conversations focus on the AirTag? What is it that the AirTag does better/worse/differently to the other options out there?

AirTags have a huge advantage in that they use ALL iPhones as part of the tracking network, regardless of whether the iPhone owner has an AirTag themself. This allows them to work over short ranges with a tiny battery as they only need to be close enough to any iPhone for them to be trackable.

AirTags are (at least as far as I can tell) maybe a bit easier to use for this purpose than other tech, but that's not quite the point: we didn't have these discussions earlier because people didn't realise they were discussions we needed to have.

As another data point, I've met several people who put AirTags on their dogs, and have been disappointed by how poorly they've worked: if the dog runs off and there's no-one with an iPhone around, the AirTag is no help. I have a battery-powered GPS and GPRS tracker on my dog, which works just about anywhere. The AirTag-using dog owners just don't know these things exist.