Silenced AirTags With Disabled Speakers Are Popping Up for Sale Online (gizmodo.com) 72
To make it harder for stalkers to abuse them, Apple included (and has since upgraded) several safety features that will alert someone to the presence of a nearby AirTag that's not their own, including an audible beep. But according to PCMag, one Etsy seller was, up until very recently, selling AirTags with the speaker physically disabled, raising privacy concerns once again. From a report: The AirTag, a small, easy-to-carry device about the size of a quarter, relies on Apple's Find My network which leverages millions of Apple devices to discreetly keep tabs on the location of the trackers and report that information back to each tag's registered user. The general idea behind the AirTag was that users could attach one to their keys, their backpack, or to other valuable items, and be able to quickly locate them if lost. To prevent their misuse, such as using an AirTag to track someone without their knowledge, iOS users would be eventually notified if a tracker registered to someone else was nearby, while Android users would have to rely on an audible beep that would start chirping three days after an AirTag was separated from its owner.
The product was ripe for abuse -- a concern we emphasized in our initial review of the AirTags -- and a couple of months after their debut Apple addressed those concerns with promised updates that would see Android users getting similar notifications as iOS users when an AirTag was nearby through a new Tracker Detect app that allowed Android users to more easily spot the devices. And the timeframe for when the trackers would start beeping after being away from its registered owner was shortened to a "random time inside a window that lasts between 8 and 24 hours," according to a CNET report.
The product was ripe for abuse -- a concern we emphasized in our initial review of the AirTags -- and a couple of months after their debut Apple addressed those concerns with promised updates that would see Android users getting similar notifications as iOS users when an AirTag was nearby through a new Tracker Detect app that allowed Android users to more easily spot the devices. And the timeframe for when the trackers would start beeping after being away from its registered owner was shortened to a "random time inside a window that lasts between 8 and 24 hours," according to a CNET report.
Relax, they are the most detectable trackers (Score:5, Interesting)
GPS trackers have been around for a while, they are undetectable and make no noise.
Even if you disable the speakers on an AirTag you can still use an Android or iPhone to find out if one has been near you for a while, no speaker makes it slightly harder to find but the iPhone app at least has directions as to where it is that gets you very close.
AirTags are not the things you should be worried about, but they are a helpful tool for protecting stuff you think may get stolen.
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GPS trackers have been around for a while, they are undetectable and make no noise.
The ones on TV shows usually have a flashing red light and often even beep -- both for some (stupid) reason.
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It's called entertainment.
Realism generally takes a back seat to drama and excitement, which is why action movies tend to be in the top ten lists and documentaries generally aren't. (There are a very few exceptions but they are just that: exceptions.)
There's an old adage in movie making -- never tell the audience something that you can show them.
So you get countdown timers on bombs, colourful graphics on the nmap scan of the bad guy's computer network, and so on.
Again, that's entertainment.
Re:Relax, they are the most detectable trackers (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Relax, they are the most detectable trackers (Score:4, Interesting)
Purpose built gps trackers tend to be quite a bit larger (due more to market applications than hardware limitations)
Baloney: [walmart.com] Bigger, yes. Quite a bit bigger? No.
and require a subscription fee to pay for the cellular modem link used to convey location.
And? If you're being stalked, I think a couple of bucks for a subscription isn't really going to present a "hurdle" to the bad person's objectives.
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The point of cost is adoption, a monthly fee for 1 minute reporting being the price of the BLE tracker itself slows adoption whereas a one time purchase and it p
Yes, he picked the one that showed you were wrong (Score:2)
you picked a GPS tracker on the smaller end.
The fact there is in fact one that is small negates your entire original point, even if someone else makes on the size of a car.
Just admit it and move on instead of trying to gaslight us all about how your invalid post in any way made sense.
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Purpose built gps trackers tend to be quite a bit larger (due more to market applications than hardware limitations)
So you have the reading comprehension and temperament of a toddler. Got it.
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Did you even look at the other products on your own link? The BLE trackers are all about the dame size while you picked a GPS tracker on the smaller end. There are many other GPS trackers appearing in similar products that are quite a bit larger. None of the BLE trackers are large while many of the GPS trackers are, so the statement is correct. The point of cost is adoption, a monthly fee for 1 minute reporting being the price of the BLE tracker itself slows adoption whereas a one time purchase and it piggybacks off all vanilla iPhones means it’s going to get far higher adoption rates. Those budget rates typically are once per hour or day.
All pointless if the person tracking you wants to track you. Look, it doesn't matter if it's bluetooth or gps.. It tracks..
I showed you a SMALL device that links to cellular. It tracks.
Ban all the fucking apple tags you want. I'll still track you for a nominal fee. And no, you'll never know it. Because I'll use a small device and I'll pay the $8/month for a daily SATELLITE ping.
The only thing the apple scenario will do is stop "casual" or "random" tracking. Anyone who wants to track anyone for any re
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All pointless if the person tracking you wants to track you. Look, it doesn't matter if it's bluetooth or gps.. It tracks..
I showed you a SMALL device that links to cellular. It tracks.
I simply refuted the point that larger gps trackers weren’t common, the typical use case is to track larger assets or items and as such do not need to be miniature and favor a larger battery for months, perhaps years, of runtime over “short” periods of a month or less. That’s why similar items in the link you provided were large. There isn’t as much of a market for the miniature ones, as as such they fall beneath the purview of public awareness.
Ban all the fucking apple tags you want. I'll still track you for a nominal fee. And no, you'll never know it. Because I'll use a small device and I'll pay the $8/month for a daily SATELLITE ping.
Where was I calling for a ba
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Baloney: [walmart.com] Bigger, yes. Quite a bit bigger? No.
The problem with a tracker of that size is its battery life tends to be quite short, particularly if you want reasonably real-time tracking. Most trackers are larger (think deck of cards) in order to support a larger battery or plug into an external power source.
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Baloney: [walmart.com] Bigger, yes. Quite a bit bigger? No.
The problem with a tracker of that size is its battery life tends to be quite short, particularly if you want reasonably real-time tracking. Most trackers are larger (think deck of cards) in order to support a larger battery or plug into an external power source.
Only an obstacle if you aren't okay with tracking the person's car. Automobile trackers can be wired directly into the vehicles electrical system and that gives you an, effectively, infinite amount of power.
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Do those little GPS trackers actually work though? To fit all that in such a small case the antennas must be severely compromised (one for GPS, one for cellular), meaning when hidden in or on a car the reception is going to be pretty bad.
With a silenced AirTag the victim's own phone tracks them on behalf of the attacker.
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Do those little GPS trackers actually work though?
Yes. They work very well. We use them for asset tracking. They get wired directly into the batteries for our generators (a commonly stolen item). The small 12v 18AH Lead-Acid battery will power them for.... a year? two years? The power requirements are minuscule. The battery will go dead from self-discharge long before the GPS unit drains it of power.
One doesn't _have_ to use the GPS satellites to get a GPS location. WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) are terrestrial beacons and are part of the GPS syst
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GPS trackers not that large and can last a while (Score:2)
GPS trackers are larger (more battery needed), these are quite a bit smaller. They also last a lot longer than GPS trackers.
I had a luggage GPS tracker I bought a few years ago that was pretty compact, and it lasted easily 3-4 weeks. You could set it to broadcast locations at various intervals to stretch out the battery life... if you are trying to stalk someone having a device broadcast just once during the middle of the night does exactly what you need and you can get weeks of use out of it. It would ma
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If they transmit their location, then by definition that transmission must be detectable. That's similar to AirTags, which by definition must be detectable in some way to be able to transmit their location.
In the case of passive GPS trackers they must be collected at some point to retrieve the data they might have recorded.
Theoretically but not practically (Score:1)
If they transmit their location, then by definition that transmission must be detectable
A luggage tracker I have you can set to send out location just once per day or so. Not very detectable.
Realistically are any GPS trackers using cell data to transmit going to be detectable even if they are transmitting constantly?
Very few people have gear to even detect cell transmissions around them, and if they did the tracker would be lost in a sea of all of the other cellular signals around us, including our own pho
Re: Relax, they are the most detectable trackers (Score:2)
"The product was ripe for abuse" (Score:5, Insightful)
AirTags weren't the first tracker to market - several others have existed for almost a decade. So did anyone scream about Tile being "ripe for abuse"?
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Only when Apple when released their trackers.
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Yes, some people did, but the profile of the objections rises in concert with the profile of the products, and Apple puts a major spotlight on things, provoking a lot more people to consider it.
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Nope.
Only when Apple when released their trackers.
Not only have plenty of people objected, but there have been [hackneygazette.co.uk] plenty [newsweek.com] of people [kwch.com] (mostly men) convicted [nbcchicago.com] for abusing [law.com] GPS tags.
Funny how it's only when people start criticising Apple products that a whole load of shills turn up to "protect" them. Apple are grown ups, they don't need your protection.
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A lot of people aren't aware something exists until Apple starts selling it. Kind of the definition of a closed ecosystem.
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A lot of people aren't aware something exists until Apple starts selling it. Kind of the definition of a closed ecosystem.
I know blaming all the ills of the world on Apple but this time you are grasping at straws. I used these things for years before Apple made the AirTag. When running the search "Bluetooth tracker tag" on Amazon it returned:
1-16 of over 1,000 results for "bluetooth tracker tag"
Before the AirTag hit the market and it still returns:
1-16 of over 1,000 results for "bluetooth tracker tag"
... after the AirTag hit the market. There is nothing, literally, noting new about stalkers using bluetooth tags.
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yet here we are, not talking about the tech until the Apple fan bois had it in there hands. hrmmmm.
I think I feel the same way as you, holding a HandSpring Treo 600 some 18 years ago while someone tries to explain to me that Apple invented smart phones a few years later.
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yet here we are, not talking about the tech until the Apple fan bois had it in there hands. hrmmmm.
I think I feel the same way as you, holding a HandSpring Treo 600 some 18 years ago while someone tries to explain to me that Apple invented smart phones a few years later.
The only reason this story is featured here is to clickbait obsessive compulsive little suckers like you who get a micro orgasm every time you type 'Apple hipster' and 'Apple fan boi'. Stalkers discovered bluetooth tags way, way, way, way, way, before the AirTag was even a thought in Tim Cooks mind.
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You may want to re-read this thread before replying. You seem to have made some erroneous assumptions that have made your ad hominem fall flat.
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You may want to re-read this thread before replying. You seem to have made some erroneous assumptions that have made your ad hominem fall flat.
What ad hominem? It was a dispassionate scientifically sound description of you.
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Remember:
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Also, Apple's tracking legitimately works better because every phone is listening. With something like Tile, you could only track the user when a nearby device had the Tile app installed. So the real-world impact was lower even if the potential would have been the same if Tile had become ubiquitous.
Works better than tile ONLY. AirTags do NOT work better than a real GPS tracker with a cellular connection. In that scenario you don't need any phone to be anywhere nearby.
And, we do have trackers with Sat connections. With those you don't even need a cellular tower.
If someone wants to track you, they will track you, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it outside of "luck" (finding the tracker by chance).
Re:"The product was ripe for abuse" (Score:5, Insightful)
I’m not saying this isn’t a paid hit job by tile or someone, but airtags work much more effectively out of range of the users devices than any other BLE tracker that came before. Often it takes reaching some critical threshold of coverage or ease of use and it may be that Apple just passed it first.
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Air tags use the existing cellular bandwidth of nearby iPhones and their location services which are ubiquitous enough to provide fairly accurate location and good coverage in most cases.
In the US only. Outside of this country Apple has 10% of the market. So, I hope your "most cases" claim is only dealing with this country. Because it's certainly not true on the majority of the planet.
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Well, somehow it works outside the US pretty well it appears.
I"ve seen YouTube videos where they mailed AirTags to different parts of the globe and still tracked them...even one to North Korea?!?!
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Well, somehow it works outside the US pretty well it appears.
I"ve seen YouTube videos where they mailed AirTags to different parts of the globe and still tracked them...even one to North Korea?!?!
And did they bother to show how many tags didn't work at all (cherry-picking the success for a video)?
Regardless, I can mail a GPS tracker with a sat connection to ANYWHERE on Earth and I'll get updates. So, what is Apple doing that I can't already do?
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In the US only. Outside of this country Apple has 10% of the market. So, I hope your "most cases" claim is only dealing with this country. Because it's certainly not true on the majority of the planet.
False. You may be thinking of the precision location feature [macrumors.com] Apple is currently the world leader [statcounter.com] in market share.
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Apple is currently the world leader [statcounter.com] in market share.
Are you mentally defective? The only place I could find that suggests Apple is leading anything is your link. And even that shows Apple has less than HALF THE MARKET. And that's for NEW SHIPMENTS. It's not taking into account existing phones. NEW SHIPMENTS ONLY.
https://www.t4.ai/company/apple-market-share
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1168529/global-apple-market-share-2020/
https://9to5mac.com/2021/11/04/iphone-13-boosted-apples-market-share/
I was incorrect about 10%. It appears to be closer
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Again false. Those numbers are out of date single quarter sales and not total devices in use. Couldn’t bother myself to find out how many tile installs there are per android device but it’s probably under 5% so your entire premise is invalid. You seem awfully frantic about this.
You are not an intelligent person. In fact, you are a fucking moron.
Nobody said shit about TILE.
Get this through your tiny fucking brain: I said that a person, MOST OFTEN, is not tracking themselves with an airtag because MOST PEOPLE DO NOT OWN A FUCKING APPLE PHONE.
How the hell is that so goddamn hard for you to understand?
APPLE USERS ARE A MINORITY. That's not a fucking opinion. It's a fact.
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AirTags weren't the first tracker to market - several others have existed for almost a decade. So did anyone scream about Tile being "ripe for abuse"?
Longer than that. GPS trackers have been around for more than two decades. Granted, they weren't the tiny little doo-dads like Airtags. But they were small enough to hide on, in, or under a vehicle.
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The issue with AirTags is that Apple has the only really good network for tracking them. All the others require you to install the manufacturer's app, which you are unlikely to do if you don't own one of their trackers yourself. GPS trackers need a paid cellular connection.
The solution is to add the Bluetooth tracker detection to Android, and have it warn the user if unknown Bluetooth devices seem to be following them around. There are some apps that do it, but it needs to be implemented as background scann
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It's about scale (Score:5, Insightful)
I know everyone's going to say "airtags are nothing new, we already had (bluetooth) tracking technology". But that's missing the point. Technology can disrupt society for a number of reasons. Being new is one, but scaling up is another.
This technology is now becoming more mainstream, more socially accepted (by the very fact that Apple is giving the OK), more robust, and easier to use.
That matters. In fact, I'd argue that the issues with technology more often stem from it's scaling up than from it's initial introduction. We're had face recognition technology for decades, but it's getting so easy to implement that regulation is becoming a necessity.
My prediction: as smart homes become more prevalent, the way they are being abused to spy on each other will also become more visible than it is now. The signals are popping up: https://youtu.be/bqpJK2O2B-8?t... [youtu.be]
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SmartPhones existed before the iPhone, but were slow and lacked other existing innovations, such as touch screen dis
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Exactly. When the tech goes mainstream so does the abuse.
Disable it yourself (Score:1)
Is Tile paying for all this anti-Apple hate? (Score:2, Troll)
Is Tile paying "journalists" to write smear pieces?
Not that any business entity would stoop to such lowness.. if Tile's sore apple muscled in with a better product, maybe Tile should up their game.
If not Tile, then *someone* is trying their best to bitch and moan about this, when if they had a legit concern, they would've raised holy hell when Tile came out.
But no one did. I wonder why?
Hmm.
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If Tile were more widely used and with as much guaranteed coverage, I guarantee that it would have had the same level of concern. Nobody's switching to WikiTribune in the way of Facebook smear campaigns, and I doubt people are switching to Tile over Airtag abuse.
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I'm against trackers!!! (Score:4, Funny)
(This message posted from an iPhone with location services enabled for Candy Crush)
"Addressed those concerns?" (Score:5, Insightful)
...Apple addressed those concerns with promised updates that would see Android users getting similar notifications as iOS users when an AirTag was nearby through a new Tracker Detect app...
So I will be notified about people using an AirTag to spy on me, as long as I go and install an Apple "am I being spied on" app on my Android phone? Yeah, that's a great solution.
I don't think that Apple is really responsible for people using AirTags to stalk people, or whatever -- but claiming that having an app that most targets of stalking are never going to use is "addressing the concerns" is just stupid.
Re: "Addressed those concerns?" (Score:2)
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So I will be notified about people using an AirTag to spy on me, as long as I go and install an Apple "am I being spied on" app on my Android phone? Yeah, that's a great solution.
I don't think that Apple is really responsible for people using AirTags to stalk people, or whatever -- but claiming that having an app that most targets of stalking are never going to use is "addressing the concerns" is just stupid.
Yes, exactly! See you're missing a key concept here. This absolutely is "addressing the concerns", namely the CONCERN that some people may have that they're being tracked. So here's an app that can tell you. Concern addressed.
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I don't know that there's much else that Apple can do for Android. But Alphabet (parent of Google) could do more for Android to raise those alerts.
So are these devices bluetooth? (Score:2)
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I am (Score:2)
...Jack's complete lack of surprise.
Surreptitious wide area but precise, cheap, long duration anonymous tracking devices?
I'm not a part of the Apple Ecosystem, but wouldn't it be a simple fix to require the use of these to a confirmed Apple Ecosystem ID, ie I have to identify MYSELF to deploy this on what is (ostensibly) my own stuff, yeah?
Or am I missing something?
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It would fix nothing. I can buy a Chinese made GPS tracker with cellular connection for $50. Data-only subscription for service will set me back about $11.50 / month. (depending on the carrier of course).
Furthermore, I can wire that tracker directly into your vehicle's power system without setting off any alarms. Now I have, effectively, an infinite battery.
Nothing about this story is novel. Trackers have been around since the late 90s. Trackers have been TINY for two decades.
A satellite GPS trac
Interesting (Score:2)
If a person can't modify their devices, it's a bad thing. Not specifically repair, but controlling what the consumer can do.
Not needed for stalkers (Score:2)
More FUD. A stalker doesn't need to buy a silenced AirTag. There are plenty of videos on YouTube showing exactly how to disable the speaker in a matter of minutes. Why make an online transaction that leaves a trail if you intend to commit a crime?
Second (and this is the part everyone seems to ignore), the "Find My" network isn't some James Bond 007 tracking system where you get constant location updates on your quarry. If you want to know just how good it is, share your location with someone on your iPh
The internet wouldn't exist if privacy mattered (Score:2)
The internet as-built is a privacy disaster, and would be shot down by every reporter and privacy advocate before it started.
What does that tell you about those people? Ignore them.
oooh i see what they did there (Score:1)
Bop It! (Score:2)
Reminds me of when we bought a very noisy toy (called Super Bop-It) for a friend's toddler. We laughed and laughed thinking about the incessant racket that it would cause at their house! (OK, evil, LOL.)
It didn't take long for the mother to take a sewing pin to the speakers on the device...