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Apple and Google Team Up To Stop Unwanted AirTag Tracking 52

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Apple and Google said on Tuesday that they were working together to prevent lost item trackers like Apple's AirTag from being used to track people without their permission. From a report: The companies came together to draft a new industry standard that will add the ability to alert victims to unwanted trackers in Android and iOS, the companies said. Apple's AirTag is intended to help people find lost items such as keys by displaying an item's nearly real-time location inside an iPhone app. But there have been many reports about the $30 coin-sized device being used to stalk people since it went on sale in 2021. In response, Apple previously built detection features into iPhones that allow users to detect unfamiliar AirTags in the user's area. Tuesday's announcement suggests that Android phones will also soon gain the ability to warn their users if they are being tracked by an AirTag.
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Apple and Google Team Up To Stop Unwanted AirTag Tracking More

Apple and Google Team Up To Stop Unwanted AirTag Tracking

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  • So you trust Google and Apple? Because their apps will certainly have telemetry functions reporting your phone's position and the tags around you.

    That's a core function required by these tags, right? Only now they're making us all so afraid of being tracked that... we agree to be tracked, increasing the functionality of their system and adding us to it.

    Third party open-source only, please. With no ability to call home.

    • They referred to it a Industry Standard so that likely means it will be published and implemented by any other person or company. That being said, if you have an Android with Google Services or iPhone, they both already phone home with your location data.

      • Yep. I love the bit where if you deny location data on Android... It stops sending but caches then plays catch up the next time you want to use a map function.

    • So you trust Google and Apple? Because their apps will certainly have telemetry functions reporting your phone's position and the tags around you.

      The corporate surveillance complex doesn't want peons to be able to do what they do, that's all.

      I'm pretty sure nobody gave Google or Apple permission to collect all the information they collect on everybody all the time - let alone a simple geolocation. Yet when they do it, they're quite okay with it.

    • So you don't use a smartphone then? Because if you do, you are already being tracked. Oh, you turned off location tracking? Yeah good luck, the towers still triangulate your position. The only way you can avoid being tracked is to never ever use the internet, and never go out in public.

      Open source isn't going to help you either. Android is itself open source. Do you think that means it doesn't track you?

  • How to distinguish? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dark.nebulae ( 3950923 ) on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @02:49PM (#63492078)

    So how do they distinguish between my dropping a tag on someone riding by on a bike vs having a tag on my bike that someone just stole and are riding away with it?

    I certainly don't want the thief to be prompted "Hey there's a tracker on this bike, do you want to disable it?" or some other nonsense.

    I recognize that stalking is a problem, but so is theft, yeah?

    • How does one distinguish between the two without further inputs?

      Honest question. And Also, why we can't have nice things.

      • Maybe just by assuming positive intent until evidence demonstrates otherwise?

        I can't prove it, of course; but I would wager a fairly large sum of money, gold bars, and bricks of cocaine that more people... many, Many, MANY more people... are interested in AirTags and would like to use them to prevent theft or recover stolen objects then there are people who want them for stalking purposes. So logically we shouldn't gimp them for the first purpose just because some minority of edge cases prefer them for the

        • You're not wrong. But that was kind of the point of the question.

          Nobody has a right to track others, and people have a right not to be tracked. These things are being used to track people, for nefarious purposes. And if I can turn off tracking for some tag that's following me around, so can a bad guy turn off the tag on the property he just stole.

          And further, I don't have an Apple device, I have NO WAY to know if a tag has been put on me or me vehicles. Do I need to spend $450 on an iphone just to make sure

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Dusanyu ( 675778 )
      I got one of these warnings on my phone while sitting in a class. the warning was triggered by someone sitting next to me who has one on their keychain so apparently they are very easy to trigger. As far as the warning it's self I did not see a option to disable the device.

      • My neighbours are using it, same as me. I occasionally get the warning regarding their tags. I presume they get the warning about mine as at one point my keys started to beep without me looking for them.

        • I got one of these warnings on my phone while sitting in a class. the warning was triggered by someone sitting next to me who has one on their keychain so apparently they are very easy to trigger. As far as the warning it's self I did not see a option to disable the device.

          My neighbours are using it, same as me. I occasionally get the warning regarding their tags. I presume they get the warning about mine as at one point my keys started to beep without me looking for them.

          I propose that this is deliberate. Apple and Google have an incentive to generate so many warnings that the average person gets sick of the alarms and turns them off. Thereby normalising ever more invasive surveillance and allowing Apple and Google to go back to their core business of logging every minute detail about our lives and profiting from it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

        To be notified, you need to be followed by an AirTag and this AirTag should not be close to its owner device. That way you don't get prompted about the AirTags in the car next to you of your wife's, or etc.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The proposed standard in TFA does include a command to disable the device, which can be issued by someone who isn't the owner. It's up to software to enforce limits on its use.

        There is an open source app called AirGuard that lets you trigger the sound on AirTags after just 10 minutes of being near one. Great fun at the airport. I expect as soon as this feature is rolled out to AirTags there will be free apps to disable any that come near you, perhaps automatically. If not, I'll look at writing one, and add

    • Probably by the amount of time it interacts with your device without knowledge of the airtag. If your getting into a car every day that has an airtag not registered to you and then it follows you, then it will tell you. Likewise if you use a stolen bike for several days, which is being tracked with an air tag. It's a solution for long term stalking not short term.

      • I think that there's also an element of distance traveled as well. I was going to be driving to a place that a friend would be flying to, so I brought their bag for them, which they keep an airtag in. I've spent many hours at their place near the bag, and never got the alert, but after the half-hour drive home I got an alert on my phone.

        The frustrating element is that there doesn't appear to be a way to acknowledge a particular tag (just to turn off the warning feature altogether), so I had the alert come u

    • I was asked about using AirTags to track some rental equipment. Don't see much of a way a thief wouldn't get an alert if they were traveling with it. You just have to try and put them somewhere not easy to get to.

      Had a guy say he buried one in the dash of his car. Well, a bunch of people hop in his car to go to lunch and that's an alert. That's not an edge case, either. Where I work, it is 90% iPhones.

      Also, real gps trackers usually have an API so that you can build reports for a dispatcher to monitor locat

      • You can get a low bandwidth data-only cellular account for under $10/month. You can use any burner phone with GPS as a GPS tracker if you want a very short-duration tracker. At some point, you need to wire a charger into something to keep it going.

        If you upgrade to something less power-hungery and tune the data gathering and transmission to be more power-efficient too, you can get weeks of use out of one... but it's still ideal to find a way to tap some power to keep it charged. A GPS tracker is general

    • Re:How to distinguish? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @03:11PM (#63492152)
      The simple answer is: It won't. Airtags were designed and marketed as an item locator, not an anti-theft device.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by msauve ( 701917 )
        No one is using Airtags as an anti-theft device, they do nothing to prevent theft. They only help locate what was taken. Are you claiming that locating stolen items isn't a legitimate use?
        • It is a theft device, around here it's people having highly targeted cars like RAV4 Prime or Lexus RX350 finding tags on their cars, because thieves will stole those cars at the right time and right place, put them in a container, and ship them to middle-east.
        • Use them how you like however Apple did not design them with the intent of finding stolen items and as such they are under no obligation to support that use case as they update them.

      • Airtags were designed and marketed as an item locator, not an anti-theft device.

        Which to me seems like a pretty big failing, since in all likelihood if your possession isn't where you expected it to be, someone stole it.

        From my perspective, Apple already had a fairly good misuse deterrent by tying the devices to your Apple ID. Gimping AirTags so they can't be used as anti-theft devices is just lame. It's entirely why I haven't bought any of them. It'd be like owning a gun that can only fire at the range.

        • They donâ(TM)t want to be responsible for idiots getting injured/killed trying to retrieve their stolen goods. Also the stalker issue is a huge PR issue that some news sites wonâ(TM)t leg go of.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • So how do they distinguish between my dropping a tag on someone riding by on a bike vs having a tag on my bike that someone just stole and are riding away with it?

      Why even bother? Just alert you to all tags that seem to follow you, and remember which ones you tell the system are yours so you don't get notified again.

    • This subject came up during the last AirTag discussion. A tracker that tells the thief "you're being tracked" is rather useless. The consensus seems to be that these things just aren't truly intended as "anti-theft" devices - their actual target use case is for scatterbrained individuals who have a propensity for misplacing their possessions.

      As someone who has never really had an issue with losing things, I figured an AirTag might at least make a decent pet tracker, right? Turns out, nope, they're not re

      • Now I want to put them on some feral cats just to annoy people

      • I also use AirTags in my checked-in luggage. Again, because it is a way to find the luggage. But it TSA or baggage handlers can disable the tags, how do I then find my luggage?

        My point is, there are many reasons why I might want to be able to at any time find something that is valuable to me. That's the whole point of an AirTag. There can be a slew of different circumstances where one might say "Sure, user should be able to use an AirTag for that" along with cases where one might say "No way, creep, the Air

      • I had a good experience with one that wasn't mine.

        I was at the airport baggage claim standing around wondering what to do about the message "all bags delivered" while dozens of other people were also standing around wondering where our bags were. Eventually an airline employee showed up to give us the URL to file a lost bag claim (which I had already found by this cool new technology called a search engine). She assured us that there was nothing that could be done other than fill out the web form and wait t

    • It's fine for the thief to know they're being tracked. But only the AirTag owner can disable tracking, right?

      And if you want to buy something that can survey people (including thieves) without them being aware of it, then you buy something other than an AirTag.

      • Wrong if you know the tags there you can find it and smash it with a hammer. Tracking disabled, no ownership required.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The draft proposal is here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/d... [ietf.org]

        It mentions that the device must support being disabled physically, and the manufacturer must provide instructions for doing so. In fact, the device itself must provide a URL that links to the instructions.

        This is supposed to cover all tracker devices, not just AirTags. I'm sure you will be able to get non-compliant ones though.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      So how do they distinguish between my dropping a tag on someone riding by on a bike vs having a tag on my bike that someone just stole and are riding away with it?

      I certainly don't want the thief to be prompted "Hey there's a tracker on this bike, do you want to disable it?" or some other nonsense.

      I recognize that stalking is a problem, but so is theft, yeah?

      The problem is, stalking is considered a much larger problem than theft. A person stealing your bicycle, well, a bicycle is a thing and other than the

      • The problem is, stalking is considered a much larger problem than theft. A person stealing your bicycle, well, a bicycle is a thing and other than the annoyance of methods to replace it, it's something you can do.

        By who? its a mater of opinion, google and apple stalk track you constantly most people couldn't care less. Parents track there kinds through cell phones, if you are so concerned about not being tracked don't use your cell phone.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      They don't. If you want to use it that way you need to make a few modifications yourself.

    • Obviously they can just check the is_evil_intent bit, and then they'd know! :-D

    • Yes wouldn't it break this suggestion on Slashdot today "NYPD Urges Citizens To Buy AirTags To Fight Surge In Car Thefts"
      https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]

  • They created an unsolvable issue for themselves. Only solution is to say sorry and pull out - stop selling such devices and stop detection, just to minimise the userbase.

    • While Apple didn't create this market, they certainly expanded it significantly. If they were to pull out now, people would just shift to using Chipolo or Tile devices for the same purpose - nothing would be solved.

    • I would rather the just quit worrying about stalking. Losing things and having expensive items stolen is a problem that everybody has. Stalking is rare.
  • Those support Find My when turned off via the U1 chip. If they have crippled their theft protection mechanisms, surely there would be scope for legal action? If they have not, all this does is change the cost when it comes to stalkingâ¦

  • In other words, ante up for a real tracker that has its own LTE / cellular connectivity (and the associated monthly fee). You can actually get them cheaper than AirTags, and since they use their own data connection they work even if there is no iPhone nearby to piggyback off of. The main downside, from a technical standpoint, is the battery life can't approach the 1+ year battery life of an AirTag.

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07N... [amazon.com]

    The real value of an AirTag for me (I own 6 of them) is theft prevention (on

  • It was only a matter of time until someone sued Apple because they were stalked and you need an Apple device to be told you're being stalked out of the box; for Android you'd need to download an extra, which you'd only do if you were aware of the possibility you could be stalked like this in the first place.

    So this is Apple's solution to preempt that. Makes sense.

  • The idea behind the air tags is great, but the form factor is limiting. Right now having a single tag, you run in conflicting use cases. They market it as for finding "lost items", but a lot of people use it to protect their stuff against theft. Others use it to stalk unwitting people. These two use cases conflict with each other and stem from the form factor of the tag.
    Where I see potential is Apple licensing the tag technology, so it can be embedded in high value items like photo cameras, photo lenses,

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