[w0mbat]

All these stalking counter-measures make it useless if your device is stolen rather than mislaid.

If my bag is stolen I want it to contain a hard to find device, not one that gives away its position (by warning the thief). I also want an easy mechanism to give the police temporary access to track it, til they catch the thief and get my stuff back.

[madeofpalk]

It gets back to picking a purpose for the device and tradeoffs for privacy and the rest.

Airtags are not for finding stolen things. They're for finding lost things.

I think what you described is a privacy nightmare that Apple very rightly wants to avoid. They do not want to make a small device that is hard to find and doesn't give itself away to allow people to track each other. At Apple's scale, it will be abused and there would be significant negative attention on Apple for that.

[matt-attack]

Then why did Van Moof bikes adopt the Find My feature as a third party? No one really misplaces their bike. Surely it’s for anti-theft.

Pretty sure Van Moof is literally the first example of a third party Find My device and it sounds to me like it completely contradicts your (and Apple’s) statement about the scope and intended use of the Find My network.

[vineyardmike]

I don’t know where you are, but in the US, if I gave the police a literal GPS coordinate of a stolen good, I still wouldnt expect them to actually go there and find it unless it’s of exceptionally high value (car, etc).

[sokoloff]

If it was anything less than a kidnapped police officer or child, I wouldn't expect them to do anything.

[jonfw]

yep... I had a cell phone stolen when I was in high school, we could track it to a specific house, and they didn't even knock on the door.

[w0mbat]

If there was an easy mechanism to temporarily hand over tracking of stolen tags/iPhones/iPads to police, with the nice ultra wideband tracking that gives an arrow and direction, police would go and get a lot of stuff back. The police love low-hanging fruit and easy arrests.

[nemothekid]

You can already do this today with iPhones and iPads and the police won’t do anything

[filleduchaos]

Chasing down petty thieves is not the low hanging fruit most police departments go for.

[jessaustin]

They'd be interested if drug activity in that house were reported. Then they could raid the house, and keep whatever goods weren't broken or burned in the raid for themselves.

[Alupis]

Part of the problem is the GPS resolution, which isn't accurate enough to know exactly which individual on a street has your stuff, or even which house it might be inside.

A long while back, on a early Saturday morning, I was awoken by my doorbell and accosted by an angry father of a crying daughter who had had their iPhone stolen by someone at a bar the previous night. Well, "Find My iPhone" showed the dot location of the phone was my house, so it must be me... turned out it was a neighbor two houses down - thanks Apple.

The best GPS resolution available to civilians is about 8 meters (26 feet) - and that's under the best, most ideal situation using the best GPS receiver and a large antenna... things a small cell phone in a pocket or bag doesn't have.

Cell tower triangulation isn't much better either... although the two used in unison can provide better resolution, but still far from good enough to pinpoint an exact individual, or even house (if the device is near an exterior wall, it may appear to be in the neighbor's house).

Police can't exactly go up and search people on the street because some Apple service says somebody within 20-40 feet or whatever might have the device - doubly so for searching a vehicle or house without a warrant.

So, while these devices are great for personal use - they probably cannot be used for real law enforcement purposes.

[_s]

> The best GPS resolution available to civilians is about 8 meters (26 feet) - and that's under the best, most ideal situation using the best GPS receiver and a large antenna... things a small cell phone in a pocket or bag doesn't have.

I am not sure where you got this from but that is incorrect - the accuracy (or resolution) depends entirely on the number of satellites and/or augmentation systems you're tapped into, and how strong / clear those signals are. It can vary from a few kilometres down to a few centimetres.

Back in the 90's "Selective Availability" was a thing but it has since been removed.

See https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/

Also - most modern phones can and do tap into the major providers (Galileo, Glonass, GPS etc), towers, WiFi spots, beacons and use all of these to give a a VERY accurate position of where the device is.

Edit: Might mention I worked first hand on indoor tracking of users, and a warehouse project for optimising worker picking - we were able to easily distinguish where a person was in a busy retail setting down to which section of a clothes rack they were selecting clothes from, and exactly where a worker was in a very interference-heavy (metals) warehouse floor using the above mentioned technologies.

[Alupis]

From your link:

> For example, the government commits to broadcasting the GPS signal in space with a global average user range error (URE) of ≤7.8 m (25.6 ft.), with 95% probability. Actual performance exceeds the specification. On May 11, 2016, the global average URE was ≤0.715 m (2.3 ft.), 95% of the time

Which assumes clear skies and good line of sight... Neither condition exist inside your pocket or house.

Regardless, none of the technologies you listed are accurate enough for police to legally search a person or their home simply because some tech company says a device is located around some dot on a screen.

PS: Your warehouse tracking thing is interesting, although I think you'd of had an easier time tracking gyroscope/accelerometer senor data.

[ViViDboarder]

From your quote:

> Actual performance exceeds the specification. On May 11, 2016, the global average URE was ≤0.715 m (2.3 ft.), 95% of the time

[Alupis]

Did you read nothing else? That is the best possible case, as measured by someone's particular device under ideal conditions - which simply do not exist for a cell phone or a device in a pocket, backpack, or house.

Civilian grade gps receivers often do not have large antenna, can track only a few active satellites at once (often only processing 3-4 satellites even if they are aware of 20 or more) and only receive a single frequency of signals instead of both available frequencies. You want your device to be thin, right?

All this means your stolen cell phone, in someone's pocket inside of a building is going to have horrible resolution, unless it augments it's position data with other sources such as realtime cell tower triangulation or is in a really dense, previously observed wifi area... which are things not available to these tracker devices.

[w0mbat]

This is true, but irrelevant to discussion of AirTags. AirTags give much finer grained location once you are close, as it uses the new iPhone's ultrawideband hardware to give you accurate bearing and distance to the tag, based on live information.

[PurpleFoxy]

What police should do is keep a record of reports and their location and if too much shows up on one address, they investigate.

I have also seen reports of actual police knocking on people’s doors looking for things that show as on their house but we’re inaccurate.

[jolux]

>All these stalking counter-measures make it useless if your device is stolen rather than mislaid.

I think “useless” is a bit extreme. After three days, the thief may notice it when it starts beeping, but before then it will track just fine. Clearly there’s a trade off here, but I think having anti-stalking protections is pretty important for a product that millions of people are going to bug.

[ziml77]

Are the advertising it as a way to find stolen items? I've only ever thought of products like this as a way to find something I've misplaced.

Given that they talked about people scanning found AirTags and that they have those fancy looking holders for them, I can't imagine they expect the tags to be hidden. And if that's the case then a thief is going to know to take the AirTag off right away.

[matt-attack]

VanMoof bikes adopted Find My technology explicitly for theft protection:

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/07/find-my-third-party-acc...

[gonehome]

It's a tradeoff of course, but I think they struck a pretty good medium.

I like how much they thought about this issue.

[PurpleFoxy]

Agreed. Previously I could not find lost or stolen items. Now I can find lost items. That’s a pure improvement in my eyes.

[Rapzid]

I would think they would both not advertise these for locating stolen items as well as warn people not to retrieve items they suspect have been stolen.

Retrieving stolen items can be very dangerous, and Apple would want no liability from that.

[illustriousbear]

The anti-theft argument is a bit over stated.

1. The thief would probably still find the tracker.

2. You would probably still lose connection/track of the device.

3. Police would probably still be reluctant to travel to a private residence somewhere and try to find it.

4. Are you going to physically find and confront a criminal yourself?

Encrypt your digital devices, have backups and insure anything valuable. That is the better than using some tracker and spending your time trying to chase down criminals.

[adriancr]

This goes against someone else not wanting to be tracked. (via someone gluing an airtag under their car, hiding one in their coat or whatever)

I'll definitely look if a easy to use bluetooth scanner/tracker is on fdroid and build one if not.

I also wonder how easy it is to generate random ids / ddos iphones in an area... since by default they listen and forward tags on users data connection.

edit: it beeps after 3 days so its nice enough to prevent a need for countermeasures

[libeclipse]

I would not trust police with location data or with getting my device back.

[nodesocket]

> give the police temporary access to track it, til they catch the thief and get my stuff back.

I don’t know where you live, but as somebody who previously lived in San Francisco, do you really think the police are going to actively pursue theft claims? It’s why car break-ins and petty theft are out of control in the bay area. The police don’t enforce laws, and certainly don’t actively track down stolen property.

[djrogers]

As somebody who has lived in a lot of places that aren't San Francisco, I can tell you that San Francisco is an outlier WRT how much illegal activity "law enforcement" puts up with.

[Alupis]

If you dig a little deeper, you'll find out the issue isn't police choosing not to enforce the laws in SF...