[melvinram]

It wasn't omitted. It was covered in the keynote. It's also on their website:

  Let friends know how remote you go.
  
  If you’re on an adventure without cell service, 
  you can now use Find My to share your location 
  via satellite so friends and family know where you are.

[tonyhb]

Apple's always-on pingback no matter where you go in the globe, even if you disable cell networks. I do believe they care about privacy, though if you look at features like this it's easy to see that they can be worse than Google if they wanted.

[wyattjoh]

Except this (currently) requires users to point their phone at a satellite so it can connect and transmit, with clear line of site of the sky. It seems it will be more likely something you'd do when you get to your "campsite" and want friends/family to know where you are located.

[s0rce]

edit: I didn't realize this will apparently be required due to the antenna design in the iPhone, seems very cumbersome, you can't easily see where the satellites are...

You don't really need to point it, at least with my inreach if its near the top of my pack and I'm not in a canyon or something I can get a message out.

[Jtsummers]

> you can't easily see where the satellites are...

Which is why when you're using it they guide you on how to orient the phone (per their released info so far, we'll have actual user reports in a few weeks).

[Scoundreller]

I look forward to whatever video game they create where you get the rescue points for holding your phone in the right orientation.

[saghm]

And if you don't, it presumably says "you're holding it wrong!"

[zikduruqe]

Your in reach uses 1.6 GHz at 31.5 dBm for one of the bands and 2.4 GHz at 5 dBm for the other.

That's 1.412538 watts versus 0.003162 watts... hence why you can just leave it in your pack.

[stubish]

That limitation will have to be fixed before this accounts for 85% of a satellite network's capacity.

[dymk]

Airplane mode.

Of course if you don’t trust that, you shouldn’t be buying an Apple product anyways. They could ship an always on microphone streaming to their servers if they wanted to. But we trust that they won’t.

[adolph]

Faraday bag or turned off in a freezer “stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

[usefulcat]

  s/freezer/bottom of a locked filing cabinet/

[adolph]

Edward J. Snowden insisted that a group of lawyers advising him in the Chinese territory “hide their cellphones in the refrigerator of the home where he was staying, to block any eavesdropping,”

https://archive.nytimes.com/thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/0...

[alasdair_]

Find my works even if the iphone is turned off - does airplane mode stop this?

[artificial]

Since we can't remove batteries I know a mylar Cheetos snack bag does the trick.

[mburee]

https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/faraday/

Make of that what you want

[dwaite]

The toggles to turn off this feature (as well as Find my in general) do stop this.

[ErneX]

That’s opt-in though.

[zarriak]

I agree with your sentiment but this seemed in the keynote to be something you had to do on purpose and not like the normal always on find my.

[SergeAx]

Correction: if they shareholders wanted.

[toomuchtodo]

AirTags are even more compelling when your sensor fabric is satellite comms enabled.

[lostlogin]

Not if you can’t share them with family.

What the hell is that all about?

If this has changed, scratch all of the above.

[nikdoof]

I had the (dumb) idea of putting an AirTag in the family car, with the idea of being able to get a rough idea of where it is parked without depending on the terrible manf provided app. Every time my partner would drive the car it would ping away for a good 2-3 minutes due to the safety notifications. We're all part of the same family account, I don't really understand why it isn't an option to just ignore it.

[mschuster91]

> We're all part of the same family account, I don't really understand why it isn't an option to just ignore it.

Because there are way too many spouses who go to as absurd lengths as setting private investigators on their partners. Stalking is just as much a concern inside families as it is for everyday persons - I might be tempted to say that the impact is worse given the potential for domestic violence. Or just imagine fundamentalist parents tracking their children to Planned Parenthood, a known LGBT-friendly place or whatever.

Ideally, there would be laws and regulations on trackers - and not just hardware-ones like the AirTags, but also software-based ones - that mandate features to prevent abuse, but sadly politicians haven't caught up on tech developments yet.

[mort96]

That still doesn't explain why it's not an option _for nikdoof's partner_ to choose to disable notifications from that particular AirPod. It makes total sense why nikdoof shouldn't be able to disable it for their partner.

[mschuster91]

> That still doesn't explain why it's not an option _for nikdoof's partner_ to choose to disable notifications from that particular AirPod.

Coercion, simple as that.

[BiteCode_dev]

Ah, tracking the entire population even in the highest mountain and the deepest desert.

And all that to protect your love ones, of course.

People apparently forgot all about PRISM already. That didn't take long.

[xbmcuser]

Its amazing to me how easily people are willing to give Apple their data compared to Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Specially looking at how Apple was to willing to put its servers in countries that want control of the data. I think people seem to forget the privacy fight was not about privacy from advertisers but from government over reach. People are looking at Google for building skynet but Apple seems to be successfully building it and people are enthusiastically adopting it.

[simonh]

Apple has a really strong track record of resisting Government intrusion, within the bounds of the law, not selling customer data to third parties, and holding app developers to account for the privacy of their apps. The others have business models based entirely on selling user data.

The contentious element is the "within the bounds of the law" bit. In the US and Europe that means a lot, because Apple can use the courts to block government overreach and they have done so. In China they can't do that, so they don't just as nobody else operating within China can.

Google does deserve credit for refusing to operate their search services within China, while Apple and many other companies decided they were willing to do business there on Chinese government terms.

[BiteCode_dev]

Apple is much better at marketting than Google, Facebook or Microsoft.

[matthewmacleod]

I'm genuinely getting pretty annoyed by this increasingly prevalent style of know-it-all neo-ludditism that manifests as middlebrow, pithy dismissals of entire technologies with obvious benefits.

If you have a viewpoint on the relative risks of these technologies, the I genuinely wish you'd use your time to talk productively about what you think the risks are to help others make an informed choice – instead of sarcastically assuming that anybody who doesn't have the exact same set of priorities as you is a fucking idiot. It's making the quality of discussion on this site totally unbearable.

[BiteCode_dev]

Well, asbestos has obvious benefits. It's an amazing, cheap way to insulate things, and it's very resistant to fire.

We knew abestos was dangerous even before the WW2, and kept using it because it was so convenient.

That's the thing about know-it-all neo-ludditism pithy dismissals. They started 30 years ago witha much more soft tone. But since not only people ignored the warnings, but eventually even came to insult the people performing said warning (even after the warning proved to be true), the same people turned kinda sarcarstics.

Poor you to have to read a rational argument in a comment using history and logic to underline our societies shit where they eat and ignore the asymetry of risk.

Sacarstic people are mean and don't understand how to have quality discussions. They should always stay perfectly calm and neutral while they feel like half of the population is setting us up for troubles.

[simonh]

>Poor you to have to read a rational argument in a comment using history and logic

Your comment above didn't actually contain any such thing. It contained a vestigial semblance of them too trivialised by vitriol to land a persuasive point.

>Sacarstic people are mean and don't understand how to have quality discussions.

Not always for sure, but yes that's often the case.

[BiteCode_dev]

Oh but this comment is part of a thread. Because comments are in a context. Like this one, from 6 hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32763171

[brookst]

You should read up on how AirTags work; Apple does not ever know the location of any person or their stuff. Good read: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec6cbc80fd0/...

[leokennis]

There are articles/white papers available, showing Find My info is only visible to people you authorize it to.

[BiteCode_dev]

Sure.

Because 3 letters agencies never, ever had backdoors in popular systems. It's not like the US had an illegal massive secret cabale dedicated to mass spying on its own population after all.

Luckily, Apple plateforms are notoriously open so it will be easy to check. It's great that we don't have to take their word for it after they lied about not being part of any PRISM-like program.

Anyways, all that doesn't matter much. Why would it be a problem when the economy, climate, international politics and the democracy are so stable these days? I can't see any reason why history would repeat and powerful entities would abuse any power they get.

Somebody who thinks like that would be a crazy tin hat conspirationist, and not at all a concerned citizen.

No, only the part of the population ready to spend hundred of dollars on an upgrade to get copy/paste must be capable of rational thinking. Anybody else is biased.

[xani_]

which changes nothing, they're free to do whatever they want in actual code.

There is also no source code or even audit by 3rd parties (that are not US government related)

[SergeAx]

> And all that to protect your love ones, of course.

And for your own privacy!

[tinus_hn]

> You can now

There is an optional feature where you can choose to share your current location using a satellite even if you don’t have coverage.

It would be stupid to use this capacity to track users because the data is not worth more than what you can get for free if you just cache the location and wait for the user to move into cellular coverage again. There is no conspiracy here.

[cyanydeez]

How soon till this is just. A stalker feature

[ShakataGaNai]

Well, it's fairly easy to turn off. If you are in a situation in which you think you might be stalked through technology, you should certainly check your Find My along with any applicable location sharing Applications (both Android and Apple, such as google maps location sharing).

So I doubt this will be used much as a stalker feature. Unless of course they hide a phone on your person/vehicle in such a way that it is both totally unnoticeable to you AND maintains a very clear view of the sky. Apple said that sending messages could take a minute or more with even light foliage, so hiding it in/under a car will be a total no-go.

[Jtsummers]

You have control over who can see your location in Find My. If a stalker has access, that means they're already someone you trust or you've never looked at the list of people you're sharing your location with.