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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and your stuff through their devices, privately. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluet...

The part here is:

"A nearby stranger's iPhone, with no interaction from its owner, will pick up the signal, check its own location, and encrypt that location data using the public key it picked up from the laptop."

This dialog makes it unclear whether the stranger has agency to turn this on or off.

My definition of privacy includes the ability to have NO traffic, while apple has a different definition.

> This dialog makes it unclear whether the stranger has agency to turn this on or off.

I believe they do.

Looking at my iOS 14.5 settings, I can (1) turn off Find My completely, (2) turn off "Find My network" to opt out of the Find My network, and (3) turn off "Item Safety Alerts" that tell you when an unexpected item is travelling with you (and possibly being used to track you).

This sounds cool, but does it make sense?

“It uses just tiny bits of data that piggyback on existing network traffic so there’s no need to worry about your battery life, your data usage, or your privacy.”

How do you piggyback on existing traffic without increasing it?

For example, by having a queue that only gets sent when you were going to send something anyway. When you have tiny bits of information, you're getting into the space where setting up the connection, starting the radios or getting them to an active power level is more taxing on the system than the actual sending of the payload.

"No need to worry" doesn't equal 'zero bits transferred', but more like 'so little the impact is immeasurable to you'.

It does increase traffic but probably not extra sockets/processes which is why they say battery life isn't an issue.

There could be segments of the packet that are sending null data that can be leveraged.

You can queue and hold the data until your phone was already going to wake up to transfer something which reduces the wake ups. And it’s such a tiny amount of data being sent it probably wouldn’t total 1mb used in a year.

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