‘I was just scared’: Apple AirTags lead to stalking complaints | Hacker News Reader

‘I was just scared’: Apple AirTags lead to stalking complaints

theguardian.com

51 pointsmmphosis70 comments

> “If you really are nefarious and evil and you really want to find someone, there are things that are much better than an AirTag” (...)

While it's true that there are better ways to stalk people, I think an AirTag brings something to the table that wasn't there before: the normalization of having stalking hardware at hand.

Buying a "stalker kit" requires me to think long and hard about stalking someone. I need to make the decision, buy the hardware, wait for it to be delivered (or, alternatively, walk into the kind of store that sells spy equipment), create an opportunity, and go for it. Most well-adjusted people wouldn't go so far.

But once AirTags normalize having these things in your keychain all the time, the "entry barrier" for stalking is lowered. All it takes is one beer too much and a split-second decision.

Yes, normalizing has a lot of reverberations, a conspiracy charge couldn't be levied anymore because its a common combination of items.

Whereas before you could easily have your freedom curbed by having your prior thoughts known in combination with buying the hardware. Ive seen people beat conspiracy charges on appeal but their freedom was still undermined along the way.

Now having a bunch of airtags is benign.

Also it makes the justification of buying such a product much easier. "I need to track my backpack" is better accepted than "I need a GPS tracker to follow my ex partner".

I do believe Apple opened a can of worms they shouldn't have, and that it's going to cause great distress to many people.

Apple opened? Weren't these trackers popular long before that, e.g. tile?

Apple integrates it into their network of phones, such that they can reliably track someone everywhere they go. I don't think other market players are capable of that.

Tile has "Tile Network" which is similar: https://www.thetileapp.com/en-us/blog/what-is-tile-network-c...

That blog is from 2020, prior to the release (maybe not the announcement, though) of AirTags. It's also probably nowhere near as widespread as Apple's device network, but it does exist.

Amazon’s Sidewalk network is backing Tile. All those Echoes, by default, are hardware trackers, too.

Which is why Tile is much better in dense areas than it used to be.

democratizing stalking since 2021™

A month ago, almost everyone in my family received "unknown accessory detected with you" alert on our iPhones. It was scary, and we spent hours looking for an Airtag in every crevice of the car, and checking every bag we had. Couldn't find anything.

After extensive googling, we found numerous reports online about AirPods Pro most likely having a bug alerting their owners about "unknown accessory". If it's true, and firmware had a bug, Apple was probably in a weird position of not being able to publicly acknowledge it, to avoid potentially giving a false sense of security to folks who actually had the real alerts.

For us the alert never reoccured, and FindMy was erroring out when we clicked on "get more info about the device", so most likely it was a bug.

[edit] Reddit thread with other similar possible bug reports: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphonehelp/comments/q3n1e5/dont_own...

It sounds like carrying Apple hardware may be the only decent way to detect an unwelcome Airtag.

Are there any Android apps that monitor bluetooth traffic for possible stowaways?

From the article:

> Near the end of 2021, the company released a new Android app called Tracker Detect, which was designed to help people who own Androids discover suspicious AirTags near them

This is as bad as (or worse than) having to stick _nomap onto your WiFi SSID to stop Google from collecting WiFi location data. A silent, passive "feature" that can violate your privacy unless you take specific, active steps to stop it.

I wonder how many people are aware this even exists. I doubt Apple will be running a flashy marketing campaign for this app any time soon.

The scary thing about all this is people only know because Apple told them.

How many have this problem and have no way of knowing?

It's one of those things where having mitigations on the widely used ones doesn't necessarily address the problem, and banning them entirely would probably only stop the casual use of them.

I installed the Android app mentioned in the link a while ago and have never detected one (but it only detects them when actively running, and I have no reason to think anyone would be stalking me).

I agree it doesn’t really address the problem. But it brings visibility. And what that little bit of visibility shows is kind of terrifying.

I found the beep on lost (in this case, "lost" but not in a malicious way) tags to be pretty quiet or just not distinctive. While taking care of a friends cat with an airtag in the collar I kept thinking I was hearing a car down the block or maybe my PC was making a strange sound. Even knowing about the behavior and expecting to hear a beep I didn't pick up on it for several days.

We have an AirTag in our dog's collar which is registered to my wife's AppleID¹ The first walk I took with the dog after she put it on the dog, I got a notification about an unidentified AirTag (which included her email address and I think phone number) following me.

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1. My single big complaint about AirTags is that they can't be shared between Apple IDs. Presumably that will be changed in a future software upgrade. Right now, only my devices can be used to find my things and her devices her things even though we can use Find My to find each others devices.

This is my complaint too. There needs to be a way to share airtags with family members so they can also located missing items and they don’t get spammed with alerts. Without this option it’s just creating alert fatigue and will make users discredit real alerts.

There is the ability to mute notifications from particular items so I don't get an alert every time I walk the dog.

How far/long does the owner have to be away from the AirTag before it can be detected by others? I noticed my neighbor had an AirTag on his dog one day and so we tried to detect it with my Android Phone using the App and never could.

To the stalking concerns, if the AirTag doesn't think it's lost then it doesn't chirp. It also seems to remain undetectable to others. Does that mean someone could put an AirTag on someone and as long as they are close by it won't alert others?

> can't be shared between Apple IDs.

Even with Apple family? In Find My app, my partner and I can see all of each others' devices.

We can see each others devices, but not each others "Items" which AirTags are categorized under.

Well that's fucking dumb, I was going to purchase some and now I will not.

How many people will hear the beep and just ignore it? It just occurred to me that I've replaced smoke detector batteries for people who didn't know what the beeping was and had just accepted it into their lives. How many people will do the same for AirTags?

I'm the kind of neurotic person who found a loose cable harness on the underside of my fridge because the hum it made changed one day, but that's not everyone. How many people will just accept and AirTag alert as something new they have no control over?

I had the same experience when my friend hid one (with my knowledge) in my car. It took me a few days to cotton on that the beeping was the AirTag and not my car making squeaking noises of some sort. And I knew that the AirTag was there. I imagine someone unaware could fail to notice it for months.

This is excellent news; Apple designed these to be difficult to use to stalk someone, and those features are working.

Hopefully this makes enough noise that Tile and GPS trackers are forced to implement similar features.

How are airtags difficult to use to stalk someone with an android phone? Most don't know about it and don't install anything to prevent it.

Is the beeping not enough? I understand you don’t get a phone notification but it would be obvious as long as you’re near the tag.

I believe the assertion was that someone could disable the beeping.

However, I don't think a speaker is a requirement for Find My (I could be wrong). I don't think this has one: https://chipolo.net/en-us/products/chipolo-card-spot?cl=head...

One of the listed features is that it reaches 105 dB.

You are right. I searched for 'speaker', which didn't work :(

It shouldn’t be too difficult to remove the beeper from the device, or disable it somehow.

Once you figure out how to open the thing (there are videos of how to do this online, it's not that hard to do it destructively, and once you know where to pry, pretty easy to do it without breaking any of the plastic that holds it closed), you can remove the speaker without even needing to break anything, it's just held in place with glue.

I don't think any of this is excellent news. I'm sure the beep can be easily dismantled, we've been through that with the required camera sound nonsense. And security/privacy conscious people keep Bluetooth and NFC off for security/privacy reasons.

There's articles all over the Internet on how to remove/disable the speaker on airtags. Doesn't look to hard to do either, no hardware sensing if this is the case so it just keeps on working.

> no hardware sensing if this is the case so it just keeps on working.

Even if there were, you could defeat it with just a resistor across the old speaker terminals.

It merely announces stalking, rather than preventing it, yes?

Its not an ideal experience and I don't have the imagination to say what that is.

4 hours before notification if you have an iphone or the app on an android, which was lowered from the original plan

In thinking aloud about this issue, I'm uncertain whether there's a solution other than to make AirTags costly or single-use:

A. I lose my AirTag-equipped item in/on your bag/car/person.

B. I “lose” my AirTag-equipped item in/on your bag/car/person.

These are indistinguishable from one another without outside intervention. By making them expensive, Apple could raise the barrier to entry but would not stop someone from pursuing a “high value” stalking subject.

Conversely, by making them single-use (e.g., I can only activate “lost mode” once and when I do, both Apple and the person who finds it are given my information to facilitate a return), it might deter would-be stalkers.

Doesn’t making them expensive just move them closer to the price of trackers that are already available and have no mitigations in place while also making them less useful for the target audience?

I gave my partner an airtag as a test to see how accurate it was. After three days of daily driving around going to work errands etc, they received no warning whatsoever but I could still track. Don't know why, but it scared both of us.

Weird, I tried exactly the same thing - for exactly the same reason I assume - and it complained in less than 6 hours. I wonder if they’ve been fiddling with how soon the notifications happen?

I’m stalking my whole family - with daily warnings to everyone - because apparently Apple hasn’t realized it can be useful to have keys shared within a family. We do all have iPhones connected to the same family account. This is a glaring omission.

If you're in the same family account there's a button to turn off those alerts. It worked for my family.

That must be new because it want there a few months ago.

It appears when you get the first alert - click to silence it, and choose "indefinitely." That option only appears for Family devices.

Turning off the alarms would be a great start (they already added that?). What I really want is shared tags though, i.e that my wife can search our house keys and not just me. They are our house keys and everything else is extremely integrated in iOS so it feels weird to not be able to share the AirTag.

This is the most confounding thing for me as well. There are plenty of times having a single shared tag is what you want. But you either have one person able to find the item and one person getting stalker alerts, or both people getting both.

[edit: expand “both” as necessary to include the entire family :) ]

I wonder how much of this problem is of Apple’s own making. As far as I know AirTag competitors, find my phone, etc never included these “anti-stalking” features. Hell, if you have an Android Google has probably tricked you into letting them stalk you by the hour for years. Yet Apple makes it really easy to tell if there’s an AirTag close by and now anyone with that notification thinks they’re the hapless victim in a Liam Neeson film.

Because the cost and ease of use means that even the most hapless DV offender can reach hitherto unrealisable levels of accuracy. While an AirTag isn't going to beat 'lumping' your missus' car, the level of entry to this sort of stalking behaviour has suddenly plummeted with their introduction.

The fact that these things beep and notify you make it just about impossible to use to track someone's movements without their knowledge, which isn't true with prior location tracking. Anybody using this nefariously would choose a device that doesn't make such tracking impossible.

What's craziest about this outrage to me is, if the anti-stalking feature weren't there, the most an average Joe would be able to use this for is to collect a fraction of the data about you that tech companies already collect. You're yelling at your fellow peasants because you suspect they're stealing meanwhile the King is openly pilfering everything.

The reason apple have made it really easy to know if one's about is precisely to avoid the stalking issue.

That's a deliberate design feature which actually removes some of the utility as a covert device to keep hold of your own stuff.

> The reason apple have made it really easy to know if one's about is precisely to avoid the stalking issue.

I agree. My point is that the only reason people are reading 'stalking' and 'AirTag' in the same sentence is a failure of Apple's marketing. If they just had those features and didn't try to paint a world where your neighbors are out to get you they wouldn't be having this problem.

It's insane to me that technology that is very likely used for stalkerware or other dystopian purposes, like AirTags, Google Homes, Alexas, Ring Cameras, Boston Dynamics Spot and related models, and the like, have been embraced unquestioningly by the vast majority of people because of flimsy weak reasons of "convenience" or whatever. Maybe I've just been in our industry for too long....

Spare me the "embraced unquestioningly by the vast majority of people because of flimsy weak reasons"

There were hundreds of engineers at Apple that worked on AirTags. Not a single one of them stood up and said "No". Not a single one of them went to the press and screamed about it before the launch. Not a single one said that Cook and his high up lackeys and their wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, whoever they have one night stands with, their children should be forced to be carrying publicly accessible airtags just to ensure that they still think they still think it is a great idea when then and their their wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, whoever they have one night stands with, their children are the targets. Oh no, the enlightened technorati prefers $$$ just like Joe who knows exactly nothing about what this can be used for.

The “hundreds” of engineers who designed a “find my missing item” feature that people clearly want, and made it so that it could be:

* accurate - to a few feet over arbitrary distance

* private - no one other than the owner can track it

* anti-stalker - despite the privacy it’s possible to know when you’re being stalked

AirTags are useful, there was a market of similar, less private, devices before hand. And unlike the existing non-private solutions this one does actually warn people if they’re being stalked.

If you think that’s “engineers not caring about misuse” I don’t know what to say?

Maybe I am in the minority but I keep bluetooth turned off on my iPhone (battery life and I never pair anything) and suspect that the unknown AirTag alert won't work without bluetooth enabled.

If you want to be able to check for Airtags being used to stalk you there is the great 'AirGuard' Android app on Fdroid.

Surely this means google needs to react to this and add native Airtag support to Android to detect this behavior?

A simple concept with an incredibly difficult UX experience due to the existence of bad actors…

How many people were being stalked before AirTags with no way of realizing that it was happening?

Are you suggested that the number of people being stalked has remained constant but the now a subset of those people now know they're being stalked?

I would expect the number of people being stalked to starkly rise. I'd be more curious about the number of people being stalked with AirTags who don't realized it.

I suspect it hasn’t changed too much. Maybe there were some people on the edge and the ease pushes them over it, but stalker behaviour isn’t a sudden rush.

It seems more likely that someone who is already a stalker adopts something that makes it easier. There was an article a few weeks/months back where a mother was unhappy that her daughter was angry when she found that the mother has planted an AirTag. The mother was point blank saying stuff like “I’m not stalking her I just want to know where she is”. Iirc the daughter was an adult who didn’t live at home.

In other words stalker/possessive behavior isn’t a trivial thing, and like most behaviors of this sort isn’t something that can appear out of nowhere.

That said, I do think it would be nice if apple could provide a mechanism for other manufacturers to integrate stalker protection directly, because the current app based solution is far from ideal.

Airtags are creepy as fuck. Even if Android has built in airtag detection, it doesn’t solve the problem of people without up to date smartphones, or people that don’t know what any of those messages/warnings mean.

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