Stalking victims sue Tile and Amazon for negligence over tracking tech

Good on them although I feel like including Amazon in the suit is a standard money-hungry lawyer play. Amazon just vends network connectivity via a mesh net, but obviously happens to have deep pockets so they’re an attractive target.

I think the bigger one that needs more callout is Life360 as a whole. It's literally paid spyware for family tracking. Ever since Tile got bought out by them I've veered way too far away from that can of worms.

There is a proposal to create an IETF working group for protocol revisions to make unwanted trackers detectable in a standarized way:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/dult/about/

At the recent meeting there was much debate over the charter but a lot of support for doing work in that areas. ( meeting minutes: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/minutes-117-dult-2023072716... ).

Related draft: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-detecting-unwanted-lo...

During the meeting I raised a scoping question: would proposals for protocols to suppress tracker reporting at locations be out of scope?

In cases where you want to protect a particular location from tracking it might be superior to have something beacon to disable reporting, particularly because the trackers are attacker controlled but the reporting devices aren't (if they are, you already lost) and because detection is too late: your opponent may have learned your location by the time you detect the tracker.

Trackables need some sort of mode where the user can consent to the police putting the trackable into a silent mode while the police investigate, with a fixed expiration. It would be trackable by both the user and police in this mode, and either one could revoke silent mode. I feel like this could be done with some fancy cryptographic signature system to keep mass surveillance at bay (people hold their own private keys).

The primary use case for trackables _is_ recovering stolen property, despite Apple trying to say its "finding lost items". An incredibly small minority of people are using them as a stalking device, even though totally silent GPS trackers have been around for decades at this point.

Apple already has a law enforcement portal it maintains. I feel like they could encourage good behavior by police in this manner while also greatly reducing crime.

This tracking tech seems like genuine 'badware'. Very easy to cause harm, and government regulation may be needed to block the harm.

Which could lead to stricter privacy laws.

It's also Victorinox's and Walmart's fault you got knifed.