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Tile? The brand that predates airtags and where apple stole the idea from and just made it proprietary to their ecosystem
Edit: what a bizarre thing to downvote
tile just had a data breach 👎
Which happens to practically all companies eventually.
The hacker gained access to a customer support platform. Credit card numbers, passwords, and location data are not at risk, says parent company Life360.
True yet still not OK.
That’s also why a lot of us do try to avoid, as much as is realistically feasible, to provide any data to any company that should store it. Hence why a lot of questions here are about self hosting, no cloud, etc. It’s not paranoia, it’s because companies cut corners and as you correctly point out, fail to keep us safe. So it’s not about Tile specifically, they are just yet another poor example. Let’s not defend them nor this kind of practices. If people in the Privacy community are OK with that, we have a rather deep problem.
They asked for an alternative to airtags. I provided one. Doesn’t matter if they were compromised because like I said, everyone is eventually. The data leaked is almost certainly super redundant for almost every user anyhow
They asked for an alternative to airtags. I provided one.
And even though I’m not OP I’m genuinely grateful for that.
Doesn’t matter if they were compromised because like I said, everyone is eventually.
No! That’s the whole point of this Privacy community! If someone is using, using home automation as an example, Apple HomeKit or Roomba or Google Home they will eventually get compromised BUT if they are using something local, e.g Zigbee with HomeAssistant they WILL never get compromised because by the very local only architecture of that solution no data is leaving the home and thus can NOT be compromised.
The ENTIRE reason d’etre of this community is not to say “Oh well… the default solutions are imperfect, we have to shrug and accept the statu quo” but rather provide genuinely alternative.
I understand a lot of people can enter into a learned helplessness mindset imagining that only poor solutions exist and thus, better pick the least worst one, but by doing that we are giving power to Big Tech, surveillance capitalism, etc.
Please do NOT say that “everybody gets compromised” when you actually mean that “the vast majority of people who accept to use a popular solution with trade offs that are not good for privacy”. It sounds like a finicky difference but it’s actually totally different because it shows that it’s not inevitable.
By taking shortcut in your language you limit what’s conceived as possible by others who are asking for help, again, in a Privacy focused community.
- I didn’t realize what community it was because they weren’t specific at all. They just asked for an alternative.
- You don’t seem to realize that it is literally true: everyone gets compromised. I mean not only companies but it also applies to self hosted systems. One example was that my home server got hacked a few years ago. Magically virus filled executables showed up in thousands of my directories. This was a Linux server. Any open port will get hijacked if it is open for long enough.
- This type of product asked about literally does not and cannot exist in a self hosted situation. The only way they can work is if a critical mass of other users are near the device, also using the supporting app, with Bluetooth enabled, that way you have any chance of its location being reported.
- The data breach that happened in this case affected data that almost every citizen has out there anyhow from a dozen other data breaches. Yes it obviously is sometimes due to irresponsible practices but there isn’t much to be done about it now that the data has been out there for a decade.
I know you mean well here but you’re off base and it’s coming across as lecturing me about something you aren’t fully informed about. I am not saying people shouldn’t care about privacy. I’m saying if you want this type of product, all the concerns you’re mentioning here are literally impossible to avoid. The best you could do is find the company with the least number of breaches and then pray they remain that way. But that doesn’t really get you very far.
I must express myself quite poorly. It is not a point about technical knowledge, in fact if you were to know more about the topic than I do, I would expect you to even more be upheld to higher standards and thus not promote a bad solution, even more so assume it’s the only one. I can’t imagine that even a PhD student who is supposedly at the frontier of knowledge in their very narrow field would assume no alternative is possible, or will ever be. This even more the case without having both a complete understand of the landscape but also about OP’s actual needs, which is probably hard to express clearly and thus leading to a lot of assumption. Here maybe a simple loud alarm from a BT speaker going out of range might be enough.
My whole point is that abandoning hope, and leading others to do so, is worst than actively finding for a barely OK compromise.
Anyway I don’t want to invest more energy on this discussion unfortunately so simply wishing you the best, thanks for the clarifications.
air tags function by utilizing the ad-hoc network all Apple devices create - if you run an Apple device, you’re involuntarily part of this P2P network, even when your device is supposedly off. otherwise, said tags wouldn’t be able to send you status reports from the other side of the planet. that’s just how they and find-my-shit apps work, there are no alternatives to global availability.
all that’s kinda antithetical to the whole privacy thing, so you’ll have to balance the good with the bad and determine how much spyware you will tolerate to gain this sort of convenience.
Do you have a source for the “even when your device is supposedly off” part? I know iPhones have tracking enabled when off, but there’s no way they’re using Bluetooth to find these devices and reporting back. I can’t find a source for that at all.
But even then, it’s still pretty private because there’s no way to reverse track an AirTag. I don’t even think they can do that internally at Apple.
Kensington? I don’t think an air tag can actually prevent theft (if they see it they’ll remove it - if they don’t see it they’ll still steal your stuff)
For large luggage/containers in third-party storage?
You can get GPS systems that upload data using a SIM. Only viable if you live somewhere with cheap roaming plans. Last I checked, a local company was selling the hardware (without sim) for 200EUR. The thing I was trying to protect was 120-ish.
I’m leaning towards this but which are private?
If you’re outside the US, or where more people use Samsung devices, Samsung Smarttags could be a better choice.
I can’t recommend them because I haven’t used them, but AFAIK Motorola came out with their own take on trackable tags.
