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Researchers come up with better idea to prevent AirTag stalking (arstechnica.com)

submitted 11 months ago by L4s to c/technology

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Researchers come up with better idea to prevent AirTag stalking::Solution relies in part on cryptography practice of secret sharing to maximize privacy.

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[–] MuhammadJesusGaySex 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I put air tags on all my shit. I have an air tag on my wallet. I have an air tag on my keys. I even hid an air tag in my pc so that if it’s ever stolen I can hopefully track it down. I have an air tag on my tv remote.

They have literally changed my life. Living with 3 other people. One of which is severely autistic and will pick up things and set them down under the sofa or some such nonsense. I spend a lot less time being angry. Air tags are the best thing that Apple ever invented.

iPhone is ok, but I miss my HTC touch pro 2. Apple Watch is superfluous junk. Air pods pro? Pshhhhhh whatever! Air tags, they will change your fucking life man.

[–] lemming741 16 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Tile had trackers in 2013, 8 years before air tags. They might be better, but apple didn't invent the tech.

[–] MuhammadJesusGaySex 14 points 10 months ago

I had tile many years ago. Back then and this may have changed all you could do was make the tile thing beep. Which isn’t very helpful if some child stuffed your keys into the sofa or you left you wallet in the car. Air tags actually lead you directly to your stuff. They don’t just beep. They say your thing is 15’ that way. As you get closer the feet count down. That proximity thing is all I use.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

As far as I know, Tile is Bluetooth based and thus just general area. An AirTag your iPhone can point you in the exact direction and tell you how far you are, down to the foot. That’s an amazing feature especially for when stuff gets lost around the house. Also, they have replaceable batteries, an extreme rarity among Apple products.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Apple hasn't said exactly how long this time interval is, but to create the much-needed alert system, Apple made some crucial changes to the location privacy design the company originally developed a few years ago for its “Find My” device tracking feature.

The idea is that this way other devices can detect potential stalking, but won't be throwing up alerts all the time if you spend a weekend with a friend who has their iPhone and the AirTag on their keys in their pockets.

In practice, though, the researchers say that these changes have created a situation where AirTags are broadcasting their location to anyone who's checking within a 30- to 50-foot radius over the course of an entire day—enough time to track a person as they go about their life and get a sense of their movements.

“We had students walk through cities, walk through Times Square and Washington, DC, and lots and lots of people are broadcasting their locations,” says Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matt Green, who worked on the research with a group of colleagues, including Nadia Heninger and Abhishek Jain.

Apple has been working with companies like Google, Samsung, and Tile on a cross-industry effort to address the threat of tracking from products similar to AirTags.

And for now, at least, the researchers say that the consortium seems to have adopted Apple's approach of rotating the device public identifiers once every 24 hours.

The original article contains 464 words, the summary contains 236 words. Saved 49%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Missed the "better idea" which is using part of the rotating ID for something called "secret sharing" that lets you determine which IDs belong together after gathering a few random IDs. Eg, you have 3 IDs and they look unrelated and you get a 4th and boom the math works out and now you know you have a rando airtag in your pocket.