poopkins

The brakes broke, so I guess technically it could be a "break failure."

Whoa, the owner acknowledged that the weather was to blame, not Tesla?!

Allow me to clarify:

• Limited support for AirTags has been added to Android, that is the context of the posted article and the experience you are describing.
• Apple neither supports account access on Android devices or provisions access to their tag network on behalf of linked accounts, so unless you have an Apple device, you cannot stipulate that a tag that belongs to you.

Consequently, the solution offered by Google appears to have been effectively built without Apple's support. Goggle's added support for AirTags despite Apple's cooperation—and support for other tracking devices—is a net positive for privacy.

Yes, users have begun to be alerted of trackers—this is the recent change by Google as it relates to this post. An ongoing issue is, to my knowledge, that there's no way to identify what kind of device it is. Goggle's instructions literally suggest taking a screenshot of the serial number for later reference.

Android has no way of knowing if a tag is "unauthorized" because Apple does not provision access to their tag network. You could, in principle, ignore tags that you know about, but you'd have to do it by identifying it by some arbitrary hexadecimal GATT ID.

As always, Apple wants to keep it that way, because it gives a poor experience on Android.

Theoretically (and I might be wrong about this), without attempting to reverse engineer how Apple assigns these codes, there would be no to differentiate AirTags, AirPods, iPhones, etc.

We're up in arms about the discontinuation of a 12-year-old security camera? I think 12 years of support is more than reasonable.

There is a much more sinister issue that Google is trying to resolve with this: it's currently possible to stalk somebody by placing a tracker fob in their bag or on their car, so long as you know the victim's device doesn't support it.

Suppose some creeper with an iPhone is stalking a victim with an Android phone. So long as they use an Apple AirTag, the victim will never know they have a tracker trailing them wherever they go. And in reverse, the issue is the same.

Apple isn't concerned about this, because they hold a monopoly in the market they care most about and can leverage this as an iPhone-only feature. After all, so long as you have an iPhone, you'll be warned about an AirTag you don't own following you. Apple wants to leverage this as an exclusive safety feature and have no intention of allowing other devices to do the same.

Apologies for providing this background as I know that this goes against the circle jerk of accusing Google of infringing our privacy. Feel free to disregard this context of it being beneficial to our collective privacy.

As somebody who is very deeply integrated with ad integrations that include the ones listed in the article—AdWords and AdMob—there are no insights provided to me as an advertiser or any other bidder regarding individual data. Perhaps the EFF would like to research this topic in some more detail.

There is simply no data for me to obtain, no insights for me to dig into, no aggregated collections for me to unpack, no anonymized groups for me to attempt to drill into. With honest sincerity, I just don't know what the EFF is trying to accomplish with that article. I genuinely feel that this article is taking a native approach to the creative use of "sale" and undermines their credibility.

If an advertiser like me can't obtain this data that's supposedly for sale, then where is it being sold? We instead begin to navigate down a path regarding the choice of the user: do you prefer personalized ads or non-personalized ads? If you have chosen for personalized ads, then it will be Google and Google alone that will bucket you into groups to perform bidding towards interests that you group into.

Then coming back to the original question: where exactly does Google sell your data?

Correct, roughly 78% of their revenue is from ads.

Can you walk me through your logic that Google would sell your data? Who would they sell your data to, exactly, and how would that be financially advantageous to them?

Precisely; for context, it was recently discussed in Dutch media how some of these e-bikes reach 60 km/h. Together with a culture of people refusing to wear bicycle helmets, there's certainly some more nuance and middle ground.

There needs to be some kind of solution, but doing nothing is not really an option.

How do you navigate?