'I Used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS Tracker To Watch My Husband's Every Move' (nytimes.com) 77
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times, written by journalist Kashmir Hill: In mid-January, my husband and I were having an argument. Our 1-year-old had just tested positive for Covid-19 and was occasionally grunting between breaths. I called urgent care and was told we should take her to the emergency room. But, because I had been up all night with her, I was too exhausted to drive. "I'm worried," I told my husband. "I want you to take her to the hospital." "Doctors always tell us to take the baby to the E.R. whenever we call about anything," he replied, exasperated. (This was true.) "She is fine. She is eating and playing and happy. This is not an emergency." He eventually caved and set out for the hospital a half-hour away. Knowing he was already annoyed by me, I did not want to pepper him with questions about how it was going. Instead, I turned to the location-monitoring devices that I had secretly stashed in our car a week earlier.
I put a quarter-sized Apple AirTag in a seat pocket; a flat, credit card-shaped Bluetooth tracker made by Tile in a dashboard pocket; and a hockey-puck-like GPS tracker from a company called LandAirSea in the glove compartment. I realize I sound like the worst wife ever, so let me explain. It was for journalism. [...] I shared the feed from the LandAirSea GPS tracker with the photographer Todd Heisler so he could follow my husband around New York City. When my colleague and I reported on this, experts we spoke with were of two minds about Apple's attempts to prevent nefarious use, with some saying the alerts were inadequate and others praising the company for unearthing a larger problem: widespread surreptitious tracking, usually done with devices that don't notify a person of their presence. I decided to examine both claims by planting three AirTags, three Tiles, and a GPS tracker on my husband and his belongings to see how precisely they revealed his movements and which ones he discovered. [...]
Thirty minutes after my husband and youngest departed for the hospital, I opened an app linked to the most precise tracker in my arsenal, the $30 LandAirSea device. To activate it costs extra, because it needs a cellular plan to relay where global positioning satellites have placed it. I chose the cheapest plan, $19.95 monthly, to get location updates every three minutes; the most expensive plan, for updates every three seconds, was $49.95. The app has an "InstaFence" feature that can alert me when the car moves, and a "Playback" option to show where the car has been, so I could see the exact route on windy roads my husband had taken. I saw that he parked at 4:55 p.m., so I wasn't surprised when I got a text from him 12 minutes later reporting that they were in the waiting room. The other trackers in the car -- the $34.99 Tile and $29 AirTag -- didn't work as well in real time out in the sparsely populated area where we live. The AirTag, designed to find keys left behind "at the beach," took an hour or so to reveal that the car was in the hospital parking lot. The Tile, intended to "find misplaced things nearby and far away," never realized it had moved from our garage. That's because these devices rely on Bluetooth technology. Hill went on to say that she hid an AirTag in her husband's backpack, which became her most powerful tracker, "outperforming the GPS device, and allowing me to tell a photographer exactly where he was at all times."
"Within two hours of my putting all the trackers in our car, my husband, who has an iPhone, got an alert about the AirTag, after running an errand," adds Hill. "The problem was that he couldn't find it. [...] The one time his iPhone connected to the AirTag in the car, so he could play the noise, it was so hard to tell where it was coming from that he gave up looking for it after five minutes."
In response to the surreptitious tracking, Hill's husband said: "For all the bad press the AirTags have gotten, and as flaky as the detection mechanisms were, at least I was consistently getting notifications they were following me. The privacy dangers of the other trackers were way worse."
I put a quarter-sized Apple AirTag in a seat pocket; a flat, credit card-shaped Bluetooth tracker made by Tile in a dashboard pocket; and a hockey-puck-like GPS tracker from a company called LandAirSea in the glove compartment. I realize I sound like the worst wife ever, so let me explain. It was for journalism. [...] I shared the feed from the LandAirSea GPS tracker with the photographer Todd Heisler so he could follow my husband around New York City. When my colleague and I reported on this, experts we spoke with were of two minds about Apple's attempts to prevent nefarious use, with some saying the alerts were inadequate and others praising the company for unearthing a larger problem: widespread surreptitious tracking, usually done with devices that don't notify a person of their presence. I decided to examine both claims by planting three AirTags, three Tiles, and a GPS tracker on my husband and his belongings to see how precisely they revealed his movements and which ones he discovered. [...]
Thirty minutes after my husband and youngest departed for the hospital, I opened an app linked to the most precise tracker in my arsenal, the $30 LandAirSea device. To activate it costs extra, because it needs a cellular plan to relay where global positioning satellites have placed it. I chose the cheapest plan, $19.95 monthly, to get location updates every three minutes; the most expensive plan, for updates every three seconds, was $49.95. The app has an "InstaFence" feature that can alert me when the car moves, and a "Playback" option to show where the car has been, so I could see the exact route on windy roads my husband had taken. I saw that he parked at 4:55 p.m., so I wasn't surprised when I got a text from him 12 minutes later reporting that they were in the waiting room. The other trackers in the car -- the $34.99 Tile and $29 AirTag -- didn't work as well in real time out in the sparsely populated area where we live. The AirTag, designed to find keys left behind "at the beach," took an hour or so to reveal that the car was in the hospital parking lot. The Tile, intended to "find misplaced things nearby and far away," never realized it had moved from our garage. That's because these devices rely on Bluetooth technology. Hill went on to say that she hid an AirTag in her husband's backpack, which became her most powerful tracker, "outperforming the GPS device, and allowing me to tell a photographer exactly where he was at all times."
"Within two hours of my putting all the trackers in our car, my husband, who has an iPhone, got an alert about the AirTag, after running an errand," adds Hill. "The problem was that he couldn't find it. [...] The one time his iPhone connected to the AirTag in the car, so he could play the noise, it was so hard to tell where it was coming from that he gave up looking for it after five minutes."
In response to the surreptitious tracking, Hill's husband said: "For all the bad press the AirTags have gotten, and as flaky as the detection mechanisms were, at least I was consistently getting notifications they were following me. The privacy dangers of the other trackers were way worse."
At least she knows (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:At least she knows (Score:5, Funny)
Well she is a New York Times journalist. So she might not know.
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Nothing to see here! Just another pretend article from a lefty pundit pretending to play a journalist for NYT. But the NYT does not do much journalism these days.
Sure, but she's also pretending to be a stalker, so the article is also a tutorial for those who aspire to this craft.
And. Not completely incidentally, she's put her husband on notice that she could be tracking him anytime.
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Re:At least she knows (Score:5, Informative)
I mean, that she's the worst wife ever. Actually, I wonder if they are still together?
According to TFA, she ask his permission to track him:
I decided to examine both claims by planting three AirTags, three Tiles, and a GPS tracker on my husband and his belongings to see how precisely they revealed his movements and which ones he discovered.
Some states, including New York, where we live, have laws criminalizing this sort of thing. Not wanting to break the law, or my husband’s trust, I had asked him for permission.
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Ah, so journalistic integrity just added a couple of extra-hot dashes of Hype and Bullshit to make it sound bad, and even came with a self-admittance rather than just stating surveillance was approved up front.
Glad she feels good about that while the rest of are are in the WTF-zone.
If that's how she executes a privacy check, I'd sure hate to see a red team pen test. Is anal bleeding normal or expected?
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Not sure what you're on about, but I'd chalk this up to the TFS and /. editor(s) more than TFA as it was clearly stated in the latter...
Re:At least she knows (Score:5, Insightful)
How else are you supposed to check that Apple and others are doing what they can to make their devices not useful for stalking?
I mean, if you're investigating how well the devices alert the user, a semi-real world test seems to be appropriate, no?
So rather than just say "I tested airtags, tiles and GPS locators to see how suitable they are for stalking", it would be a rather boring article and few people would read it. Instead. adding the spice of tracker her husband, she wrote a more interesting article that would reach a larger audience who may not know that the devices can and are being used nefariously.
It was less a scientific test and more a human article on how people can misuse these devices to track you for stalking or theft purposes, and whether or not Apple's attempts at alerting users is adequate. So it appears that iPhones will tell you constantly if you're being stalked, but the speaker doesn't even have to be disabled - the sound is soft enough that it can be easily muffled.
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He may know that she might try to track him at some point before eg. June, but not by exactly which means or exactly when. As he's not a trained spy he probably won't be on alert 24/7.
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We need to know how Apple deal with stalkers too. If you take an AirTag tracker to the police and complain that someone planted it in your car, what happens? The police probably won't be interested, but say you get lucky and they request data from Apple about the owner, will Apple supply it? Do they need to get a warrant?
The best thing to do if you find one is probably to destroy it, and then get an app that lets you scan for those things. Apple are unlikely to tell you who it belongs to I think.
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What? I'm not sure you even know what you're trying to say ...
Permission for article, not personal use (Score:3)
According to TFA, she ask his permission to track him:
For the article and its controlled experiments. That does not cover her later personal use.
Re: At least she knows (Score:2)
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They might still be together.
I wonder though about that function that plays a sound to help locate the to "foreign" AirTag. Can't they use some kind of triangulation to give you a better idea of where it is? Or you know, just something that measures the signal strength as a "hotter/colder" indicator? I mean they definitely use some triangulation method to approximate the location of the air tag for the owner.
Re:At least she knows (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is the signal strength is a poor indication. The Bluetooth antenna is meant to be omnidirectional - after all, the device you connecting to can be anywhere around you. This lack of directionality makes it hard to pinpoint where it might be. The next issue is the signal is attenuated and bounced in unpredictable ways, such that a signal strength indication is only accurate to probably a few feet. Enough to determine if a tag is following you (if you detect the same tag while you're moving then it's likely following you, even if the signal strength varies wildly - the signal is only good for 30 feet at most so if you keep detecting the same tag after you move more than 30 feet several times, chances are it's with you.
It's why you can get the alert on say, public transit, or if you're traveling in heavy traffic even if the tag is somewhere else.
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Omnidirectionality within this context just means that the device is located on the surface of a deformed sphere (accounting for attenuation). If the signals are sent out frequently enough you can track that down as long as your receiver is mobile. Perhaps to conserve battery they only sporadically broadcast out a signal, making that method not feasible?
Otherwise you use a 2nd receiver. And if you know the relative position between the two you now have tw
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I mean, that she's the worst wife ever.
It is kind of a shady thing to do even if it was "for work." Most people would be stressed by wondering if they're being stalked (when the AirTag notification pops up), and that's a lousy thing to put someone you care about through.
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I mean, that she's the worst wife ever.
The gauntlet has been thrown.
"Hey hon. Come over here for a sec."
Re:Glad I'm not their kid (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Glad I'm not their kid (Score:3)
Actually she did surreptitiously track ... (Score:2)
RTFA isn't your strongest suit, huh. They performed some field testing on some trackers. She wasn't actually tracking him surreptitiously.
Actually when she used the tracker for personal use rather than research for the article she was surreptitiously tracking him.
Re: Glad I'm not their kid (Score:1)
Itâ(TM)s rather unclear from what I read, it sounds like they did some planning for the research together, then during an argument she threw them in without his knowledge.
Itâ(TM)s unclear whether his consent extended to or if it was even considered this could happen at letâ(TM)s say an inopportune moment in the relationship.
The argument for consent is very thin on this one.
r/Adultery (Score:2)
I understand this is a common topic of conversation on Reddit/adultery - people afraid their spouse is tracking them with an Airtag in their car. Not that I would know anything about that directly. A friend told me about it.
Re:r/Adultery (Score:4, Funny)
Worried wife: "Oh, that's a relief. He's not driving to some other woman's house... he's just driving to a car rental place repeatedly."
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people afraid their spouse is tracking them with an Airtag in their car.
There is no technological solution to an unhappy relationship. They either need to stop cheating or tell their S.O. how they feel and reach some sort of amicable solution (which could include an open relationship if both parties agree, or breaking up/divorce). Of course, you'd probably get downvoted straight into oblivion for stating the obvious in that subreddit.
Re:does it make a difference if it's for an articl (Score:4, Informative)
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Except for the part where she got his permission. You need to stop jumping to conclusions because they fit a personal narrative.
To be fair, TFS doesn't mention this even though TFA does (which is where I noticed it). As it's customary for /. readers to skip reading the latter, it's a fairly important bit that editors should have included in former (if they even read the latter) ... :-)
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To be further fair, she does say she stashed the things in his car "secretly".
Last time I checked my english syntax, that's a fairly strong implication that she DIDN'T ask him.
But as we know, in this case she meant 'secretly' in ironic sense, ie without his SPECIFIC knowledge of where they were, but he did know he was going to be tracked.
Considering the article is behind the Great Paywall of NYT, I can't really fault /.ers for "NOT RTFA" this time.
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> stashed the things in his car "secretly".
Another interpretation is that she asked him permission but that the actual position of the tracker was (by agreement) secret.
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Except for the part where she got his permission.
Except permission for the article research is something entirely different than permission for personal paranoia use.
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she could totally have done her research while telling her husband what was happening
TFA stated that she did ask his permission to track him personally, as I noted [slashdot.org] above ...
Re: does it make a difference if it's for an artic (Score:2)
If you track, maybe you also need tracking. (Score:2)
Cheating used to the domain of deplorables. Education now shows this is universal.
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Those believing it was the domain of the lowlies (deplorables, fly-overs, trailer trash, etc) are either deluded, ignorant of readily available history or brainwashed.
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Unjustified trust in the past was the real problem revealed by the trackers today.
Just like cameras showed us eye witness reports were also untrustworthy when they had previously been the gold standard.
Lame (Score:2)
Was this supposed to be cool or at least somewhat informative, eye opening? Cause it was only dumb.
If you want to track them, get a divorce (Score:2)
Your distrust of them is just as bad as them committing adultery. Marriage is many things, but legally it is a financial contract that you should NEVER stay in with someone you do not trust.
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Nah. She doesn't distrust him: it was journalism. That's what she said.
Journalism is what you say when you get caught breaking the rules. Kicked out of some IRC or Discord chatroom for selling drugs? Actually Mr. Moderator, I was doing research for an article on the underground narcotics market.
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If you'd bother to RTFA, you'd find out that she asked him if she could track him.
TMI (Score:1)
"I had asked him for permission." (Score:3)
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The point was to simulate what someone might do, and see if the husband found the stashed away tracking devices.
Husband tracking wife? (Score:2)
So... if we switch the sexes, how do you feel about the story? Are you OK with it? Or does the husband tracking his wife feel creepy and controlling, an example of patriarchal oppression? Do you believe him when he says he asked permission, or do you suspect that maybe he pressured her into it?
Yes, you are not a good person ... (Score:2)
I realize I sound like the worst wife ever, so let me explain. It was for journalism.
Yes, you are not a good person. Journalism is just your rationalization for bad behavior. As a journalist you have no more rights than anyone else.
Husband's every move (Score:3)
"It's Sunday afternoon and he's still in front of the TV set in the den."
She needed an AirTag for that?
lol (Score:2)
Notice she wrote an entire advertisement to distract from the fact that he was right about the baby being ok, and that going to the ER was a waste of time.
Seriously? (Score:1)
Attack the woman (Score:2)
Who's going to keep defending Apple's privacy record?
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I miss the days of people being responsible for their own actions. *sigh*
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Are we back to the good old Slashdot where corporations can do no wrong? *sigh*
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Well, it's not like the Apple tag has no competition. "Unleashing" seems a bit of an overstatement.
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I farted on the metro: It was for journalism. I drowned a dog in a septic tank: It was for journalism. I set fire to a maternity ward: It was for journalism. I invaded Ukraine: It was for journalism...
I studied hyperbolae: it was for journalism.
BUT THE OTHERS ARE DOING IT TOO!! AND WORSE!!! (Score:2)
Apple apologists are so reliable.
Now image if he tracked her instead (Score:2)
Er ... (Score:2)
"'I Used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS Tracker To Watch My Husband's Every Move' "
Who doesn't?
Hmmm (Score:1)
Re: Hmmm (Score:2)
Yeah, this whole idea that Apple wants you to have an iPhone to defeat their stalking devices is insane. That should be illegal. These devices are obviously designed for illegal activity and serve almost no real world purpose that shouldn't get you thrown in prison.
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These things have specific, easily identifiable use cases that are completely benign.
Similarly, there is absolutely no end of crime and nefarious activity facilitated by a motor vehicle. Try getting a tag to transport a dead hooker for disposal.
Zyklon B still exists as Cyanosil.
Now imagine (Score:2)
If this was a guy tracking his wife (even with permission)
Queue the outrage !