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Apple Announces Find My Network With Support for Third-Party Devices
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It's designed so that only devices associated with the same Apple ID can "find" each other. The location reports from finder devices are end-to-end encrypted with rotating keys only known to the owner of the Apple ID, so not even Apple can read them. Here's a paper with an analysis of how it works:
Who Can Find My Devices? Security and Privacy of Apple's Crowd-Sourced Bluetooth Location Tracking System
Overnight, Apple has turned its hundreds-of-million-device ecosystem into the world's largest crowd-sourced location tracking network called offline finding (OF). OF leverages online finder devices to detect the presence of missing offline devices using Bluetooth and report an approximate...
arxiv.org
It is of course possible that there are undiscovered weaknesses (the authors of the paper discovered a potential location correlation weakness).
Dear Mr Borchers,
A “decade” ago my wife had her purse stolen and we were able to track down her phone using “Find My”, it was located in a residence not to far from where her purse was stolen. Unfortunately, the Police could do nothing about it. Maybe you could lobby the Feds or local governments to use your data to obtain a search warrant? After all most of these phone thefts would be considered Grand Theft? No?
Or figure out a way to completey render the phone useless forever and do a PSA telling would be thief’s the phone is a useless asset of stolen. Now that would taking care of your customer.
A “decade” ago my wife had her purse stolen and we were able to track down her phone using “Find My”, it was located in a residence not to far from where her purse was stolen. Unfortunately, the Police could do nothing about it. Maybe you could lobby the Feds or local governments to use your data to obtain a search warrant? After all most of these phone thefts would be considered Grand Theft? No?
Or figure out a way to completey render the phone useless forever and do a PSA telling would be thief’s the phone is a useless asset of stolen. Now that would taking care of your customer.
Don't really need airtags to do that. Your spouse shouldn't really have an issue with sharing location already using Find my. And then you can also track your spouse's iphone and applewatch as a device even if "share location" as a person is off.
I think this is an interesting perspective. I wonder -- if true -- it'll ever come out. But yeah, I think I could see Apple shifting course on this to avoid heaping coal. I hope we find out!
And sailed some time ago. Mobile startups in 1999-2000 were pulling location data from phones using towers.That ship already sailed. Cell location from the modems in most cars, cell location from your cell phones, toll transponders, or they can straight up stash a lojack or something in your car. At least now we get a chance to use the surveillance network for finding our stuff.
This will be Find My 2.0 as far as AirPods will be concerned.
The first implementation of Find My for AirPods has been weak because it's dependent solely upon a Bluetooth connection to devices with the same Apple ID. It's the same capability that's available for other Bluetooth devices, like my father's Bluetooth hearing aids, which uses the hearing aids' dedicated app to home-in on a lost device that is within Bluetooth range. It's far from wonderful, but nice when it does work.
The ability to invoke Lost Mode and to be detectible by a huge number of mobile devices (and no doubt fixed-location Bluetooth/ultra-wideband devices in retail stores and other public locations) is a game-changer for locating lost items.
We can complain, "Hey Apple, what took you so long," but part of what's happening here is that Apple has quietly pre-installed this capability into the last two generations of iPhones. When people start using this network there will already be a large installed base of detectors out there, ensuring a reasonably satisfactory lost-and-found experience. Had it rolled out in September 2019 with iPhone 11 the first complaint would inevitably have been, "There's nothing out there that can find my lost stuff!"
I'd guess that Apple held off on implementing U1-equipped AirPods and Beats products in order to maintain the element of surprise. All the talk in RumorWorld has been of an Apple-branded tag, with barely a suggestion of what this could mean for Apple's audio products. So I'd expect that there will be more than a few new U1-equipped products announced in upcoming days, and Tags will be nearly a footnote - the long-rumored AirPods 3, a new AirPods Pro, new Beats, the next round of Macs, iPads, Apple TV... everything from now on with U1. And of course, the inclusion of U1 in HomePod Mini makes more sense. What else? So far, outside of HomePod and Apple TV-as-base-station, Apple has stayed out of the market for Home Kit accessories. U1-equipped devices, whether by Apple or others, will become even more appealing for finding items lost in the yard.
Lost Mode for headphones and other personal electronics, not to mention any Taggable physical object, will be huge. A web-based Lost Mode process where the owner of the lost device can maintain relative anonymity (no phone number plastered on the device display for anyone to find and use in SMS scams) will be very welcome indeed. At some point there does have to be some identity information exchanged between finder and owner, but this should still cut down substantially on risks and scamming.
Altogether, a very exciting expansion of the Apple ecosystem.
Yes, but nonetheless there is a risk that something like the Airtags could "democratize" surveillance. They'd make small, cheap and almost untraceable tracking devices. Just hide one in e.g. your spouse's bag or car and you could probably track them quite well.That ship already sailed. Cell location from the modems in most cars, cell location from your cell phones, toll transponders, or they can straight up stash a lojack or something in your car. At least now we get a chance to use the surveillance network for finding our stuff
Have you not seen ? There’s actually a feature to prevent this.
“An item on your person has been causing your location to be tracked” with the ability to stop it.
So no. It’s a non-issue
I don't think it's purely a matter of handing this off to others. Apple still has the built-in advantage of adding the technology to everything it sells, without additional licensing fees (well, other than whatever everyone in the industry is paying to license UWB). Further, it extends/enhances Apple brand promotion ("Halo Effect"), and brings/binds more users into the Apple ecosystem.
Pragmatically speaking, this is one of those cases where opening the door to third party products will accelerate adoption and Find My brand awareness - the kind of rapid build-out of a platform that can lead to market dominance.
I wonder if this was originally going to be announced at a late March or early April event. Something tells me Apple's supply chain has slowed down and any event they were planning for iPads, AirTags, etc. had to be delayed. This seems like a BIG deal that they would normally like to announce at an event, no?
iOS has a 1 billion device install base - this 3rd party integration solution Apple has proposed will work just fine and is a huge improvement over what Tile had offered.
what you’re suggesting isn’t going to happen
Sonos speakers quality and product diversity are better than any Homepod Apple has put out, so no. Amazon Alexa is hands down so much more responsive and accurate than Siri, so no. Google, maybe, you can have Google Assistant.
yea.. but to those who already are in the apple ecosystem this is indeed great news, service or not.
Likely both a product they were looking at releasing as well as a way to test this 3rd party service. Who knows if they will ever sell an actually Apple branded "AirTag" device, but the fact that they didn't release when they announced this program is not a good sign for the future of that product. As others have said maybe it is low margins or maybe it was something they found during internal testing.
It could help with finding the car at theme park close - although these i walk so slow mine would be the only one left in the lot anyway.
We used find my in 2019 to find exactly where the teen left her phone before our cruise. Oh lookie there, on the shuttle van to the port... next time put it in your backpack????
And i'd 100% put it on my AppleTV remote - except it is already missing 🤣
We used find my in 2019 to find exactly where the teen left her phone before our cruise. Oh lookie there, on the shuttle van to the port... next time put it in your backpack????
And i'd 100% put it on my AppleTV remote - except it is already missing 🤣
Maybe yes, maybe no. Today's story is, "Apple Opens Find My to Third Parties." That's more buzz-worthy than "Apple Adds Another Feature to Its Closed Ecosystem." This generates some news today, and gets four companies spinning out press announcements about it. This seeds interest in the feature now. Then in a few weeks or months Apple announces its latest, greatest "now compatible with..." products. I think it still works fine for Apple.
Maybe AirTags is a test-only product, but just because it wasn't first to be announced doesn't mean it can't be introduced at a later date. Chipolo ONE Spot doesn't ship until June, which gives Apple plenty of time.
Tags are yet another high-value product that occupy very little space on the Accessories rack in the retail store and make a nice add-on to nearly any other sale ("Hey, did you know you can now use Find My for your key ring, purse/wallet, etc.?"). I don't think Apple is going to walk away from this and leave it to the third-parties.
Mama Apple already has you covered to find your car! https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/find-your-parked-car-ipha13ef1c2e/ios