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New York Police Department Encourages Car Owners to Use AirTags to Deter Theft, 500 Free AirTags Available
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In my experience 80% are all “keep your head down till retirement”
The New York Police Department (NYPD) is encouraging New York car owners to install Apple AirTags in cars in order to cut down on car theft in the city.
In a tweet shared over the weekend, the NYPD said that "the 21st century calls for 21st century policing," and that an AirTag in a car will help officers recover a car if it is stolen. An accompanying video instructs car owners to get an AirTag and install it in a location in the vehicle where it can't easily be found.
The video then demonstrates a car theft where the owner uses the Find My app to track the car, with the tracking information relayed to the police. Officers find the car thanks to the AirTag and are able to recover the vehicle and arrest the thief.
"Safe guard your car by simply putting an Apple AirTag inside of it," the NYPD writes at the end of the video. The AirTag initiative comes after a viral TikTok car theft video that caused an uptick in thefts across the United States. In the TikTok, thieves demonstrate how to get into Hyundai and Kia vehicles through an easily accessible exploit.
In an accompanying press conference on Sunday, New York City mayor Eric Adams said that the city will provide 500 free AirTags to car owners. According to CBS News, the AirTags are available to residents in Castle Hill, Soundview, and Parkchester, as these areas have seen a 548 percent increase in stolen Hyundai and Kia vehicles.
Article Link: New York Police Department Encourages Car Owners to Use AirTags to Deter Theft, 500 Free AirTags Available
What I've heard from other police department is AirTags don't help inside of cars. Cars are too much metal and block the signal so if in a car need to put it by a window where it there is less metal. Some people are using the keyfobs with AirTags so they can track the thief or where ever they leave the keys.
What you’re saying is
1) The police did their job catching the person
2) The ADA contacted your wife, because victims should have an opportunity to have a say in sentencing. Sounds progressive to me.
The rest is cynical assumption.
Free electronic tracking devices from a law enforcement agency with a very strained relationship with civil liberties, specifically search and seizure? Man, where do I sign up?
PS - Google “state sponsored hardware level surveillance” before trying to suggest the NYPD (which also has RF and comms gear at every traffic light, right of way, in every vehicle, and on every Officer on foot/bike/bus, etc) couldn’t easily slide their own baseband into them to (at the very least) simply track hardware identifier whereabouts.
PS - Google “state sponsored hardware level surveillance” before trying to suggest the NYPD (which also has RF and comms gear at every traffic light, right of way, in every vehicle, and on every Officer on foot/bike/bus, etc) couldn’t easily slide their own baseband into them to (at the very least) simply track hardware identifier whereabouts.
From my experience, 80% are doing their job, 10% are trying to climb the corporate ladder and 10% are keeping their head down.
Great question. People can obviously search for AirTags nearby with an iPhone. If a vehicle has one hidden in it, a criminal who doesn’t want to get caught is not going to start searching all of the places an AirTag can be hidden outside of the glove compartment or centre console. They’ll move on to the next car. So for that criminal, it acts as a pretty good deterrent.
They can track every car with ANPR, so why would they bother with developing technology for 0.025% of cars to have an AirTag. Conspiracy theories are hilarious.
While we are on this topic, is the ability to scan for AirTags inside the find my app a US-only feature? I am living in Asia and I can't seem to locate the feature anywhere inside said app.
Perhaps it's as you said - more of a deterrent than a means of tracking down cars after they have been jacked.
On a side note, whatever happened to in-car GPS systems? Didn't cars used to come with them?
I’m in Australia and I just tried it and it works, although other than mine, I got a negative result.
They do have GPS, but only a few high end ones have transmitters as far as I am aware. But you can get them fitted after market.
Dude, back in 2013 state sponsored actors were compromising phones (much more sophisticated, delicate, and hardened devices than an AirTag) at the hardware level, do you really think 10 years later state-sponsored actors can't easily do the same thing to basically just a glorified microcontroller?
Some guy in his spare time with zero state-sponsored apparatus did rooted his AirTag. I guarantee you your AirTag is "shared" with any agency of any scale that so desires it, without Apple even in the loop on that "sharing".
Let's not forget the NYPD is an enormous entity with significant links to US federal LE agencies and even the DoD. And they don't have the best record when it comes to civil liberties, either.
Apple AirTags Hacked And Cloned With Voltage Glitching
Apple AirTags are useful little devices. They essentially use iPhones in the wild as a mesh network to tell the owner where the AirTag is. Now, researchers have shown that it’s possible to cl…hackaday.com
Hack a day 🤘
It's simple... Tile etc does not work... I used them in the past and the crowdsourcing was a joke. And even non-crowd sourcing, it just didn't work...
Wait, were you a cop in Australia or the US? There’s a huge difference there, here police act like an occupying army with no rules of engagement. When I was in Europe I never even saw a cop with a gun and they were always friendly and helpful, never once did I feel threatened by them.
The point is to increase the odds by a substantial enough percentage that fewer thieves will risk being caught.
If I put 500 poisoned M&Ms in a bowl of 10,000 safe M&Ms, you’d get far fewer people digging their hands into that bowl.
There’ll always be the pros who operate in surgical fashion but all the opportunists are going to stay away, making it easier for the cops to focus on the big fish.
This is not true. I have one attached to a backpack always in the car works fine.
Good to have something like AirTags to keep track/protect the vehicle.
I have one attached to my house, just in case I come home one day, and the house is completely gone.
I predict about 460 end up on posh Manhattan poodles (or similar lapdogs) that rich socialites walk in Central Park.
You’re the one cherry-picking. The pandemic obviously caused a spike in crime because of the loss of income of so many people. It went back down after
It’s a thing 🏠🎈🥸😃
Attachments
It’s true that metal blocks signals so it’s better not to hide it in the motor compartment or something like that. Easy enough to test it for yourself, if you get a signal then it’s OK, simple as that.
What worries me is that insurance companies might sooner or later make tracking mandatory. Some might even require access to your location. Otherwise you will not get the cheapest premiums. There are already insurance contracts that say that your car is not insured if you park it outside at night.
Not sure though if there aren't any better solutions that can't be detected that easily by a thief. A good spy device would stay silent and undetectable most of the time and then send the location out once an hour or even just once at night when then thieve is likely sleeping.
If you really want to fool the thieve, you could put two trackers in the car. One that he will easily find and feel save afterwards and one that he will likely not find, as he will probably start searching after he found the first device.
Of course if a thieve could detect that there is a tacking device somewhere in the car, that might also be a good thing. He would probably rather steal another car then. So it could even make sense to put a sticker on the car that mentions the tracking device.
Not sure though if there aren't any better solutions that can't be detected that easily by a thief. A good spy device would stay silent and undetectable most of the time and then send the location out once an hour or even just once at night when then thieve is likely sleeping.
If you really want to fool the thieve, you could put two trackers in the car. One that he will easily find and feel save afterwards and one that he will likely not find, as he will probably start searching after he found the first device.
Of course if a thieve could detect that there is a tacking device somewhere in the car, that might also be a good thing. He would probably rather steal another car then. So it could even make sense to put a sticker on the car that mentions the tracking device.
For career criminals, crime is only deterred if the criminal is scared of the punishment, not whether they are caught or not.
Just a GPS transmitter hard wired with a kill switch. Easy to have installed and quite common
I literally don't know anyone who has a Tile (or the app installed) so the chances of tracking successfully would be close to 0% vs close to 100% with an Airtag. It's the cheap and cheerful option that works (for purposes not endorsed by Apple).
Firstly, it's not a blowey uppy "Lithium battery" ... it's a big watch battery. I leave a dashcam that does have a far more volitile "LiPo" battery in my car windscreen. It's survived over 5 years just fine in the 35 degree heat here.
It's not like you are going to leave the Airtag on the dashboard anyhow unless you are attaching it to the base of a Hula Girl.
Thieves attaching them to cars they want to steal, and taking it whenever its most convenient. Do you always check your wheel wells
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