<
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/03/10/how-tracking-someones-movements-can-make-them-look-guilty-even-when-theyre-not/>
"Last month, the NY Times published a really great article by (the always
innovative) tech reporter Kashmir Hill, in which she tested out a bunch of
those location tracking tools by hiding them (with permission) on her husband,
Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. It was
a great and eye-opening article, looking both at how well (mixed bag) some of
those tracking tools worked, and how easy (often much more than you’d expect)
it was to hide them on someone. Here’s just a snippet, though the whole article
is worth reading.
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.
The problem was that he couldn’t find it. The alert said he could make the
AirTag play a sound, but when he attempted to do so, his phone wouldn’t
connect to the device. This happened multiple times, and he started to get
frustrated. “Is it in my shoe?” he asked me at one point, taking his blue
Nike off and peering at it. “You have to tell me. I don’t want to destroy my
shoe looking for 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.
The critics were right: Apple’s safeguards against nefarious use weren’t
foolproof.
I had meant to write up a post about it at the time, but am kind of glad I got
busy and didn’t get around to it, because now, Timm has been able to write an
article from his own perspective on how all of this played out. And the key
lesson learned was that
even if you weren’t doing anything bad, it’s entirely
possible for people to suspect you of being up to no good based solely on your
location info."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
