And it is opt-in... you need to enable Find My iPhone at setup time in order for that to be enabled.
"Find My Network: Participating in the Find My network lets you locate this iPhone even if its offline"
So in fact there is no option (there at least) to opt out of finding other people's AirTags unless you also want to opt out of finding your own iPhone, at least as stated.
Or is it the airtag functionality specifically that’s bothering you?
Yes. What does find my phone have to do with airtags?
Either you use the roads and pay for all the roads or you don't.
Everyone interested in finding their lost or stolen iPhone already turned it on. AirTags will bring up another small percentage of people. The sum of everything available to you, means you have this small price to pay to be part of it: contributing to finding stuff for others.
The specs are here: https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1902/en_US/app...
Page 139 onwards.
If you can find a security/privacy hole in the spec, I think Apple will compensate you pretty well.
Not something a regular dude off the street will be doing any time soon. =)
A phone is bigger, more visible, and expensive if someone would want to use it to track you. Not practical at all.
Maybe they should have 2 options: Phone and Tags (or All). Enabling find my phone would not necessarily allow tags.
Yes.
There’s nothing on any of the apple pages I could find about opting out.
If it took me that long to disable it, it won’t be obvious for most people.
I found it through Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services -> Share my Location -> Find my iPhone -> Find my Network.
They could have put it 2 steps above or found a better way.
They have a search bar at the top where you can type "Find my" and it jumps you straight to those sections.
The only jump that is not immediately obvious is that the Find My settings are under your Apple ID settings. Everything else is blindingly obvious and is not confusing at all. You being confused does not mean the average person will also be confused. You could just be a confused person.
From there though, it is a root level option when setting up your phone and enabling "Find My iPhone".
I'm actually disappointed that the disabling of the network is even an option.
Bit of a tragedy of the commons situation if we have too many selfish people like you who want the benefits of being able to find their own phone when it's lost but not participate in helping find other people's.
What if you only want to turn off airtags? This false choice is caused by apple.
Furthermore, when you disable the find my network it disables it for you as well. You can't just do it one way so it's not selfish.
> tragedy of the commons situation if we have too many selfish people
I can’t think of how helping the Find My network would compromise my privacy in any significant way. But I am still glad there’s an option to disable, there may be people for whom it is a concern.
Eh, I find it a stretch to consider things that need to be typed "discoverable" unless there's a user manual provided telling you everything that can be typed. This same reasoning is why many would consider GUIs (or text mode menu-driven interfaces) to be more user-friendly than CLIs.
Voice assistants have a very similar issue, but nobody likes IVR systems either, so who knows.
2) You can just disable this stuff when you first get your phone it walks you through these prompts there. If you don't enable it - it is not enabled.
3) Spam should be opt-in - most people don't want it. But a lot of Apple stuff should be opt-out, because people do want it. Ie, turn on GPS / location features - folks really want weather, maps with turn by turn etc. Apple already over prompts on setup for my tastes.
AirTags have some protections against using them to track people, and the AirTag network doesn't appear to leak any private information. That last part could be completely wrong, for all we know: it relies on the software to be correct. The whole point of the gizmo is to "track", and I struggle to come up with an improvement to their solution to allowing users to track things but not stalk people.
This is being automatically enrolled in some kind of public good, where "public" is the Apple ecosystem. Is that bad? I mean, I don't mind, but offering an opt-out seems... polite, at least?
Let the user block types of devices from using their "find network". And let them block individual devices from using the "find network" through their phone.
If everyone could see, every local device, there would be no private tracking.
Sibling comments point out that opting out of the AirTag network is a setting in a given iOS device, which I didn't know, but I don't think that's what you mean.
They even might? It's not unheard of for Apple to release software on other platforms, however uncommon it might be. It's certainly not the kind of thing they do right at the time of release.
I don't imagine you'd get much penetration relative to running it on every device at the OS level, though. Probably rough on the battery running in userspace?
It doesn't seem like it solves a problem most people are likely to have.
People are not going to use AirTags to more effectively stalk people than the existing GPS trackers on the market. GPS tracker would be much better in fact.
AirTag: Very economical (no monthly fee), 1 year battery life, no line-of-sight required, easily purchased without attracting attention or providing an address, unguaranteed data freshness, size of a coin.
GPS tracker: Monthly fees, 1 month battery life, line-of-sight required, slightly unusual thing to purchase & may be difficult to obtain without supplying an address, usually better data freshness, at least as big as a box of tic tacs.
It's not that AirTags would always be ideal for stalking, but considering the ease of availability & use, it's definitely going to happen. The most interesting part is that Apple decided to release this product. It's only a matter of time until AirTags are linked to a case of stalking (whether the best device for it or not) and when that article gets written, it's simply not going to be aligned with the brand image they typically aim for.
The latter isn't something under the stalker's control, it's just a really poor tool for that particular type of antisocial behavior.
Plus it's tied to your Apple account, so we're talking about getting a fresh iPhone and ginning up an account, or leaking exactly who is doing the stalking.
The number of people who will try it isn't zero, we don't live in that kind of world. I don't picture it going very well for them.
iPhones can be grabbed used for fairly low prices, same for Apple accounts.
Apple asks you every, single time you upgrade your iOS/OSX device to confirm your privacy and telemetry settings.
And all of the features they implement are private by design. They use features such as differential privacy to make sure they aren't leaking private data: https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Differential_Privacy_Over...
My iPad has the "Find My network" setting (toggled on) but I was a bit surprised to see my iPhone has what seems to be the same setting (also toggled on) but it's called "Enable Offline Finding".
Find My Network is described as "Participating in the Find My Network lets you locate this iPad even if it's offline."
Enable Offline Finding is described as "Offline finding enables this device to be found when not connected to Wi-Fi or cellular."
Which makes me wonder if "Find My Network" is just a repacking and rebranding of something Apple has been doing for a long time. Regardless, I'd prefer to have opted-in. I suppose it's possible at some point I opted in while setting up a new device with "Find My" but I'm not sure. I certainly had no idea there was a way to find my iPhone even when it wasn't connected to wi-fi or cellular signal.
E- It seems this feature was added ~2 years ago and it did indeed use bluetooth and "crowdsourced" Apple devices[1]:
> Offline Finding uses a background process called "Search Party" to broadcast and receive Bluetooth beacon signals at regular intervals, and it can even do its work when the device is in a sleep state. And it does this with limited battery impact for all devices involved, so you should see little to no difference in power consumption.
And whether it was turned on by default seems to depend:
> By default, if you had Find My iPhone, iPad, or Mac turned on before updating to iOS 13, iPadOS 13, or macOS 10.15 Catalina, Offline Finding should already be on. However, if only one of the device's had the Find My service enabled but not another device, it may not have turned on automatically. To make sure it's on, check the following.
[1]https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/track-your-lost-iphone-ip...
To be surprised that Apple uses "their" network of devices to provide services to their users shouldn't be surprising.
If you wanted control over your device you shouldn't buy Apple, their stance on user's ownership of devices is widely known.
The AirTag was not moving, hence the lack of notifications. Otherwise you'd get a ton of notification practically anywhere you approach an AirTag. It is working as intended.
How can it get any more opt-in?
For example, your device hardware serial is sent to Apple every time you open the App Store, like a permanent supercookie. Analytics are sent whenever you stream a video or make a FaceTime call, even with analytics off. Location Services sends your location 24/7 to Apple over the network, et c.
Apple's approach to co-opting the Apple-branded hardware that you own to benefit Apple is a poor one.
I did get a little pissed that the Find My Network isn't opt-out, even though I would likely choose yes.
Informed consent is the gold standard, except when it's not.
You're thinking of medical research and experimentation.
In the practice of medicine the Hippocratic oath takes precedence over everything else so of course informed consent gets thrown out when there is concrete evidence that it interferes with medicine's purpose: healing people.
When's the last time someone gave informed consent while unconscious and bleeding out after a car crash or shooting? That's why we have DNRs.
I just might help out. But the idea that by owning an iPhone I'm automatically opted into this and I can't (temporarily) disable it is concerning. Especially since the feature to alert users of the possible privacy invasion outlined here, seems to not yet be working as advertised.
It's unclear to me if the "Participate in 'Find My Network'" option is what I'm talking about. But I also don't remember being asked about this at any point.