It says:

"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.

Which is entirely fair, don’t you think? If you want to make use of the ability to find your phone while it’s powered off, you should help others to do the same.

Or is it the airtag functionality specifically that’s bothering you?

> Or is it the airtag functionality specifically that’s bothering you?

Yes. What does find my phone have to do with airtags?

You can still have traditional Find My- the one where your phone connects and tells Apple where its GPS is. This switch is specifically for the networking, which allows other devices to help out when your phone is dead or otherwise not connected to the internet/gps.

But i wouldn't mind helping people find their phones, but i would want to opt out of airtags. I'm not mooching because i don't have any airtags.

If it has no impact on you, why would you want to opt out of the airtag tracking?

If you were known to be the only person who frequents an area, then an adversary's Airtag planted there getting updated would notify them that you were present.

Are ya'll trying to invent the dumbest sounding scenarios or is that inadvertent?

In this extremely specific case where people are planting airtags to track you, you can simply disable the feature as the parent mentions.

"I don't use that freeway so I don't want to pay for the maintenance"

Either you use the roads and pay for all the roads or you don't.

That's a terrible analogy. I don't allow android devices to use my "ios roads" as it is. Why does it matter if i don't want airtags to mooch off my network? It's not like airtags are providing their share of network back to me.

It is a network effect. Because people buy and use AirTags, they turn on their FindMy, which in turn benefits you when you want someone to find your own iPhone.

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.

There’s no such a thing as small price to pay attached to privacy. You either have it or you don’t.

What privacy are you losing by enabling the Find My Network?

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.

Thanks for your link, but I will start here -> https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.02282

> While we find that OF's design achieves its privacy goals, we discover two distinct design and implementation flaws that can lead to a location correlation attack and unauthorized access to the location history of the past seven days, which could deanonymize users. Apple has partially addressed the issues following our responsible disclosure. Finally, we make our research artifacts publicly available.

Not something a regular dude off the street will be doing any time soon. =)

That's... not true. Privacy is definitely shades of grey, as everything is.

> Or is it the airtag functionality specifically that’s bothering you?

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.

> is it the airtag functionality specifically that’s bothering you?

Yes.

That's because it's using the same "network" to track both. It wouldn't make sense to turn one off an not the other. When your device is offline it's acting just like the AirTags and pulling info from other nearby iphones.

I think if you’re making use of the network, it’s entirely fair to ask you to contribute to it.

I spent about 10 minutes googling how to disable it before finally finding the find my settings.

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 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.

Wow, so you can actually find the settings through two routes, I didn't know that but it makes it even easier!

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.

> 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.

Because again, the network is a common good. Why should everyone else participate in finding your devices when you don't want to participate in finding theirs?

I do want to help them in finding theirs, but just their phones. Why can't i divide up my expense/risk and spend it how i want? I'm not mooching off anyone, because i don't have airtags to mooch of their network sharing.

Or a common evil, depending on your perspective. You can't opt other people out of tracking you.

Sure, I may just be a confused person but I also have used iOS devices for many years and I'm the go-to tech support for my friends/family as I'm sure most people on HN are. I use myself simply as a benchmark because I know that if something confuses me, it'll almost certainly confuse most of the non-CS people that I know.

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.

It also comes up if you search for “location” or “privacy” in Settings. Not completely obvious but easily discoverable for anyone concerned about privacy.

> 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.

Not privacy but battery life. I don't necessarily want to constantly scan for bluetooth devices around me and have some process sending that identifier and my location to Apple, even if it's done securely.

> if you search

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.

Having a search icon where you can type stuff means anything "can be typed".