When I worked at a power monitoring startup (we monitored home power use, by individual circuit) this passive monitoring came up. And our CEO mentioned to his wife that she was home early.. "how did you know?" He saw the garage door circuit draw power... He was told he could keep his toys, but not to talk about them.
Our sales guy had a potential partners remote door installed. He noted one time the dog walker did a pretty short walk (the door opens where x minutes apart), and was wondering if he could mention it..
Passive monitoring is everywhere. Not just cell phones.
It’s easy to imagine that this higher level of easy surveillance is going to efficiently send others down the same path.
Search engines get given all sorts of data by people who give away medical data, financial data, crimes, both as victim and as perpetrator, past and present.
Social media interests give away data about people as well.
The internet is one giant intelligence tool and your every move, your every click gives away stuff.
In the 90's I had a Visual Basic addon AI which could work out who was typing at the keyboard. There was no need to have login screens and passwords, your typing pattern identified you.
Today smart phone's can tell if its you from the pressure of your finger, the surface area and shapes made by your finger as it moves around the screen. Again no need for login screens, but some people do know just how often women go through their partners smart phones! I'm surprised more women dont play poker!
This information wont be made known for a very long time if at all because not everyone on the planet is using the tech. If the true scale of surveillance was known, it would have to be broken to them gently as it could cause civil unrest.
Carte blanche access to peoples computers has been going on since the internet appeared.
How exactly does one know of one's phone is being snooped on?
You will definitely know when they tell you.
I know of sense.com but perhaps there are others?
For an easier approach, there are a bunch of wifi plugs that can report energy usage: https://www.androidcentral.com/which-smart-plugs-are-best-mo...
- amazon page (even if you buy from their website, they just order it to you off amazon): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CJGPHL9/
- install instructions: https://gist.github.com/flaviut/93a1212c7b165c7674693a45ad52...
- source code: https://github.com/flaviut/esphome/tree/emporia-vue
You can also get any of a variety of temperature sensors (I like SensorPush) and stick one in the fridge to get a pretty good idea of how much it's running the compressor.
Another thing to look at if there's central forced-air heating/cooling may be whether it's set to have the fan always running. That can be useful in balancing temperatures between floors, but it's still a fan using electricity to move air.
I've been out of the space for a while, but the "sense" power monitor was new when I left. It claims to use AI so you can just monitor the mains and it will suss out what is using power.
There were a lot of our home customers who were very obsessed with power use (trying to get to net 0 with solar). There have to be forums for this...
If you are looking for the manual way. getting a kill-o-watt and attaching it to your outlet is one way to see one of the things that takes a lot of power. I have the "Belkin" version which I like because the display isn't near the outlet. I'd suggest fridge... In my case my fridge was a large % of my power bill. Any electric heat.
When the monthly cost gets up to a certain level, we clean the coils and it drops back down.
I ordered the additional sensor that I'll use for the heat pump and one more circuit and see if it does any better, if not, the Emporia seems reasonably priced for as many sensors as it has.
> It has an airtag (not an official supported use)
I'm surprised. That sounds like a great use for it, especially for a larger breed that runs fast.
Young Husky. Medium breed that can run far and sometimes doesn't listen (like a cat... but bigger)
They have pet trackers.. But I'm not sure if its because its transmitting a lot and its close to them on their collar.. In this case in on her going outside harness..
I often wonder about these services and if we can wrap them in enough privacy to make them feel safe to advanced users?
Which is fine by me. I'm just excited to have a way to get my cat back if she ever escapes outside.
We have a tracking collar for our dog. The actual tracker is around 1" x 2", and gives realtime reports via the cell network. it would be easy to use it to track a spouse or car or whatever.
Now, for tracking your cats around the house, I think that’s a better use of AirTags.
Obviously depends on how granular the smart metering is, but it sent chills down my spine.
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/01/08/28c3-smart-meter...
Or perhaps they could correlate a person's anonymous internet activity with their use of electricity.
I think such things should be enshrined in law, however we've not reached that state with the law yet in most places - I don't think?
What does this even mean?? Your partner commented on it??
This behavior is rampant in my peer group. Most of my friends/neighbors are constantly monitoring their teen age children's location, reading their recent calls, texts, and emails, looking at internet usage logs, etc. One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she's driving over the speed limit and yells at her. It all seems so creepy to me, and I give my kid way more privacy than that, but it looks like I'm in the minority of parents.
So what happened? Crime rates are down, kinds these days do drugs and drink at lower rates than back then, I can't remember the last time I heard of a kid go missing... We now have many privacy-preserving options for emergency tracking so there's less of a reason for total control than ever. Even monitoring Internet usage - there are fewer "predators" out there and kids are better at recognising and avoiding them than ever. I don't get it.
I'll be very blunt: Do they really want to read text messages from their teenage daughter/son? They might regret that decision really fast.
> One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she's driving over the speed limit and yells at her
If he doesn’t trust her why is she driving his car?
People monitor their kids so their kids do and are exactly what they've been told to be, and nothing else.
I'm sorry, are you serious or is this a joke?
I think GP is trying to find ways to feel like they're giving their child freedom without actually giving them any at all. But it's hard to think of anything worse for freedom than attaching a camera to to someone. Yes, technically they wouldn't be directly prohibiting the child from anything, but the presence of a camera means the child is forced to assume that everything they do will be judged by the parent even when the parent has no present physical control over the child.
honestly it just sounds nuts that your you are even considering any of this but maybe things are that bad in the US these days i dunno
Or, you could ignore the overprotective parents and just let you kid run around. Maybe wait a few more years to align with your second grade goal, I don't know.
But it amazes me you live in a neighborhood where most parents don't trust their 10 year olds to take the bus.
Dealing with drug users is difficult. I'm not sure fare enforcement is the panacea you seem to think it is. But then again, I don't really know a solution.
When they decided to stop enforcing fares is just when the problem got really bad. I’m not sure what would happen if they started back to the old normal, but the current changing point is probably not a coincidence.
So why should I, or do I have a right to, keep my kids from doing the same?
We aren't only the product of our positive lessons. A lot of life is learned through burning yourself on the hot stove. And by and large, it usually doesn't kill you.
IMHO, no humans are self-actualized enough to possess omniscience and act ethically. We have too many neuroses.
And, at the more obvious end of the spectrum, all of the suburban crowd complaining about how their children fail to launch, lack initiative in life, and aren't independent.
After their entire childhood was spent being monitored and constantly corrected by the parent.
The mind boggles.
So I think a claim that "controlling parents" -> "adrift young adults" would be hard to support.
Kids need to learn from mistakes, but if not monitored, you can hit the opposite end where the lesson isn't learned because there are no real consequences. For instance, goofing off in high school won't give you consequences until you graduate high school at the earliest, and possibly not until you graduate collect (still goofing off) and suddenly hit a wall in terms of what you can get employment-wise.
And yes, sometimes kids get away with things if they aren't monitored 24/7. They're supposed to. Figuring out the boundaries of attempting that, and dealing with the consequences when you fail, is a very important lesson for children.
And frankly, the kids have the upper hand. Monitor texts and they'll switch to "Finsta"—or whatever came after that.
All it's going to do is mess up their ability to understand trust or cause them to avoid taking any sort of basic social risks.
Those are learning experiences too.
- These two girls were speeding to make it home by curfew, ran off the road, and died in a car fire over the side of this hill - don't speed if you're running late. Let me know, and get home safely.
- This is where a guy was on drugs and ran into a telephone pole. - don't do drugs. If you do drink and no longer feel comfortable in the situation, call me and I will pick you up to get you home. Don't try to drive.
- Here's the parking lot where my friend OD'd on Heroin. Don't try it. Not even once. There is a huge difference between weed and harder drugs, even though weed and harder drugs are sold by the same people. Stay clear of all of them if you can.
- Here's the cliff where my friend fell 60 feet and died trying to showboat his climbing skills. So many things today have been made extremely safe (car driving assistance, etc.) - you need to know which activities have real consequences and treat them accordingly.
- Here's the parking lot where my friend and I almost flipped his truck trying to do slides on snow at 60 mph. Don't do that.
It will be a rough day, but driving is a serious responsibility and learning from others' mistakes is better than making your own.
I don’t have kids but my parents were like this and I valued it immensely. They never wanted us to be in a position where we needed help but thought we couldn’t ask.
My father was an EMT for 20 years, overlapping most of my childhood. My memories (particularly of car trips) are peppered with stories like you describe. The "being there to help" part is the part I'd recommend you emphasize (and is something I try to do with my daughter). I carry some mental "scars" from my father's stories 30+ years later. Beyond a point the stories didn't offer any more lessons and were just disturbing.
(I don't hold any of this against my father. I think his heart was in the right place. I count myself lucky to have had the best parents in the world.)
Drinking is “doing drugs” and it sounds like you’re advocating for her to decide if she’s too drunk to drive based on how she feels, which is terrible advice.
God damn, alcohol is so endemic in society that sometimes people miss really obvious problems with how they think about it “because it’s not like ‘real’ drugs”.
And the drinking part, to clarify - preferably my daughter doesn’t drink until she’s in college and legal (“don’t do drugs”). But if she is at a place and has even one drink, she should call me to get home, rather than try to drive because she is no longer comfortable staying at the party.
I was at parties at age 13 and 14 that had drinking. I was never pressured into drinking and didn’t until I was older, but others could be peer pressured. A 16 year old at a party with alcohol or weed is not unrealistic, and if she makes a mistake and accepts a drink or a hit, I don’t want her to compound the mistake and end up with a DUI or putting her or someone else’s life in danger.
Or, as the classic Brass Eye segment put it: https://youtu.be/MIAJemmO-bg?t=238
> How do you approach that, without heavy surveillance? Did you just get lucky with good kids?
I think partly I got lucky that my son is somewhat risk averse, which rules out a lot of bad stuff he could do. But I also am not fooling myself into thinking he isn't doing dumb things and not telling me about it. I certainly understand the desire to heavily surveil your kids to protect them, but it just doesn't sit right with me. I think it sends the wrong message that he doesn't have to take responsibility and can always just rely on me to bail him out. So I'm willing to take the risk in order to give him a sense of personal responsibility. I don't know that I'm making the right choice, parenting seems to be mostly doing the best you can and having your kids usually turn out ok in spite of you.
Black Mirror is great in exposing how ideas which look good on the first look can have very dark side. I even thought some of these things would be great (e.g. recording everything you see) before watching BM, I didn't think at all about all the negative consequences. It's sobering.
That said, I share location with my wife and also monitoring our children. If you have full mutual trust with other person, there are no drawbacks but there are positive sides. Full trust implies that one doesn't monitor location constantly, that there's no jealousy or stalking, that's it's used basically when you're worried that something bad happened. If someone is late from school or work it's a relief if you see they're moving towards home or that they are at known location.
We had an ios family group set up with location sharing enabled, which was great when they were 12 and losing things all the time (using a phone as backpack lojack isn't necessarily cost efficient, but it was a nice accidental outcome). When they got a little older, they figured out how not to share with us. I was peeved, but proud. Privacy respected.
Of course it's pretty rare for children to actually press charges against their parent for that, but it has happened. Using computer software "designed or modified to" violate the law is also specifically mentioned to make it an aggravated offense, with maximum penalty of 3 years in prison.
Sadly, neither do most people.
The sticking point now is that you want to let innocent people know if they're being tracked, but you don't want to let thieves know that they're being tracked. It seems an intractable problem, because there's no way that I can think of for a device to tell the difference between the two.
Anti-loss devices should be portable and detachable, but required to be able to be easily found via some kind of standard tooling. Maybe like the Bluetooth equivalent of pinging the broadcast IP. They should also make an audible noise when the owner tracks them.
Anti-theft devices should be silent, but required to be semi-permanently installed into the device to be tracked. Something annoying to remove, but not impossible. The ownership of the tracker should also be required to be registered with someone; logically the police, since that's who you would call anyways if your stuff was stolen. Anyone who finds an anti-theft device on their person or property that they didn't place there should automatically qualify for a restraining order against the device's owner (that they could opt not to pursue if they wanted). The restraining order should also prevent the device's owner from owning or registering any other anti-theft devices for the duration of the restraining order.
There would also need to be some kind of penalties for unregistered anti-theft devices, and for anti-loss devices that have been tampered with to not make noise or respond to the standard signal.
Also likely some kind of contract two people can enter into that says "I acknowledge that person X has tracker Y in thing Z, and I absolve my right to pursue a restraining order for it" for people who share a car or bike or whatever.
I haven't fully fleshed out the ideas, but I think something like the above reinforces that it's okay to track your own stuff but that's it not OK to track other people.
I like that Apple is making changes to how they work to discourage Air Tags used for this but to fully stop it would just mean not selling the product at all. And even though I am DEFINITELY not an Apple fan I think that is a poor solution to the problem.
Instead of making anti-theft devices semi permanent I think it makes much more sense to just discourage using them for stalking in the first place at the time of purchase. If you make a device that is semi permanent people will just find a way to hack it and repackage it into something else. And realistically people may want smaller anti theft devices for small but very valuable items.
What I think would probably be the best solution is to do something along the lines of what you said about registering with the police. Instead of manually having to do that though it would probably be easier if at the time of sale you had to sign a terms of service and the vendor automatically registered the serial number to your name in some kind of semi-public registry that law enforcement and others have access to. Even if would be thieves find ways around this it is going to discourage a ton of stalking in the first place.
I am hoping we get a fully open airtag platform out of this with Android apps, devices, windows, linux, etc. In addition I think a setting on your phone that you could manually activate that told any airtags within a close vicinity to NOT track you could also be interesting - there may be many false positives but someone explicitly worried about someone stalking them could activate this feature for at least some piece of mind.
You would have to regulate this at the integrated circuit supplier level.
Oops, China; good luck.
Note that a tracking device does not have to transmit any information in real time. Suppose someone wants to find out where you live. If they know that they will run into you again somewhere they could stick a device onto you that just records your movements into flash storage. Then next time they run into you, they retrieve it somehow over some close range wireless or maybe physically. Such a device won't be detected by the presence of signals: it doesn't connect to any mobile network or Wi-Fi or anything.
Or, such a device could just sporadically connect to a network to send a small packet of information, e.g. once every few days.
I don't know. Why AirTag work for a year by a CR2032 is because usually it only uses BLE to connect near Apple devices. GPS+LTE tracker drains much battery so it can't be practically run on CR2032. Only Apple (or Google) make it very usable this kind of device.
I don't even think you have to go to China. Any sufficiently motivated person can strap a GPS hat on a Raspberry Pi and make their own tracker, or do the same out of pedestrian electronic parts.
My goal is merely to try to drastically cut down on the more casual "I'd pay $20 to track my wife/SO/friend/whatever" style stalking that AirTags and the like enable, as well as giving victims an easier recourse in the event that a more knowledgeable or motivated adversary targets them. Tracking someone without their knowledge would give a restraining order, and tracking them after that would violate the restraining order which is a crime in all states afaik, and a felony in some of them. It won't outright stop people, but it at least gives victims some teeth to fight back with.
It boils down to the age old question about why make regulations that only ever effect people who are law abiding to begin with. Which isn't an argument against all regulation, but more of a question about what regulation actually hits the desired goal.
Right now any actually nefarious stalker will just get the $25 GPS tracker, put a decent battery on it, and stick it to the bottom of the car. They're not going to use an AirTag that is easily traced back to them and stands a good chance of notifying their target of the tracking. The kinds of stalkers who use AirTags are the low effort losers.
My thought process was discouraging some kind of "sure, we'll sell you a piece of paper with a tracker stapled to it. Don't take out the staples, wink wink nudge nudge". It's a tradeoff between making sure that people can swap them out if their provider goes out of business, but also deterring people from casually trying to repurpose them. I was thinking something like rivets. They're totally removable, but not something you'd do without motivation.
> Instead of manually having to do that though it would probably be easier if at the time of sale you had to sign a terms of service and the vendor automatically registered the serial number to your name in some kind of semi-public registry that law enforcement and others have access to. Even if would be thieves find ways around this it is going to discourage a ton of stalking in the first place.
Yeah, this is exactly what I was thinking! It should absolutely be point of sale based. Both to prevent casual stalking, but also to protect normal people that just forget to register them. I'm a scatterbrain; I could totally see myself forgetting that I need to register it if they leave that up to me.
> In addition I think a setting on your phone that you could manually activate that told any airtags within a close vicinity to NOT track you could also be interesting - there may be many false positives but someone explicitly worried about someone stalking them could activate this feature for at least some piece of mind.
Currently, I believe you can tell your phone to not report the AirTag (or similar for the other similar devices). That works well, but it doesn't stop other people's devices from reporting your location. So your phone would have to be able to broadcast a message that stops everyone else's phones from reporting the location of the tracker. Even if only 10% of the population enables it, I spend a lot of time in Bluetooth range of at least 10 other people. It seems like a platform killer to allow that.
I want such a thing to exist, but I can't find a technical way for people to stop a random tracker in their vicinity without just killing trackers as a whole. I'm not an expert on the topic, and I'm a little buzzed as it is, so there might be a solution I'm not seeing here.
I think this is a partial solution to keep honest people honest. Like door locks. They keep the temptation at bay for the average person.
In abusive relationships it likely wouldn't accomplish much, but notifying might at least create known windows of "escape" when the tracking isn't being actively monitored. Maybe it could even draw someone's attention to abusive situations... if you're out with a friend and her phone "pings" that someone is tracking her 10 times over an hour maybe that's enough for someone to ask "hey is everything ok?"
The existence of technologies are fine, but we need to set strong social norms, laws (and resilient enforcing institutions), and smart design limitations to protect against abuse.
I dont think the GP is suggesting that there's no technological changes required, just lamenting the root cause of the problem.
Similarly, technology can exacerbate gambling addictions, and we have measures we've put in place there.
It'll probably take some time to work that out though.
So basically everyone is like this in some way, or will be.
The reality is that some people are emotionally vulnerable and our we should keep that in mind as we develop products. Most new products (and indeed all changes in society) have some kind of negative impact to someone, and we can't get that to zero, but we should strive to minimize the harm we do.
The airtag/tile makes this much harder, perhaps the airtag should loudly beep or notify nearby devices whenever it's being actively located.
you can share location for 1 hour or until end of day rather than Indefinitely.
Right now it’s way too damn easy to ask to borrow someone’s phone, then share their location with you indefinitely, and have that person not notice that you’re able to track them until the next time they use FindMy. There are probably a huge percentage of users that almost NEVER open the FindMy app. It’s a glaring security and safety omission from Apple.
I’m shocked that the very security-minded Apple doesn’t do this. I shared my location indefinitely with my wife and was shocked that I didn’t get a notification when she was tracking me. How is this not an option for the indefinite location share?
> The airtag/tile makes this much harder, perhaps the airtag should loudly beep or notify nearby devices whenever it's being actively located.
AirTags do have a feature like this. If an AirTag is detected on your person, it will make an alarm sound. Basically they can’t be carried near a device that isn’t their owner’s device for long without sounding an alarm.
They absolutely should. It boggles my mind a bit that they don't do this. It would even help you find them. Is there any downside to making noise?
Fwiw, I’m a pretty big fan of FindMy and share my location with friends and family, I haven’t experienced this at all. My experience is that its convenient and cuts down on the number of “whats up” type messages I get when busy.
All of these people are fairly well-adjusted adults though. I don’t care if people I trust track me, or even ask about someplace they saw me — why would I? There’s a pretty bright line between controlling/judgmental/suspicious behavior related to tracking, and just curiosity. If your grandpa tracks your cousin because he’s old and bored and wants to live vicariously, to me thats fine, if he grills your cousin about where he saw him thats wrong.
I think a lot of this has to do with how open/accepting the group is. I can say confidently that all the people in my findMy group share the attitude of live and let live, and would tell me what they were up to, honestly, when asked “whats up?”. Its the anti-social network, lol.
Hard disagree here - most people are not going to go all obsessive on their spouses, kids, etc.
A decade ago I setup an RPi Zero W garage camera for my sister, using the GPIO for driving a relay to move the garage door remotely.
Ostensibly the specific use case for this thing was so the fam. could check the garage door status and close it remotely if it was forgotten open. Innocent enough, totally sane.
Except I setup the MotionEye software to not be too sensitive about people walking around in the garage or quick open-close cycles like returning home so it wouldn't wear out the SD card with writing irrelevant minutiae.
Years later I get an email from my sister asking if the garage camera I set up was failing to capture her son coming and going via the garage door keypad. I had to explain that the thing was setup to detect just the garage door being left in a changed state for an extended period, not if it opens and closes in a short window of time. But that it could be reconfigured to be more sensitive if needed.
Turned out she'd been abusing what was supposed to be a simple "did you forget the garage door open again? close it" facility as a surveillance tool from literally the moment I'd set it up, unbeknownst to me.
Sigh.
The example was meant to highlight that not everyone uses a product/device the same way as others. If one's use of an item does not bring harm, infringe upon, etc of anyone else, then why should they not be allowed to use it? Obviously, once you use an item to infringe upon, bring harm, etc, you should be the one punished NOT the others by trying to banish the item.
That depends. If that's a way to start up a conversation, it might lead to a lot more location-checking.
Yet she always calls to ask where I am (in your first scenario: because dinner or that she will kill the children if I am not back quickly).
Here’s a pattern I’ve seen play out more than once among friends and family - they share their location willingly and for seemingly benign reasons. It’s helpful to know when you’ll be getting home so I can start dinner! Just in case something happens to you! This is the innocent end of the spectrum; subtle or outright coercion in a controlling relationship is the darker end of the spectrum.
How it starts really doesn’t matter, because the truth is that even among otherwise well meaning and well intentioned people, tracking tech can turn them obsessive. Checking in constantly. Wondering and/or quizzing their child, partner or friend about what they were doing at location X.
The truth is that most people aren’t immune to being on either end of a situation like this, and the negative outcomes can range from feeling like your everyday movements are under a microscope, to outright abusive behavior more easily taken to the extreme.
I don’t claim that there are simple solutions here, but a starting point would be tech companies making it easier to see an audit of how this “innocent” tracking tech is being used on the trackee. For example, I bet my grandpa would think twice about checking in on my cousins location as often as he probably does if he knew that my cousin got a notification every time he checked in.