Let friends know how remote you go.
If you’re on an adventure without cell service,
you can now use Find My to share your location
via satellite so friends and family know where you are.You don't really need to point it, at least with my inreach if its near the top of my pack and I'm not in a canyon or something I can get a message out.
Which is why when you're using it they guide you on how to orient the phone (per their released info so far, we'll have actual user reports in a few weeks).
That's 1.412538 watts versus 0.003162 watts... hence why you can just leave it in your pack.
Of course if you don’t trust that, you shouldn’t be buying an Apple product anyways. They could ship an always on microphone streaming to their servers if they wanted to. But we trust that they won’t.
s/freezer/bottom of a locked filing cabinet/https://archive.nytimes.com/thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/0...
Make of that what you want
What the hell is that all about?
If this has changed, scratch all of the above.
Because there are way too many spouses who go to as absurd lengths as setting private investigators on their partners. Stalking is just as much a concern inside families as it is for everyday persons - I might be tempted to say that the impact is worse given the potential for domestic violence. Or just imagine fundamentalist parents tracking their children to Planned Parenthood, a known LGBT-friendly place or whatever.
Ideally, there would be laws and regulations on trackers - and not just hardware-ones like the AirTags, but also software-based ones - that mandate features to prevent abuse, but sadly politicians haven't caught up on tech developments yet.
Coercion, simple as that.
If A had to coerce B to turn of the alert, then the alert would have already served its purpose to tell B that they're being tracked by A. Moreover, there should still be some interface which B can use to figure out which AirTag is following them, so person B would 1) know that A is tracking them in general, and 2) have the ability to check whether A is tracking them in the moment.
Please explain what additional information or utility the continued notification is giving person B in this moment, or if my understanding of the hypothetical is wrong.
I want to track the dog, the shared cars’ keys. I want to track a shared bike. There are a load of items I’d put them on, but they aren’t just mine.
I don’t believe it’s a security thing. It’s the Apple way to get software to a point then just stop development, there are plenty of examples.
And all that to protect your love ones, of course.
People apparently forgot all about PRISM already. That didn't take long.
The contentious element is the "within the bounds of the law" bit. In the US and Europe that means a lot, because Apple can use the courts to block government overreach and they have done so. In China they can't do that, so they don't just as nobody else operating within China can.
Google does deserve credit for refusing to operate their search services within China, while Apple and many other companies decided they were willing to do business there on Chinese government terms.
If you have a viewpoint on the relative risks of these technologies, the I genuinely wish you'd use your time to talk productively about what you think the risks are to help others make an informed choice – instead of sarcastically assuming that anybody who doesn't have the exact same set of priorities as you is a fucking idiot. It's making the quality of discussion on this site totally unbearable.
We knew abestos was dangerous even before the WW2, and kept using it because it was so convenient.
That's the thing about know-it-all neo-ludditism pithy dismissals. They started 30 years ago witha much more soft tone. But since not only people ignored the warnings, but eventually even came to insult the people performing said warning (even after the warning proved to be true), the same people turned kinda sarcarstics.
Poor you to have to read a rational argument in a comment using history and logic to underline our societies shit where they eat and ignore the asymetry of risk.
Sacarstic people are mean and don't understand how to have quality discussions. They should always stay perfectly calm and neutral while they feel like half of the population is setting us up for troubles.
Your comment above didn't actually contain any such thing. It contained a vestigial semblance of them too trivialised by vitriol to land a persuasive point.
>Sacarstic people are mean and don't understand how to have quality discussions.
Not always for sure, but yes that's often the case.
Because 3 letters agencies never, ever had backdoors in popular systems. It's not like the US had an illegal massive secret cabale dedicated to mass spying on its own population after all.
Luckily, Apple plateforms are notoriously open so it will be easy to check. It's great that we don't have to take their word for it after they lied about not being part of any PRISM-like program.
Anyways, all that doesn't matter much. Why would it be a problem when the economy, climate, international politics and the democracy are so stable these days? I can't see any reason why history would repeat and powerful entities would abuse any power they get.
Somebody who thinks like that would be a crazy tin hat conspirationist, and not at all a concerned citizen.
No, only the part of the population ready to spend hundred of dollars on an upgrade to get copy/paste must be capable of rational thinking. Anybody else is biased.
There is also no source code or even audit by 3rd parties (that are not US government related)
And for your own privacy!
There is an optional feature where you can choose to share your current location using a satellite even if you don’t have coverage.
It would be stupid to use this capacity to track users because the data is not worth more than what you can get for free if you just cache the location and wait for the user to move into cellular coverage again. There is no conspiracy here.
So I doubt this will be used much as a stalker feature. Unless of course they hide a phone on your person/vehicle in such a way that it is both totally unnoticeable to you AND maintains a very clear view of the sky. Apple said that sending messages could take a minute or more with even light foliage, so hiding it in/under a car will be a total no-go.
You can't even realistically point the InReach Mini at a satellite because it doesn't tell you where they are. At any time there's only a couple of iridium sats in view and they move quite fast across the sky.
But the device has an antenna with the right amount of upwards gain and the right polarisation to deal with that. For an iphone it's a lot harder to incorporate that.