I have one on my dog's collar, in a 3D printed enclosure. He got out a few weekends ago and ran all around town, and there weren't any breadcrumbs on the app. It's one of the mid-range models rather than the high-end ones, though.
I have the high-end ones in our cars, and there's plenty of activity in the app.
While I pay for the premium service, it's too much hassle to deal with the "free" battery replacements. I just buy bulk packs of coin cells on Amazon for $0.10 each.
Mobile is hard.
Google's Find My Phone fails to wake up my pixel 7 about half the time I used it, even if I am staring at the phone. Sometimes the alert goes off half an hour later.
My fitbit's "find your phone" feature also works less than half the time.
I am genuinely surprised that my wife's apple watch can locate her phone every time she asks it to.
We are also giving away free tiles to paid Life360 members, which is probably not as relevant to the hacker news crowd but we do have over 20% of US families using our service. We think tiles should be free with membership, including getting new devices.
We have now moved to either 3 year disposable units or replaceable batteries. 3 years feels like a reasonable lifespan. And, our plan is to give them away for free to Life360 members (which is probably a small portion of HN readers but a high percentage of traditional families)
I can assure you the original packaging didn't make this explicit.
It was absolutely nefarious. The only reason the device stopped working was because the $2 coin cell battery died, and it was explicitly designed NOT to be replaceable. It's beyond wasteful and I would guess I'm not the only former customer left with a bad taste in their mouth.
Your website is showing me "502 Bad Gateway" right now.
20% of US families haven't even heard of his service. heck, not even 2%, not even 2% of the families who work in tech. US-wide, Maybe 20% know what an airtag is.
go to walmart, ask anyone there if they've heard of.. well, I forgot what his service is called already. best leave it at that. something about a new cryptocoin I think it was.
what about families without children? what about a couple of old people?
for your little area where everyone knows what it is, there are 330million more people, half of whom empty their webmail folder when windows gives them an out of space message. you really think 1 in 5 families nationwide know of this niche thing? that literally makes zero sense.
what makes even less sense, the claim from this company is not only do 1 in 5 families know about it - they own one.
here's my theory: the scammers defined family as "family tree" - and if your married second cousin you've met once has this airtag clone, they count it. but if your married but don't have kids, you're not counted at all.
fake numbers from a scammer, for a product that's not unique or first, or anything more functional than a simple app on a phone.
I'd like the understand the reflex to immediately assume this is a lie. The information is readily verifiable as we are a public company and 3rd party sites like data.ai will verify this.
What is your impetus to make such strong accusations from what in my view can only be your intuition? I don't think you have taken the time to try to diligence your claims.
The reason for my "impetus" is when a claim is this riduculous, I don't need your information that's as easily verifiable as "horse dewormer cures covid."
the reflex to bs is to gag. your reflex is to blindly accept jesus into your life because he walked on water.
We initially used a Tile and then decided to switch to an AirTag since it had a larger network.
After 4 months of the air tag we're looking to switch back. Most of what the tags do is allow us to know when we're within X number of feet of our cat. The Tile had a better range and was lighter. But most importantly, we could have multiple accounts track the same Tile. Somehow Apple's airtags are missing this really critical feature that has come up again and again for us. If one of us is not home we need to be able to have another one of us be able to track her down but we simply cannot
To be honest, the biggest reservation for me personally has been the company itself. It seems like an obvious industry where a very in-your-face-look-how-trustworthy-we-are approach to marketing like Mullvad the VPN service does is the right move. Mullvad's "only one price no matter how many years you buy it for" and "we never have a sale" on top of their just straight up "our quality speaks for itself" product seems like the perfect approach for a company where trust is so critical. In contrast, our Tile tried to force us into buying a brand new Tile when the battery died instead of just... letting us get a new battery. We had to cut it open and then buy special glue to glue it back together. I understand not all the models do this but... really? This doesn't seem like the market where you should be trading customer trust for a quick buck.
Another thing I've yet to see from Tile/Chipolo/AirTag marketing is specific mention for our use-cases of ~~tracking~~(making easy to find) our outdoor cat. The network effect in this market is killer but this seems like an obvious audience that I'm shocked no one is targetting. People walk their dogs and people who let their cats out often have to check NextDoor or FB when something comes up. The point is that they talk. And the thing about the network effect with bluetooth trackers is that the network effect is localized. Meaning Apple can dominate NYC and Chipolo can dominate SF but if everyone in my suburb of Chicago for whatever reason happens to be using BlahBlah, I'm obviously gonna go with BlahBlah. I want my cat to be findable and the most important thing is what my neighbors are doing. A targeted approach seems obvious yet it's rare to see a product specifically marketed for that
I really hate Apple's insistence on using 1 account for everything (I mean EVERYTHING). I think it was what finally made me put my foot down on using iCloud and not wanting an apple card savings account. Plus their account management system sucks. It's the only system I've used that randomly forgets I'm logged in and demands me to log in again on my computers, phones, etc.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems out of proportion to any damages sustained to Tile and likely unenforceable (not to mention uncollectable)?
(FWIW: I think ID verification is a good non-technical deterrent to what is largely a non-techincal problem!)
Perhaps a court would limit the fine, but liquidated damages are a commonly used concept, and I don't think most people will tempt fate.
Aggressive stalkers will buy dedicated GPS devices - this is a real roadblock.
In so far as I would hope most people would avoid doing business with companies that mention $1 million dollar civil lawsuits in their terms of service.
You're right: they'll just use your far more well-established competitor without such ridiculous language.
Additionally, most stalkers know their victims, so you are entering into a vast grey area that civil courts do not have prior established case law (vis-a-vis a third party as you are) to adjudicate and for which the burden of proof is on your lawyers who won't have the same powers to subpoena information as is available in criminal matters. It's also unlikely stalkers would have significant assets, making civil enforcement of this policy potentially very costly and time consuming for your company. Making a mistake with an enforcement action or loosing a case would be incredibly poor optics for your company.
Sending a letter to your legal staff for a cursory review and getting their rubber stamp won't change the potential legal outcome for your company or shield you from liability, when (not if) the time comes, and likely opens you to substantial liability should the product be used in the service of a crime.
That said, if I really want to stalk someone your app already provides everything that is needed, and in fact it is currently being used by sex traffickers and domestic violence abusers to track, stalk and exploit their victims en mass [1].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2023/04/06/sex-t...
It's pure speculation, but I wonder if the average car thief is more likely to own an iPhone as a form of status symbol? Or, is the average car thief more likely to be using burner phones from Walmart?
How exactly does a non-government entity impose a fine?
As a generally reasonable person, I have no interest in submitting anything more official than a valid credit card number to any company for lack of any legal need.
It seems like it would be wise to avoid any pretense if you want to start selling covert tracking as a premium feature. Either do it or don't, but don't try to offload the moral implications onto your customers by "policing" them.
I'm confused. Life360 was found selling precise user location data to third party data brokers[0]. It doesn't take a creative mind to see the harm (or even potential harm) caused here. I could never trust you or your company.
[0] https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/12/06/the-popular-family-...
> A former X-Mode engineer said the raw location data the company received from Life360 was among X-Mode’s most valuable offerings due to the sheer volume and precision of the data. A former Cuebiq employee joked that the company wouldn’t be able to run its marketing campaigns without Life360’s constant flow of location data.
...
> Two former Life360 employees also told The Markup that the company, while it states it anonymizes the data it sells, fails to take necessary precautions to ensure that location histories cannot be traced back to individuals. They said that while the company removed the most obvious identifying user information, it did not make efforts to “fuzz,” “hash,” aggregate, or reduce the precision of the location data to preserve privacy.
> The former X-Mode engineer said that the company also received raw data from Life360. The company relies on its customers to obfuscate that data based on their specific applications, Hulls added.
We had a data platform for targeted ads. I realize that isn't popular, but we were always transparent. We exited the business because it wasn't worth the controversy.
Please go look at our public filings before you trust this article. We were so transparent about everything we did both to our users and the public.
I do think our record of zero instances of harm show we had good safeguards in place.
Once you have been covered in the press you start to realize how blatantly they lie. I'm not sure if it has always been this way but I encourage everyone to have an extremely skeptical eye to any news org that has advocacy as their mission
Basically, since apple doesn't give a damn about android users, they just unleashed airtags on the world with no way to be alerted you are being stalked if you only have android. Months later apple did release some half assed android app that doesn't do automatic scanning.
So android users need to use something like airguard and that just so happens to also snitch on tiles.
Does that mean Tile will be the preferred choice for wealthy stalkers?
I already paid for my Tile devices at retail and only access them over Bluetooth locally anyway. Please stop trying to squeeze more money out of me.
question: have you put any thought into the fact that you cannot fine Anyone, since you're not the government, and have zero authority to do so? "fine" lol. all you can do, is ban people from using your service and attempt to bully them by blatantly lying.
At Tile we just launched an Anti-Theft feature where you can turn off stalking notifications if you share your government issued ID and agree to extremely stringent penalties for misuse, including a large fine.
All Life360 users are now scanning for Tile devices, and that equates to over 10% of all phones in the country, so our network in any moderately dense area is almost as good as Apple's. And, we are cross-platform.
https://chrishulls.medium.com/tile-is-taking-a-different-app...
We've put a ton of thought into this problem so happy to answer any questions.