News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car ... by thedougd on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @08:46PM (#35796305)
The Tile app constantly nags me in ugly ways to give it always on location permissions. How is that data used beyond helping people find their items?
Re:NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car ... by crhulls on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @09:26PM (#35796563)
We need that for background scanning; Apple just cheats and does the same without really asking. We have never sold Tile user data. We did have a data platform for Life360, which we believe did no harm, but we exited the business as it seemed to cause confusion and was a very small part of our revenue
Re:NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car ... by thedougd on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @09:34PM (#35796619)
Thank you for your response. Please just let me say no once and for all. An occasional app banner is fine, but the system notifications is a step too far. That pushiness is what gave me the impression the location permission is more valuable to Tile than it is to me.
Re:NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car ... by skzv on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @09:45PM (#35796697)
The system wouldn't work without location permission.
Re:NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car ... by thedougd on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @10:15PM (#35796917)
It works fine to find your own devices by giving it permission 'while using the app'.
Re:NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car ... by renewiltord on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @10:38PM (#35797087)
The primary use case for these things requires other participants in the network. It doesn't look like this is a good product for you, yeah.
Re:NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car ... by thedougd on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @11:17PM (#35797420)
I'm using Tile Stickers the same way they're depicted on their website, as a TV remote finder. Is that wrong?
Re:NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car ... by skzv on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @02:49PM (#35806190)
I use trackers for my keys and wallet, which wouldn't work very well if I only granted the location permission when in use. Granting background location permission means that I can get the last seen location of my items when I'm already out of range, and I can help others find their lost items, too, just like they can help me, as part of the network.
Re:NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car ... by switz on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @10:50PM (#35797181)
> "We did have a data platform for Life360, which we believe did no harm"

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.

Re:NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car ... by crhulls on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @11:11PM (#35797373)
The entire premise of "found" is a bit nuts as we are a public company and disclosed this regularly and consistently, including how we used the data. The coverage we got in the MarkUp was the most unethical I have seen in my life with reporters literally cutting/pasting parts of quotes to make a point.

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.

Re:NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car ... by hitekker on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @05:12AM (#35799889)
Can you link those filings for us? The article indicated that it was much larger slice of revenue than your comments here suggested.
Re:NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car ... by crhulls on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @01:11PM (#35804936)
Sure. You can go back all the way to our IPO. It is all in there, including the % of our revenue. https://investors.life360.com/investor-relations/

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