“Find My” Privacy
This feature is super creepy surveillance tech and shouldn’t exist. Years ago, a kid stole a Mac laptop out of my car. Years later, I was checking out Find My and it showed a map with the house where the kid who stole my Mac lived. WTF Apple? How is that okay?!
Thieves deserve privacy too is quite the take.
Sweeney is seriously angry that Find My, a service for tracking lost or stolen items, can track stolen items…
To state a thesis explicitly: if a device one person owns ultimately ends up in the possession of another person, then any process of detection and recovery should be mediated by due process of law and not exposed to the owner in vigilante fashion; and no sort of surveillance mesh network in these devices should be activated without a user’s clear and specific consent.
I can respect the consistency of the view that everyone deserves privacy, though in this case it would seem to infringe on the rights of the device’s owner. Involving the law is a high burden, and by the time it’s done the device may no longer be trackable. And how would Apple even know to switch the device from “lost” to “stolen”? His thesis just seems unworkable.
The other interesting thing about Sweeney’s comment is that it inspired a Twitter community note saying:
The location of Apple devices on the Find My network can’t be accessed by Apple. “The Find My network uses end-to-end encryption so that Apple cannot see the location of any offline device or reporting device.”
Mysk:
The community note is inaccurate. The claim “Find My is end-to-end encrypted” generally is misleading. Online devices report their location to Apple without end-to-end encryption even with Advanced Data Protection is on. This makes it possible to look up a device’s location through Find My by logging in to icloud[.]com. We intercepted the HTTPS traffic of Find My on icloud[.]com, and it clearly shows that Apple can see the location of every online device.
End-to-end encryption only applies when offline devices report their location through the Find My network, which relies on other nearby devices reporting their own location.
Find My is not even listed on the iCloud page about protecting your information.
I still don’t recommend enabling Find My Mac because then anyone who breaks into your Apple ID account can remotely wipe your Mac. Whereas, if you use FileVault and elect not to store the info with your Apple ID, your data is safe even if the Mac gets stolen. So I think this collection of features is not designed properly. I wish I could find my Mac without putting my data at risk.
Previously:
- AirTag Anti-Theft Successes
- Not Setting Up Find My Bricked My MacBook
- iPhone Thieves Locking Users Out of Their Apple Accounts
- Advanced Data Protection for iCloud
- Apple Re-enables Bluetooth on Every Update
- How “Find My” Works
- Find My Mac and Remote Wipe
10 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I think one perspective of this is that we take a relatively small problem (stolen MacBooks and iPhones) and solve it by creating a much larger problem (tracking, stalking). Of course, this is not unusual in politics. If you can make people afraid of something, they'll often accept much worse overall outcomes to attack the thing they're afraid of (see also: immigration).
I sadly know from experience that stealing Macs is absolutely a thing that happens.
But yes, tracking and stalking is a tricky trade off, and with AirTags, Apple leant towards “let’s not make this a device to help stalk someone”.
Do thieves deserve privacy? Yes! Is that the foremost concern for me when someone stole my stuff? No.
As for E2EE, I wish Apple offered some kind of matrix what the encryption actually means for each service. Who keeps what data? Who has which keys?
> And how would Apple even know to switch the device from “lost” to “stolen”?
A police report would be filed.
Tracking, as a whole, is questionable. Yes, it's great when used appropriately, but not so much when it's not.
Being able to track where your device is though, seems like a pretty compelling argument. Tim's argument is that the device is tracking the thief; it's not, and thus his argument is a bit flawed.
However, there's a different view to consider as well: the scenario where an actor purposefully entices the theft of a device so that I can track someone.
Is this the same CEO of epic games that had to pay a settlement of $245 million for entrapping users in their own mobile apps?
The same epic games that has a grudge with Apple because Apple won’t allow them to do that?
I’m sorry when I see the name “Tim Sweeney” I just can’t take him seriously.
There’s a deep cost with having “ghost in the shell “style tracking on our private devices. And since most of us keep our lives on our laptops, that’s a price most of us are willing to pay with no argument whatsoever.
@David Timing it with when the police report is processed is logical but doesn’t really achieve his privacy goal because there is potentially a long time delay before that happens. Nor does it address his vigilante concern because someone taking matters into their own hands wouldn’t file the police report.
I agree that it is not really tracking the thief. The device might not be anywhere near the thief.
Another scenario is where it’s not really a thief, i.e. someone picking up the wrong bag.
I am not a legal scholar, but I seem to remember privacy being predicated on there being a reasonable expectation of privacy. Even if you're enticed or tricked somehow into taking with you a device best characterized by its myriad of sensors and connectivity and that you yourself do not control, you have lost a reasonable expectation of there not being a beacon on your person. And it's not as if the taker was, say, covered in paint that made it hard to remove such tracking from your person, because here the remedy to any privacy violation is easy: just drop the device and get away from it.
He keeps himself "relevant" by coming up with asinine takes and then arguing when people tell him he's wrong. It's all PR to him. Still.
> As for E2EE, I wish Apple offered some kind of matrix what the encryption actually means for each service. Who keeps what data? Who has which keys?
This help doc has a table of what’s E2EE and what’s not, though it’s not comprehensive (Find My is missing, for example): https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
There’s an entire section in Apple’s Security documentation around Find My: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/find-my-security-sec6cbc80fd0/web
@Anonymous Yes, if you know what to look for you can see that the document doesn’t actually say that online finding is E2EE (because it isn’t). Otherwise, reading the document gives the opposite impression. It’s more about the privacy of the finder than the findee. It would be clearer if they put Find My in the table, maybe with separate entries for the different cases.
