These people are now going to be sending their current location to Apple (which they may or may not already be doing). It also exposes the phones who are doing the tracking.Marketers already use WiFi and Bluetooth MAC addresses to do this: Find My could create yet another tracking channel. If your device is constantly emitting a BLE signal that uniquely identifies it, the whole world is going to have (yet another) way to track you.If you haven’t already been inspired by the description above, let me phrase the question you ought to be asking: how is this system going to avoid being a massive privacy nightmare? And yes, they should probably be worried.) In fact, companies like Tile have been doing this for quite a while. (It’s worth mentioning that Apple didn’t invent this idea. This will be great for people like me, who are constantly losing their stuff: if I leave my backpack on a tour bus in China in my office, sooner or later someone else will stumble on its signal and I’ll instantly know where to find it. When it picks up one of these signals, the participating phone tags the data with its own current GPS location then it sends the whole package up to Apple’s servers. Every active iPhone will continuously monitor for BLE beacon messages that might be coming from a lost device. The idea of the new system is to turn Apple’s existing network of iPhones into a massive crowdsourced location tracking system. Unlike Apple’s “ Find my iPhone“, which uses cellular communication and the lost device’s own GPS to identify the location of a missing phone, “Find My” also lets you find devices that don’t have cellular support or internal GPS - things like laptops, or (and Apple has hinted at this only broadly) even “dumb” location tags that you can attach to your non-electronic physical belongings. At Monday’s WWDC conference, Apple announced a cool new feature called “Find My”.
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