I lost a bunch of keys today. It sucks and it’s gonna cost me a lot of money to replace the locks. I want to to add an airtag-like device to my key ring in the future. However I don’t know of any device that works in a similar fashion, either through bluetooth or GPS, that works with Graphene and doesn’t require some kind of privacy invading online subscription.
Do you have any advice on privacy respecting alternatives to airtags?
Have a look at meshtastic. The Seeed T1000-E should do what you’re looking for, although the battery life would not be great for such a project.
I mean I haven’t read the papers in full but they seem pretty private the way they are set up now. Or am I missing something.
I use Samsung Galaxy Tags on Grapheme OS using the uTag open source application that allows you to use Samsung tags on any Android device.
Unfortunately having a private option is completely antithetical to the way these things function.
Your only other option is traditional trackers with GPS/modem and a cell plan.
A few answers say “they aren’t private by design,” but don’t really go into the “why.” There’s the obvious “it’s an electronic tracking device, duh” reason, but there’s also a more nuanced reason:
Airtags are able to be picked up almost anywhere because they connect to the nearest bluetooth-enabled Apple device, and then send location info across the internet to you. Without this functionality (the ability of any and every Apple device to locate it), they wouldn’t have any way to send their location back to the owner.
Your best “privacy respecting” alternatives are something that uses meshtastic (and hoping there’s enough repeaters near you), something that uses cellular data and GPS (which is about as privacy-respecting as Airtags are), or just a key finder/beeper (which only works within a small radius)
I mean if you look at the white paper they seem pretty private by design. Unless people are seeing stuff I missed.
What white paper?
Thanks for the explanation and advice. I’ll get a beeper while I’ll get into meshtastic and can get tracking working that way.
I have a itag pros, they’re no good for what I wanted but they don’t require a subscription and you can see where you last had them. Unfortunately they beep whenever they go out of range and the range isn’t far
Hey I do meshtastic and tried it for object detection and used a homemade beeper and an off the shelf tile beeper and I ended up going to airtags instead.
You really will be better served by just using airtags.
If you can be clear about what kind of privacy invasion you’re trying to avoid I can help you figure out how to make that work.
Thanks for the help and advice. What was the issue with your meshtastic experiment? If it’s location granularity that’s something I might be prepared to deal with.
My privacy expectations are as follows:
- No account needed with any major tech monopoly
- No app where any data other than tag location is transmitted through the internet. Ideally the data transmission would have e2ee.
Meshtastic didnt work and it wasn’t private.
To locate something by radio signals like meshtastic you need to triangulate it. That means you need to make contact with three transmitters whose position on earth you know then calculate the differences between round trip signals for each one then solve for those differences for a point inside the smallest triangle described by the three transmitters you heard from.
I ran into two problems with this, number one I was never in range of three nodes and Lora is so los dependent that when things were on the ground or other “lost” locations I rarely had even one! Number two was that I didn’t have a beacon with enough memory or processing power to calculate its location with the quickness without a bulky battery, which leads me to the other meshtastic problem:
Meshtastic isn’t private yet! Yes I know I’m being pedantic but the reason I ran into that was the alternative to some doohickey calculating its physical location from pings like a submarine navigator was having the council of nearby nodes do it for the device or at least send along unmolested data to my server that would do so. The former would have required all the nodes to actually do that, which none of them were particularly well equipped to do since several ran on solar and batteries, and the latter didn’t always work and caused me to realize that one node was inspecting packets. Even if I was magically in range of three meshtastic nodes, they all agreed to do the math for my location and then tell me what it was now three public nodes know my location. Suddenly not private in a way that isn’t nebulous or abstract.
Those are solvable problems. They were far, far beyond the scope of my operations.
Your first privacy requirement is one you should abandon in order to succeed at your goal. It precludes the use of any distributed tracking system run by a major tech monopoly. Here’s how: any distributed tracking system needs id and auth. Otherwise anyone could just track all the fobs at once. Once you have id and auth that’s an account. If a major tech monopoly (however that’s defined) has used its major tech monopoly to create a distributed tracking network and you want to use it securely you need to have an account with that major tech monopoly.
It’s a kind of weird pretzel tautology to this use case. Now there might be some major tech monopolies whose account systems can’t be made to meet your requirements for privacy but that’s a separate thing.
The second part is easy and I really recommend you look up about airtags. All you gotta do to make apple stuff e2ee is turn on adp. I think with airtags you can have contact data sent to the finder but that doesn’t happen fob to phone, it happens over the normal phone cell data connection when you authorize it.
They really honest to god tried to figure out some of the insane edge cases with those little fuckers.
Seeed meshtastic tracker card. The general purpose version uses more battery than I’d like but you can get one that only does tracking or turn off most of features to get more than a few days of life.
It only works if you have some other meshtastic nodes around, but it doesn’t need to be a lot and it’s getting to be more popular.
I was looking for a reason to get into meshtastic anyway, so it seems like what would fit me best. Thanks
I’ve answered this question for someone else in the context of tracking luggage. Your use case is also one that the branded apple airtags are best at.
If you want a big headache project that doesn’t work then try anything but airtags.
Theres an android find my app and you can run it in a container in graphene.
If you want a quick, simple, functional solution to your problem then bite the bullet and use airtags.
You, uh, also maybe shouldn’t be asking for “privacy respecting” electronic tracking devices. The application is fundamentally not private and cannot respect privacy by design.
So what is not private about airbags? I’d like to know what people say is not private about them? I guess I’ll have another look at the whitepapers to see, or is it people have no idea how they work and just assume not private.
It’s the latter
Not really. There are gps trackers that have a cell modem, used for tracking animals for research, but they are probably very expensive. Both to purchase and operate.
Look into tractive a tracker for dogs, it’s quite affordable and made in Austria - which means it respects EU privacy regulations.
Requires a cellular data plan to operate, which is where that expensive operating cost comes in. For a family dog, I could see the expense being worthwhile, but for a number of things (wallet, keys, purse, backpack, etc) that AirTag tracking typically targets as their use case, this would get quite expensive rather quickly.
50€ for cat version with 5 day battery time + a monthly fee
no, thanks?
What annoys me is that there were thin (~2mm) sticker-type Bluetooth tags about 15 years ago and cost a hell of a lot less (£10 for 3) than fucking
AirtagsTile. No battery, just a passive coil that could be found with Bluetooth signal and an app that shows how close it is. Only I can’t find anything on them, so it’s little more than a conspiracyI think you must be confusing things or were told a lie. Bluetooth is a standard that is definitely not designed to be able to work like that. NFC is designed to work with thin tags that don’t have a battery. Essentially they get power wirelessly from your phone in order to be able to send information. But, due to the inverse square law, you would need extreme amounts of power to be able to do that over a long range, so it just isn’t something that could work with mobile phones.
there were thin (~2mm) sticker-type Bluetooth tags […] No battery, just a passive coil that could be found with Bluetooth signal and an app that shows how close it is.
Sounds kind of like UHF RFID, which are common in places like warehouses and can be done at a distance, but even higher frequency?
I imagine range was a huge issue. Unless you have an extremely powerful bluetooth tranceiver and a very high gain antenna (i.e. not a phone, a professional radio system), the inverse square law will mean you won’t have enough energy to activate the electronics in the tag after a fairly short distance. Would probably work for finding something in your house though.
Yeah they worked within like 5m, less with walls. Tbh a fob with a loud buzzer was more effective
Sticker tag sounds like NFC. Certainly a bluetooth tag is possible too. Thing is, Bluetooth range is a few dozen meters tops. Airtag works by turning the entire Iphone population into a giant surveillance network, so if any iphone anywhere detects your airtag, it informs the Apple mothership, which in turn reports to you where your airtag was just seen.
Only comparable long distance approach I can think of without that is a cellular tracker. Those exist (search: cellular gps pet tracker) but it’s a much bigger box with a subscription plan of its own. Someone else mentioned meshtastic so maybe that’s an alternative in some places, or a LoRA tag instead of a bluetooth tag.
I’ve found smaller, cheaper alternatives by TrackR and Findr, but a promising yet expensive alternative is Chipolo - supports Apple Find My, Google Find My Device, and Chipolo companion app, however the tracking data is supposedly E2EE
I think there’s a thing with lora that compares the signals around the tag and your phone or such to try and work like an airtag tyoe thing
