Innocent St. Louis family terrorized in SWAT raid over stolen AirPods

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/25/innocent-st-louis-family-terrorized-in-swat-raid-over-stolen-airpods.html

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I have questions.

Apple being able to locate an iPhone is no biggy. They’re on a phone network, have GPS, and it’s isn’t hard to ask it to report its position.

AirPods are stupid little Bluetooth devices.

Be ready next time with the Find My network and Notify When Left Behind

Want to help make sure that you find your AirPods next time?

  • The Find My network is an encrypted, anonymous network of hundreds of millions of Apple devices that can help you find your AirPods, even if they’re offline. Nearby devices securely send the location of your missing AirPods to iCloud, so that you can find where they are. It’s all anonymous and encrypted to protect everyone’s privacy. To make sure it’s turned on: On iPhone, open Settings > Bluetooth. Tap the More Info button next to your AirPods, then scroll down to Find My network and make sure that it’s turned on.

I doubt that Apple sends a query out to all participating iPhones to look for a particular lost AirPod MAC. Are iPhones, instead, continually polling all nearby Bluetooth devices, and sending that list and position to the Apple mothership?

If the later, then there are severe privacy problems with that.

For example, anyone with access to Apple’s db could build a geo-map of Bluetooth vibrators.

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If the carjacking had happened that very day, what exactly did they think they were going to find inside a sealed wall?

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I’ve spoken about it before here in the BBS about an acquaintance in Vegas in my college days who was maliciously reported by one of her daughter’s “friends” to the cops saying they were dealing drugs or something. Cops burst in guns blazing, broke her arm when they forcefully dragged her out of the shower naked at gun point, trashed her house in the process too. At the end of the day the cops weren’t responsible for anything that happened, didn’t even get a sorry.

Even a small amount of background checking would avoid storming the homes of unsuspecting innocent people but that’s just asking for too much.

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I’d be surprised if the family gets anything from the cops over this. Trashing a place is how police searches are supposed to work, as far as the law is concerned. They had a warrant, which means, unless they lied to get it, the responsibility for this fiasco is more on the judge’s head, but everyone has quite expansive immunity for these kinds of fuck-ups, and unless there was a particularly egregious ignoring of evidence or blatant mistake (cops trash house that wasn’t the one they got the warrant for)…

“Hey, is that a hidden panel in the wall here? Ooops, I guess not.” (Although it probably wasn’t even that deliberate - they were just throwing things around, bashing things, and a wall got punched in the process.)

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Yes, although it’s only Apple devices with Find My enabled, which is opt-in.

It is end-to-end encrypted and only for Apple devices in your ecosystem. I can’t even see my wife’s keys, for instance because they are “hers”, even though they are on our family plan. If someone were able to access Apple’s systems, all they would find would be hashed gibberish.

ETA: It’s also worth noting that this is not unique to Apple and pretty much every type of tracker works this way and has for some time. Many iot devices also exploit the Bluetooth “mesh network” (and often WiFi as well) for communications. This is why usually you don’t have to pair or enter a password for a device such as a smart light to show up in your home management ecosystem. And almost none of them even bother to secure their systems like Apple does. For instance, when everyone was freaking out a few years ago that AirTags were being used for stalking, it was repeatedly pointed out that it was actually easier to do this with other devices because Apple actively alerts a user when they’re being followed by an unknown tag and it can’t be anonymized like, say a Tile tracker (which is why they were catching grief in the first place; everyone else was just unaware of it).

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This sort of thing happens so often now, they should replace the “special” in “S.W.A.T.” with “typical”.

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i like it but it might be too catchy for the disgruntled gamer community and lead to increased rash of twatings

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