this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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Privacy
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Tile? The brand that predates airtags and where apple stole the idea from and just made it proprietary to their ecosystem
Edit: what a bizarre thing to downvote
tile just had a data breach π
Which happens to practically all companies eventually.
True yet still not OK.
That's also why a lot of us do try to avoid, as much as is realistically feasible, to provide any data to any company that should store it. Hence why a lot of questions here are about self hosting, no cloud, etc. It's not paranoia, it's because companies cut corners and as you correctly point out, fail to keep us safe. So it's not about Tile specifically, they are just yet another poor example. Let's not defend them nor this kind of practices. If people in the Privacy community are OK with that, we have a rather deep problem.
They asked for an alternative to airtags. I provided one. Doesn't matter if they were compromised because like I said, everyone is eventually. The data leaked is almost certainly super redundant for almost every user anyhow
And even though I'm not OP I'm genuinely grateful for that.
No! That's the whole point of this Privacy community! If someone is using, using home automation as an example, Apple HomeKit or Roomba or Google Home they will eventually get compromised BUT if they are using something local, e.g Zigbee with HomeAssistant they WILL never get compromised because by the very local only architecture of that solution no data is leaving the home and thus can NOT be compromised.
The ENTIRE reason d'etre of this community is not to say "Oh well... the default solutions are imperfect, we have to shrug and accept the statu quo" but rather provide genuinely alternative.
I understand a lot of people can enter into a learned helplessness mindset imagining that only poor solutions exist and thus, better pick the least worst one, but by doing that we are giving power to Big Tech, surveillance capitalism, etc.
Please do NOT say that "everybody gets compromised" when you actually mean that "the vast majority of people who accept to use a popular solution with trade offs that are not good for privacy". It sounds like a finicky difference but it's actually totally different because it shows that it's not inevitable.
By taking shortcut in your language you limit what's conceived as possible by others who are asking for help, again, in a Privacy focused community.
I know you mean well here but you're off base and it's coming across as lecturing me about something you aren't fully informed about. I am not saying people shouldn't care about privacy. I'm saying if you want this type of product, all the concerns you're mentioning here are literally impossible to avoid. The best you could do is find the company with the least number of breaches and then pray they remain that way. But that doesn't really get you very far.