I’m looking to put a tracker on my mountain bike. I use GrapheneOS.
What are your recommendations?
I’ve heard Life360 (which owns Tile now) is a privacy nightmare.
AirTags are unmanageable without an iPhone.
Never heard of Chipolo until recently.
Is there anything for GrapheneOS that would work well?
(Also: Does GrapheneOS have a Find My software equivalent?)
Yeah, I could imagine a system that could be created that would allow the same functionality but also be anonymous.
If there’s such a FOSS project going, I don’t know of it (but would be interested!).
Things like Google and Apple location services only work because they’re absolutely fucking everywhere. And it’s why a FOSS implementation would likely never work. Regardless of encryption or decentralization.
It would require a large user buy-in, for sure.
But, in the meantime, it seems like we could get a few nerds together to hack out how to put a system together that preserves privacy while allowing distributed location tracking.
I mean they already have
https://fossdroid.com/a/findmydevice.html
Apple calls two different things ‘Find My Phone’, the phone’s location tracking of itself and then there’s the entire network of Apple devices across the world that constantly monitor for the AirTag’s Bluetooth Low Energy beacons allowing you to find the AirTags (and any attached valuables) anywhere in the world.
There are many things that let you ask your phone where it is (or have it report it’s location to a server that you host).
There is nothing that matches the worldwide network of Apple devices which are listening for your airtag’s BLE beacon.