Bluetooth trackers are very clever pieces of technology. They’re very small, pretty cheap and barely consume any power. Attach them to your belongings, perhaps your keys or a wallet, and you can use a smartphone to pinpoint their location on a map — a boon for the careless and the forgetful amongst us.
Their reputation, however, has been blighted by one very obvious concern: what if someone slips one of these things into your bag, your coat pocket or sticks one to the underside of your car?
The ability of these trackers to become a convenient tool for stalking has become a growing concern in recent months, as people across the world — predominantly women — report new incidents to police, journalists and on social media.
It’s perfectly natural for people to want a product which allows them to track stolen items ... but the price of that is the creation of a perfect stalking device
Eva Galperin,
director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an expert on stalkerware
Much of the focus has been on Apple’s tracker, AirTag, for a number of reasons: it has become the best-known in the marketplace; its location reporting is incredibly accurate thanks to its dependence on a huge network of existing Apple devices; and, most importantly, it has anti-stalking technology built in, such that people being tracked by a maliciously placed AirTag could be notified of its presence. Those alerts have drawn attention to problems inherent in the technology that are only now, somewhat belatedly, being addressed by manufacturers.
The complaints are all very similar. A smartphone alert informs the person being tracked that an AirTag is following them, with details of the journey they’ve recently taken. A subsequent search might reveal the device hiding in a bag, or in clothing, or wedged between the licence plate and body of a car. It’s possible at this stage to disable the AirTag by removing its battery, but the person being tracked may already be at home, and whoever tracked them may already know where they live. By demonstrating its aptitude both for tracking and for alerting victims of stalking, the AirTag has successfully ticked all the boxes. But the problem hasn’t gone away.
“AirTags are more powerful than other physical trackers because they are more accurate,” says Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an expert on stalkerware. “They do have some anti-stalking mitigations, which competing products [such as Tile] do not. However, those mitigations are not equally distributed. They’re pretty good, but only if you exist inside the Apple ecosystem.”
Galperin is referring to the fact that it’s only iPhone users running iOS 14.5 or later who will receive these stalking alerts. Anyone with an Android phone would have to download and install a special app called Tracker Detect to achieve the same level of protection. Galperin is campaigning for such alerts to be baked into the Android operating system, so potential victims don’t have to anticipate being stalked, but she notes that neither Apple nor Google are particularly motivated to work together to solve the problem.
Pushing back against criticism, Apple has been keen to highlight AirTag’s success stories, where people have been reunited with valuables, even their medication. It also notes that the safety features it has introduced (or will soon be introducing) are “a first in the industry”.
These include warning messages during the set-up process that using an AirTag to track people is a crime; improved accuracy to help find and disable nearby AirTags; audible beeps from tags deemed potentially malicious; plans to increase the volume of those beeps following criticism that they weren’t loud enough; and a special alert if an AirTag speaker is found to have been disabled or tampered with. (AirTags modified to be silent have been seen for sale on Etsy and eBay.)
Given the extent of these measures — which ensure that anyone unwittingly carrying an AirTag should be alerted to the fact — potential buyers of an AirTag may well ask: “But what if the person being alerted is a thief who’s stolen my bag?” It’s a good question, and one which highlights the dichotomy at the heart of the whole Bluetooth tracking industry. Part of the magic inherent in these devices is that we could, in theory, use them to pinpoint the location of a stolen item. But Apple is careful not to make such promises. AirTags are, it reminds us, not for tracking stolen items, merely lost ones. It’s a delicate, but critical semantic difference.
“It’s perfectly natural for people to want a product which allows them to track stolen items,” says Galperin. “But the price of that is the creation of a perfect stalking device. A device which effectively tracks your item when it's been stolen does not tell the thief that they're being tracked. Which is to say, it has no anti-stalking mitigations.”
The truth, therefore, is that a Bluetooth tracker with decent anti-stalking provisions cannot be relied upon to protect your property from theft. Unsurprisingly, this message isn’t being communicated very well by Apple, Samsung or any other manufacturer. After all, "These tags are not as useful as you think they are" is not much of a marketing slogan. “Nor is, ‘We care more about people being stalked than we care about your property’,” says Galperin.
It begs the question of whether the minor benefits that Bluetooth trackers actually bring (i.e. the ability to speed up the process of locating your lost keys) are really worth the problems of privacy and security which they unquestionably cause. “That,” says Galperin, curtly, “is a question for Apple’s marketing department.”
UK’s AI plan
- AI ambassadors such as MIT economist Simon Johnson, Monzo cofounder Tom Blomfield and Google DeepMind’s Raia Hadsell
- £10bn AI growth zone in South Wales to create 5,000 jobs
- £100m of government support for startups building AI hardware products
- £250m to train new AI models
Tamkeen's offering
- Option 1: 70% in year 1, 50% in year 2, 30% in year 3
- Option 2: 50% across three years
- Option 3: 30% across five years
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COMPANY PROFILE
Company name: Letstango.com
Started: June 2013
Founder: Alex Tchablakian
Based: Dubai
Industry: e-commerce
Initial investment: Dh10 million
Investors: Self-funded
Total customers: 300,000 unique customers every month
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What are NFTs?
Are non-fungible tokens a currency, asset, or a licensing instrument? Arnab Das, global market strategist EMEA at Invesco, says they are mix of all of three.
You can buy, hold and use NFTs just like US dollars and Bitcoins. “They can appreciate in value and even produce cash flows.”
However, while money is fungible, NFTs are not. “One Bitcoin, dollar, euro or dirham is largely indistinguishable from the next. Nothing ties a dollar bill to a particular owner, for example. Nor does it tie you to to any goods, services or assets you bought with that currency. In contrast, NFTs confer specific ownership,” Mr Das says.
This makes NFTs closer to a piece of intellectual property such as a work of art or licence, as you can claim royalties or profit by exchanging it at a higher value later, Mr Das says. “They could provide a sustainable income stream.”
This income will depend on future demand and use, which makes NFTs difficult to value. “However, there is a credible use case for many forms of intellectual property, notably art, songs, videos,” Mr Das says.
Moon Music
Artist: Coldplay
Label: Parlophone/Atlantic
Number of tracks: 10
Rating: 3/5
Our family matters legal consultant
Name: Hassan Mohsen Elhais
Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
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Profile
Company: Justmop.com
Date started: December 2015
Founders: Kerem Kuyucu and Cagatay Ozcan
Sector: Technology and home services
Based: Jumeirah Lake Towers, Dubai
Size: 55 employees and 100,000 cleaning requests a month
Funding: The company’s investors include Collective Spark, Faith Capital Holding, Oak Capital, VentureFriends, and 500 Startups.
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
Day 1, Abu Dhabi Test: At a glance
Moment of the day Dimuth Karunaratne had batted with plenty of pluck, and no little skill, in getting to within seven runs of a first-day century. Then, while he ran what he thought was a comfortable single to mid-on, his batting partner Dinesh Chandimal opted to stay at home. The opener was run out by the length of the pitch.
Stat of the day - 1 One six was hit on Day 1. The boundary was only breached 18 times in total over the course of the 90 overs. When it did arrive, the lone six was a thing of beauty, as Niroshan Dickwella effortlessly clipped Mohammed Amir over the square-leg boundary.
The verdict Three wickets down at lunch, on a featherbed wicket having won the toss, and Sri Lanka’s fragile confidence must have been waning. Then Karunaratne and Chandimal's alliance of precisely 100 gave them a foothold in the match. Dickwella’s free-spirited strokeplay meant the Sri Lankans were handily placed at 227 for four at the close.
