Received notice of a change to the service in my inbox today. Seems icky to me.
Devices in the network use Bluetooth to scan for nearby items. If other devices detect your items, they’ll securely send the locations where the items were detected to Find My Device. Your Android devices will do the same to help others find their offline items when detected nearby
Your devices’ locations will be encrypted using the PIN, pattern, or password for your Android devices. They can only be seen by you and those you share your devices with in Find My Device. They will not be visible to Google or used for other purposes.
ETA: here’s the link to opt out: opt out of the network
This is probably an unpopular opinion especially on this sub and something that will probably never happen realistically with the way the world is going but it is an extremely cool feature. If this was not done by companys that already harvest data etc and was as private as something like this can be such as your device communication to another device has a uuid that does not tie back to “you” if that makes sense or something not sure. Because there are some use cases that could be extremely good such as the one comment here about stalkers etc.
I agree with this and I’m glad we have graphene OS at the same time for the moments when I no longer want this to be the default option.
I hope to see more reasonable takes like this - weighted with reality, not just reinforcing what people want to hear.
This is how Tile works as well. Not sure what their data harvesting policies are.