Apple details the cryptography behind its upcoming Find My feature, which works so that even Apple cannot track device locations
WHEN APPLE EXECUTIVE Craig Federighi described a new location-tracking feature for Apple devices at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference keynote on Monday …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days after Apple unveiled the combined Find My app at WWDC, Federighi's team has published the mechanism underneath it: devices report their location through nearby strangers' iPhones using encryption structured so that only the owner's key can decrypt the result. That design choice is what lets a lost Mac or phone be found while it is offline — and it pre-empts the obvious objection that a crowdsourced tracking network is a surveillance grid.
First-order effects
- Users of the new Find My app can locate devices that are powered off or out of connectivity, because every passing Apple device becomes an anonymous relay rather than requiring the lost device to phone home.
- Apple gains a differentiator no rival can copy quickly: the value of the network scales with the installed base of iPhones already in consumers' pockets.
Second-order effects
- Tile-style trackers compete against a free, pre-installed network spanning hundreds of millions of devices, pushing standalone tracker makers toward hardware partnerships or obsolescence.
- The leaked plan to admit third-party devices while barring competing services shows the cryptographic network doubling as a walled garden: accessory makers get reach, but only on Apple's exclusivity terms.
Third-order effects
- Once the network ships, Apple extends it into a product line — the iOS 13 code pointing to a Tile-like tracker, later AirTags with anti-stalking safeguards and an Android scanner app — turning anonymous crowdsourced relays into consumer infrastructure that regulators and rivals must treat as a de facto standard.
- Privacy-by-cryptography becomes a competitive moat: the same architecture that keeps Apple blind also locks the network to Apple hardware, so each privacy feature deepens platform dependence rather than loosening it.
The trend: Device tracking is consolidating around crowdsourced, end-to-end-encrypted networks owned by platform holders, where the operator engineers itself out of the data path while keeping control of who may join.