this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
270 points (95.9% liked)

Technology

74265 readers
4199 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
L4s@hackingne.ws
270
TikTok Shop Sells Viral GPS Trackers Marketed to Stalkers (www.404media.co)
submitted 2 days ago by some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
54 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I can’t imagine how this could go poorly. /s

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 19 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I can tell just from looking that they're just btle not gps. Thankfully both Google and Apple tell you when a tag on their networks is traveling with you. So either these are trash because they're not on the two largest networks that share data, or they're useless because they are and if you have a smart phone it'll warn you.

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 22 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I’ve seen some pretty small GPS trackers with cell modems, I wouldn’t be surprised if these were that instead depending on the price.

[–] gressen@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 days ago

Fortunately they hold the charge for realistically short time and therefore are limited in use.

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It has way less to do with the size of the device and more to do with the size of the battery. Not much room left at all between the cell modem and GPS antenna required to make that thing work.

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

Indeed, the models I have seen have a very short battery life, or check in infrequently, or only check in when movement is detected, or use cell signal triangulation to save battery, etc.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago

At the end of the article they say many of the listings have terrible reviews because the safety features in FindMy were triggered.

If any of these devices use the networks Google and Apple made, they are not gps.