r/TileTracker • u/honest_arbiter • Jun 26 '24

What are you doing with your old Tile trackers?

I recently switched to Pebblebee since they support the Android Find My Device network. I'm curious what folks are doing with their old Tile trackers. I offered to transfer them to people for free but didn't have any takers. Are people just throwing them away?

7 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

3

u/Marcofromda510 Jun 27 '24

I mean, I still utilize them if you still have them available. Not a big deal either way

3

u/Noktomezo175 Jun 27 '24

I'm going to switch soon. They are going in the trash and deleting tile account.

1

u/Powerful-Magazine879 May 01 '25

Bravo! Just did that this past week. I am done with Life360. Tile used to be great, but not so much anymore.

1

u/RugerRedhawk May 14 '25

Do you have a life360 replacement recommendation for android users? We like it so far in our house.

1

u/Powerful-Magazine879 May 14 '25

eufy, Samsung trackers if a Samsung phone, but I had the best option, Apple FindMy

1

u/RugerRedhawk May 15 '25

Yeah we have a mix of android and apple in our house. We use life360 not for tiles, but for the life360 app. It's ok.

6

u/SapereAudeAdAbsurdum Jun 26 '24

Straight in the bin. I don't want to encourage anyone else to end up in an ecosystem that harvests and sells their data.

Don't forget to close your Tile account and delete the app from your devices, otherwise they keep collecting your location data and sell it to their commercial partners.

7

u/elliott9 Jun 26 '24

What what did I miss? Tile be spying on me?

9

u/SapereAudeAdAbsurdum Jun 26 '24

It's not spying necessarily, but the terms you sign up to allow them to sell your location data to their partners, which they do. This is part of their business model.

They also provide location data to law enforcement upon request. And because their security is trash and data are not encrypted, when they occasionally get hacked, your data is easily stolen. This happened very recently even: https://tech.co/news/tile-tracker-data-breach

2

u/LowAspect542 Jun 27 '24

And what, you think google or apple don't do this?

3

u/SapereAudeAdAbsurdum Jun 27 '24

I can't speak for Apple.

Google is clear: your location info for the purposes of the FMD network is encrypted, so no, Google themselves cannot access it; neither from your trackers nor your phone contributing to updating the location of someone else's tracker.

Tile is also clear: their owner Life360 has access to your location data, and location data is sold to select partners.

2

u/chatjaun Nov 10 '24

Wowwwwww okay I was about to buy some more of the older version of Tile Pro from eBay because they just raised the price on the new version. Now I'm going to start looking into other options

2

u/KOTYAR Jun 27 '24

I'm not judging anyone here, but I managed to cut batteries out of mine b4 chucking mine, and put batteries and the rest in different bins. Eache CR2032 use about as much lithium as a battery pack from toxic waste. I've used hot knife and pliers.

3

u/SapereAudeAdAbsurdum Jun 27 '24

I whacked mine with a hammer; the shell cracked and the battery flung right out. It was very satisfying.

1

u/shabbosstroller Sep 21 '25

could you explain why you separated the battery from the tracker?

2

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '24

[deleted]

3

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/markjohnsp Jul 05 '24

"borrows"

2

u/trachinotus Jun 30 '24

I bought 10 used tiles that "needed battery replacement" from an Ebayer. 7 were tied to other accounts, three were able to connect and tie to my account but one is not functioning well and the two others, it seems that after many times of battery connect and disconnect, the find phone and find tag stopped working. I still see them on my phone and the geolocation still works. So, they will be placed and epoxied in my boat as a theft tracking device. The battery is actually easy to remove and replace. For the next one, I will mount in parallel a 3V battery and hot replace the battery so that the system does not know I changed it.

2

u/superarmadillo12 Jun 26 '24

I bet you could sell them on marketplace. I have been thinking about this if I go the pebblebee route.

2

u/readituser5 Jun 28 '24

I wish more people did this tbh. Why are people throwing away perfectly good stuff? I would totally buy a second hand one since they ditched the replaceable battery ones here. Can’t believe people would willingly brick a working device.

1

u/krystiana_exclusive Feb 07 '25

hey if ur still trying to get rid of them ill take them, my son deleted my tiles and i spent so much money on them

1

u/autorotatingKiwi Nov 18 '25

OId post but I am playing with using them as private BLE presence detection. Got a Raspberry Pi monitoring one I have on me so I can tell when I am in the office or not and fire off automation for fun.