openhaystack VS esphome

> For Find My, since they can even locate switched off phones

They can't. Find My is actually truly end-to-end encrypted, at least the version used for when a device is off (I'm not 100% sure how encrypted the self-reported version is for powered on iPhones with data).

Copy-pasting my summary about how Find My works from another comment in this post:

> The master private key used by the system is generated locally and never leaves your Apple devices in a state that anyone except your devices can read it.

> The master key is used to derive an AirTag specific private key which is provisioned to the AirTag and is in turn combined with an increasing counter which generates a third private key that's never stored anywhere. The ID broadcast is the public key of this third key. It changes every 30 minutes or 1 hour, I forget which.

> Other devices see this key, use it to encrypt their own location, and upload that encrypted blob along with the public key to Find My, and in order for Apple to even know which account the encrypted blob they can't decrypt belongs to I have to actually request the location of my AirTag by locally deriving the keypair it used for a certain point in time.

This has all been proven through [1] where they read the whitepaper (which I can't for the life of me find now but know exist because I've read it, or at least parts) and implemented OpenHaystack which proves Apple aren't lying about anything because if they did then OpenHaystack wouldn't work.

1: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack

find my network

Much more nuance than that. You can't just tap into the networks. More information here https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack

You can actually create your own, using Apple's "find my" network. See OpenHaystack

It can even be converted to run a FOSS software stack with no cloud dependencies - https://github.com/emporia-vue-local/esphome

Thanks for mentioning Emporia Vue, it looks like you can flash it with ESP Home for cloud-free operation which could be a nice solution.

Here's what I use for my Vue: https://github.com/emporia-vue-local/esphome

Take a look at this repo to see how it's done for the custom component used by Emporia Vue: https://github.com/emporia-vue-local/esphome

I think some people have flashed their emporia devices with custom firmware to get data out into ESPhome. https://github.com/emporia-vue-local/esphome

Not Tasmotized--ESPHome!

Instructions are at https://gist.github.com/flaviut/93a1212c7b165c7674693a45ad52..., and I'm around in the discussion forums at https://github.com/emporia-vue-local/esphome/discussions to help out with getting this set up.

And I agree--it's really a great deal, and it's the only one of these products that comes with UL listing and can run open-source firmware.