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Taping them together tightly silences it. Airtags have to be the most nerfed product I've bought. Day one, they were fantastic. Then they lowered the beeping an

• endisneigh 5y ago
  Samsung trackers do not work nearly as well imo. Or tile for that matter. I’ve tried most of them and AirTags are clearly on another level for better or worse I do think AirTags should have a button like the Samsung ones, tho.
  • phkahler 5y ago
    >> Samsung trackers do not work nearly as well imo. Well, Apple Airtags use the massive network of iPhones to report the location of nearby airtags to Apple.
    • legostormtroopr 5y ago
      • endisneigh 5y ago
        Don’t know why they’re being downvoted when your point is irrelevant - the Samsung tracker only uses Samsung Galaxy devices specifically for the network
      • buran77 5y ago
        Android phones don't intrinsically track tags, they need software specifically installed for this. So almost none of those Android phones can be used to track anything. On the other hand all newer iPhones can track any AirTag out of the box, in what's probably the single biggest tracking network in the world.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • Spooky23 5y ago
    They work great, it’s just the network effects are smaller for Samsung. For people at risk, it is meaningless. Your crazy stalker will just drive around locations and confirm where you are remotely. The whole controversy is both real and bullshit. It is very trivial for people to get tracking devices for modest amounts of money in high threat scenarios. I think the issue with AirTags is the less malevolent, but creepy scenarios. And to be honest, the issue has existed for years with “Find My Friends”, which I’m sure is widely abused by family members and others to follow people around.
    • endisneigh 5y ago
      They work ok, but it’s inferior to AirTags specifically because the network effects are (much) smaller. If you’re using it to find stuff you want the largest possible network
• kevinsundar 5y ago
  At least for family, create a free family sharing account and add your wife. That'll silence the beeping when you're not around.
• ribosometronome 5y ago
  Apple gets a lot of focus on it that other companies do not. Ex. Headlines often focus on Apple when revealing some of Foxconn's worst labor practices. But stories about Foxconn using child labor to build Alexa devices, and the person who blew the whistle on that being tortured and put in jail for revealing it, went fairly under the radar in comparison. It's definitely a good thin that unethical labor practices being used to build our stuff is discussed, just the headlines and initial focus might lead laymen to believe one American hardware company is causing this, rather than most.
  • aaomidi 5y ago
    With more power, comes more responsibility. Apple is going to always be under the magnifying glass because they are just so much "bigger".
    • ribosometronome 5y ago
      For sure. I meant to add that sort of sentiment but spaced. There is definitely a level of "poor Apple, lets break out the tiniest violin for them". It's hard to cry over the world's largest public corporation getting more scrutiny than some others.
  • stefan_ 5y ago
    Apple coopted every iPhone into a global surveillance network for the benefit of throwaway keychain tokens. That's why.
    • jdminhbg 5y ago
      Every iPhone (and Android and dumbphone) was coopted into a global surveillance network from the very beginning.
      • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
        Previously, it didn't help random creeps to find home address of a girl he saw in a grocery store. Now, with AirTags it is rather trivial. Thanks, Apple.
• kube-system 5y ago
  I love my AirTags because they actually have a functional tracking network. I've lost items outside the house with a Tile tracker attached and it proved to be entirely worthless for actually finding my stuff. They simply don't have a good network.
  • beambot 5y ago
    They need to switch over to Helium's LoRa network, which has vastly better coverage...
    • BoorishBears 5y ago
      Have things changed? https://youtu.be/nerQCrOam5U https://youtu.be/nerQCrOam5U
    • wyager 5y ago
      A) LoRa is proprietary so we wouldn't be better off on that axis B) I don't trust the longevity of infrastructure financed by a shitcoin
    • duskwuff 5y ago
      LoRa and LoRaWAN don't belong to Helium. They existed long before it.
      • beambot 5y ago
        Yes, the protocols have been around for a very long time. However, do you know of a LoRa network with as much area coverage as Helium...?
  • willcipriano 5y ago
    This is a place for a generic open protocol. To have a real internet of things we need some kind of DNS but for objects.
    • steelbrain 5y ago
• micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Tile still isn't getting harped for stalking. I used a Tile to track down a backpack thief 5 years ago, could have easily been a person I was stalking. Apple's getting a lot of flack because they're enormous, consumers are more aware, and they have a better network... but the fact that they did any stalker alerting is beyond anything the existing products in the market have done. I'd guess the product designers at Apple are probably constantly frustrated with this reality.
  • izacus 5y ago
    Tile also isn't nearly as sensitive because it needs people to install their app to opt-in to their tracking network. Apple coopted every single phone into a tracker essentially creating a biggest people following and tracking network in the world - plus they use UWB which massively more accurate than what Tile uses. What Apple created would be Facebooks, NSAs and pretty much every spying entities wet dream to get fingers on.
    • micromacrofoot 5y ago
      Yeah I get it, but Tile's network is still good enough to find someone's house in a somewhat densely populated area. I've done it. >What Apple created would be Facebooks, NSAs and pretty much every spying entities wet dream to get fingers on. The government already has this with cell phones, no?
    • Spooky23 5y ago
      > What Apple created would be Facebooks, NSAs and pretty much every spying entities wet dream to get fingers on. No, Apple made it available to you. Police and intelligence agencies can buy this data from various entities or subpoena it.
• xoa 5y ago
  I haven't experienced the same issues you describe in terms of random beeping or the like. But I do think one of the most curious and irritating missing pieces from AirTags is no sort of tie-in with Family Sharing or some sort of contacts whitelist. I saw one thing saying that was about privacy but that makes zero sense because Apple doesn't do the same thing elsewhere in "Find My" for people or devices. While it's correctly opt-in, once everyone has done so we can see device locations for all of the family's stuff, which is very helpful when somebody is missing their phone or the like (anyone else can help with it) as well as checking in disasters. I don't see why that would be fine but keys wouldn't. In terms of privacy, someone is more likely to have their watch, phone or airpods on them then an Apple Tag frankly. Indeed that's the core logic of Apple Tags, we put down and misplace other random stuff but still have our phones/wearables. It can't be that rare for a family to have multiple vehicles where a certain amount of sharing happens, particularly if it's a pattern like us where the SO and I each have a car but then there is a single old truck that we both use. Family names are on the insurance, legally it's multidriver property. And even good friends/room mates probably share some kinds of property. Whomever has it is responsible for not losing it and thus has an interest in tracking it. Yeah it's a v1.0, but even so when Apple already has all this infrastructure up strikes me as an odd omission that significantly detracts from the utility for no good end. Even a basic "ignore this tag for a day/week/year/permanently" would at least help sand down a bit of the most irritating notification spam. And worth noting that this sort of thing is a genuine security/privacy issue too: in real security systems, the human factor matters a lot. If people get spammed with noise, they will inevitably end up ignoring it when an actual signal turns up. We've known this forever.
  • samatman 5y ago
    Apple still has some weird atomization issues for a company which is going all-in on family stuff. This is the company which ran out a credit card and payments infrastructure with serious fanfare— and, incredibly, no provisions for married people having joint accounts. None, they added it later when dhh and Steve Wozniak made a stink about it.
    • Androider 5y ago
• sephlietz 5y ago
  Maybe this a dumb question, but is the AirTag configured to Notify When Left Behind except when left at your home? I've never heard an AirTag beep before.
• duxup 5y ago
  I haven't experienced any of the rouge alerts with them. That's very strange, I wonder what is triggering it for you. For my use case, tracking bags, kids on vacation and etc it has worked fine.
• caconym_ 5y ago
  I have not had any issues like this with mine, and I use them all the time to find things. I would buy more if I had anything else to attach them to.
• filoleg 5y ago
  For me personally, I had to stop using my airtag (a singular one), because I notice that my phone has started draining battery much quicker than it was supposed to, for weeks on end. I checked the battery management page, and it turns out that the airtag functionality was draining most of it (despite my airtag being always near me, pretty much). Neither software updates nor disconnecting and re-pairing the airtag from scratch helped. Once I completely disconnected the airtag, the battery issue went completely away. I realize that this might not be a common experience and that it could be just some particular quirk about how it works with my phone specifically. But I gave up after that.
• jedberg 5y ago
  If you have a family Apple account you can avoid having your keys beep at your wife.
• JohnTHaller 5y ago
  Apple has over a hundred million iPhones all across the US and opted them into helping track Airtags without asking for permission (I'm sure it was buried in the middle of pages of terms of service). The only way to opt your iDevice out of tracking is to turn off Find My, so you can't find your phone if you lose it. Nice bit of artificial tying there. Tile and Samsung devices are more for personal use and won't really work outside your own location.
  • autoexec 5y ago
    I could swear that Samsung's find my phone service works exactly the same way. Your phone is automatically used to track every other phone around you. It might not work for whatever their air tag equivalent is though
  • kemayo 5y ago
    You can opt out of the "Find My network" part separately from the overall Find My system. This does mean that you'd not be able to find your phone if it's fully powered off, of course, but that seems to be a fair trade-off if you don't want to track or be tracked as part of this. See: https://imgur.com/a/ZY9oBPV https://imgur.com/a/ZY9oBPV
    • seanp2k2 5y ago
      Reminds me of Comcast, ooh sorry, XFINITY (rebranded to try to drop their reputation as the #1 anti-consumer company) enabling public wifi on your modem / AP without your consent, then burying the opt-out. Not on the same level, but Netflix auto-playing videos and previews is also annoying, and the option to disable it is purposely hidden on their website, not accessible through the app. Ugh.
• myself248 5y ago
  Tile didn't work well enough for stalking. I bought some Tiles and Trackrs and gave them to friends who agreed to help me test their usefulness, pretending that they had "stolen" these items from me. I would see if I could locate them a few days later when I "noticed them missing". I got one ping from a Tile once when the friend had apparently stopped for gas, but none from their house. And zero at all from the Trackr. Apparently there just aren't enough users in my area for the networks to accomplish much? By stealing battery from every iphone user and data from their cellular plan, Apple has built a find-me network that actually works. Therefore it also works for stalking. Therefore Apple is getting the criticism.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • riversflow 5y ago
    > Apple has built a find-me network that actually works. Therefore it also works for stalking. Therefore Apple is getting the criticism. Isn’t this criticism a bit like arguing that binoculars/telescopes are bad because they allow people to peep into other peoples windows or cars deserve criticism because they allow you to tail someone(or run from authorities)? Tools can basically always be misused.
    • austhrow743 5y ago
      Yes it is exactly like that.
    • taneq 5y ago
      More like the criticism that tiny cameras DO get because they're used for stalking / creepshots.
    • resoluteteeth 5y ago
      It would be like criticizing a company for making a new type of telescope that is massively easier to use to spy on people
  • GekkePrutser 5y ago
• aaroninsf 5y ago
  I have also not experienced beeping. I do get the occasional alert from family member tag crosstalk but it feels like this is improving. But the lack of explicit Family cross-view when other devices automagically have it is nigh unto unforgivably bad. I have heard arguments made about privacy but they are not that coherent. Expose an "opt this device out of Family sharing" during config option or whatever. That friends have attached two different tags to their kid's backpack so both spouses can track is total fail. :|
• heavenlyblue 5y ago
  I had once been standing in a queue of a few hundred people and one of them (maybe several) had an AirTag. I could not silence the warning so I had to endure the huge warning message that doesn’t tell me where the AirTag is nor allows me to disable it. It’s impressively pointless. Maybe I should buy one and annoy people with it.
• eternityforest 5y ago
  Tile is amazing. But all this AirTag stuff has me worried stalkers will switch to Tile, and then Tile will get ruined the same way. I wish we had a fully open alternative with the same global tracking network.
  • dole 5y ago
    Considering Tile's new owners, Life360, aren't above selling subscriber information, they're kind of already ruined. https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/9/22820381/tile-life360-location-tracking-data-privacy https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/9/22820381/tile-life360-loc...
    • eternityforest 5y ago
      I mean, I never had any expectation of any privacy at all from tile to begin with, so I'm Not sure I'd say it's ruined. It's commercial proprietary tech, I definitely wouldn't be using it if I considered my location history sensitive data.