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> This is like suing the phone company because your creepy ex calls and threatens you. I was going to try and come up with some witty way to claim that your ph

> This is like suing the phone company because your creepy ex calls and threatens you. I was going to try and come up with some witty way to claim that your phone company could enable direct physical violence against you, but that feels disingenuous. We have a responsibility, as humans, to not enable bad actors -- and the Airtag lies somewhere between a phone company and an obviously illegally sold remote access trojan. I think Apple's fucked up because they've been told repeatedly that they're making it trivially easy for people to commit crimes against others, whether it be vehicle theft or stalking, and their solution is just to add a very easily defeatable speaker. I want a lot more from one of the most powerful corporations in the world.

arolihas 4y ago
People on hackernews, for self-evident reasons, tend to not be receptive to the argument that some technologies shouldn't be made.
yunwal 4y ago
They have anti-stalking features (little notifications that say "The owner of this Airtag can see your location."). You can also trigger the airtag to play a sound if it's in your vicinity I believe. Ultimately, any device with location services will eventually be used this way. Even if it's cost-prohibitive now, you can definitely buy 5-year-old smartphones for the same purpose. This feels like something that you can't expect Apple to solve more than they already have, and needs to be handled by law enforcement.
- NegativeK 4y ago
  I think we're disagreeing that if a organization makes bad behavior notably easier (a cheap Airtag with a long battery life that's implementable by the vast majority of people, versus an old cellphone), they bear proportionate responsibility for the bad behavior. It's not acceptable to me to significantly enable evil and just say that someone else (LEO) can handle it. In this case, that means figuring out stronger controls before releasing a product.
  - yunwal 4y ago
    I'm not disagreeing that apple has some responsibility here. I'm saying they've pretty much done all they can without the cooperation of external forces. Some things they could do are: 1. Make sure android phones also detect Airtags out of the box by coming up with some universal standard. This is not entirely in their hands. 2. Collaborate with LE to try to detect and warn of stalking behavior. They could feasibly try to do #2 and brick devices that are likely to be involved in stalking, but I'm not sure if this is technically feasible (too high of a false positive rate would obviously cause issues, and it's not a lot of data to go off of).

arolihas 4y ago

People on hackernews, for self-evident reasons, tend to not be receptive to the argument that some technologies shouldn't be made.

yunwal 4y ago

They have anti-stalking features (little notifications that say "The owner of this Airtag can see your location."). You can also trigger the airtag to play a sound if it's in your vicinity I believe. Ultimately, any device with location services will eventually be used this way. Even if it's cost-prohibitive now, you can definitely buy 5-year-old smartphones for the same purpose. This feels like something that you can't expect Apple to solve more than they already have, and needs to be handled by law enforcement.

NegativeK 4y ago
I think we're disagreeing that if a organization makes bad behavior notably easier (a cheap Airtag with a long battery life that's implementable by the vast majority of people, versus an old cellphone), they bear proportionate responsibility for the bad behavior. It's not acceptable to me to significantly enable evil and just say that someone else (LEO) can handle it. In this case, that means figuring out stronger controls before releasing a product.
- yunwal 4y ago
  I'm not disagreeing that apple has some responsibility here. I'm saying they've pretty much done all they can without the cooperation of external forces. Some things they could do are: 1. Make sure android phones also detect Airtags out of the box by coming up with some universal standard. This is not entirely in their hands. 2. Collaborate with LE to try to detect and warn of stalking behavior. They could feasibly try to do #2 and brick devices that are likely to be involved in stalking, but I'm not sure if this is technically feasible (too high of a false positive rate would obviously cause issues, and it's not a lot of data to go off of).