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> It’s possible the tracker is attached to an item the user is borrowing, but if not, iPhone can view the tracker’s identifier, have the tracker play a sound to

> It’s possible the tracker is attached to an item the user is borrowing, but if not, iPhone can view the tracker’s identifier, have the tracker play a sound to help locate it, and access instructions to disable it. That means someone can steal your stuff, and then disable the tracker so you can't find it. Most people and myself included were sticking these cheap tags on everything we own, and it was genuinely useful during travel or in scenarios where theft was a consideration.

thebruce87m 2y ago
> That means someone can steal your stuff, and then disable the tracker so you can't find it. This is by design. AirTags were never marketed as an anti-theft device. They had anti-stalking features from day one which were/are at odds with anti-theft. It was marketed as helping you find things that are lost, nothing more.
- pompino 2y ago
  Design doesn't matter after a point - you have to meet your users on their turf. Most people were using it for other reasons - and if Apple's stance is, fine - don't buy it, then so be it.
  - asdfaoeu 2y ago
    There's two products here Bluetooth trackers and phones. People don't want to buy phones that expose themselves to tracking by other people.
    - pompino 2y ago
      Every phone is already being being tracked and logged. What youre really saying is that people often tolerate some tracking if done by CIA/phone company/Apple/Google/FB. We're just playing with semantics here. Tracking is either acceptable or not. The only real solution is to go off-grid.
      - tdeck 2y ago
        It's reasonable for a person to have a threat model that's more concerned about their violent narcissist ex attaching an AirTag to their car than about the CIA.
        PurestGuava 2y ago
        It's astonishing how few people actually seem to realise this.
      - datadrivenangel 2y ago
        If the FBI wants to obliterate me, they can get a warrant and send goons to my house. The costs of preparing for that threat model are excessive, so I don't. If some scumbag ad company wants to track me, they can eat shit on my adblocker and not track me. The cost of preparing for that threat model is trivial, so I do.
      - wolfendin 2y ago
        CIA/phone company/Apple/Google/FB/some rando are all different, independent, situations; as a reasonable adult I have decided that some of them are acceptable, some of them are not.
  - ezfe 2y ago
    It's been that way since day 1
    - pompino 2y ago
      No, not in a free society. For any product, users should be free to use it for any (legal) use they see fit. Artificially limiting the use of a product goes against the hacker culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture
      - sodality2 2y ago
        You’re free to use the purchased device. You’re not free to demand changes. It’s not like you’re unlocking functionality that should be built in. Changing this would require patching the firmware of every iPhone
        iamthirsty 2y ago
        > You’re not free to demand changes. I mean, technically you are — doesn't mean anyone will listen.
      - criddell 2y ago
        Hacker culture would mean working around the limitation, not complaining that some consumer product doesn’t work exactly how you want it to work. FWIW, there are videos on YouTube showing you how to silence the speaker. No idea if they work or not, but it's hacker culture at work.
      - Uehreka 2y ago
        > For any product, users should be free to use it for any (legal) use they see fit. None of these companies ever agreed to be bound by that value, and aren’t under any obligation to adhere to the tenets of Hacker culture. Hackers as a group have failed to convince the public that these things matter, so as far as these businesses are concerned, they don’t. Like, I agree, it sucks when companies restrict what I can do with a device. But when that happens I don’t talk about it like they betrayed me, I knew what I was buying and decided to buy it anyway.
  - madeofpalk 2y ago
    The device, from the beginning, was not designed as an anti-theft tracker. It’s always had features that made it unsuitable for this use case. At every point Apple has made it very clear they’re not interested in meeting users on that turf. Users can say they’re not interested in it because it doesn’t suit their needs - that’s completely fine.
  - fkyoureadthedoc 2y ago
    > Most people were using it for other reasons Source? I just use them to find my keys and remote, didn't know it was popular to try and recover stolen property given the alerts when you're near not-your-airtag for any length of time.
    - macintux 2y ago
      There have been news articles since practically the day of release. I tracked stolen keys to a house a few miles away, but didn't feel like risking my life for them. There are any number of products allowing you to mount them inconspicuously.
    - pompino 2y ago
      Its not just popular, police departments have recommended it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/28/airtags-theft/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/28/airtags... https://www.axios.com/2023/05/24/apple-airtags-track-car-thieves-you-dont https://www.axios.com/2023/05/24/apple-airtags-track-car-thi... https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/apple-air-tags-travel-explainer-sfo-18335108.php https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/apple-air-tags-travel-... https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/police-urge-caution-in-using-apple-airtags-to-combat-theft https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/police-urge-caution-in...
      - superb_dev 2y ago
        To no one's shock, the police departments are giving poor advice
      - dragonwriter 2y ago
        Police department recommendations are often wrong, and often based on either poor information about the domain the advice is being given in or actively-promoted (by police leadership) disinformation. Police agencies aren't systematic domain experts except in the application of force to obtain compliance, as well as not having an interest in accurate advice.
  - CPLX 2y ago
    The killer use case here, as I think most people have figured out, is figuring out where your stuff is when it's in a system you don't have visibility into. Like if UPS says it's "on the way" from NYC to LA or something, and especially if the airline isn't sure where your luggage is. It's just spectacular for that. And of course where did I leave my keys and is my backpack in the car or at work stuff, but that's the obvious/advertised use.
- sandworm101 2y ago
  >> helping you find things that are lost, nothing more. So it is now on me to know whether my object is lost or stolen? Even if I magically knew all the details, that isn't a bright line rule. One person's "lost" luggage is another's stolen electronics. Clearly, more people are using these things to track down stuff that has been taken rather than find the remote control lost somewhere in their living room. Will apple allow people to disable the tracking of other people's iPhones too in the name of privacy? What if my wife leaves her phone in my car? Can I get tracking disabled on that phone so she cannot track my location?
  - happyopossum 2y ago
    > So it is now on me to know whether my object is lost or stolen? This isn't new - AirTags have always been this way. The only thing changing today is the cross-platform and 'standard' aspect to it...
  - microtherion 2y ago
    > So it is now on me to know whether my object is lost or stolen? No. AirTags let you track your objects whether they are lost or stolen. It's just that they also alert potential thieves to their presence, so any reasonably competent thief will be able to disable them. > Clearly, more people are using these things to track down stuff that has been taken rather than find the remote control lost somewhere in their living room. My use cases are to (a) find items that I misplaced or lost somewhere on my own. (b) track the whereabouts of luggage that got lost by an airline. These cases are not particularly hindered by anti-stalking mechanisms.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      > My use cases are to (a) find items that I misplaced or lost somewhere on my own. (b) track the whereabouts of luggage that got lost by an airline. You are technically not allowed AirTags in luggage because they contain li-ion batteries.
      - Jtsummers 2y ago
- zarzavat 2y ago
  Perhaps something was lost in translation then. The most likely reason to lose things is because they are stolen.
  - nexus7556 2y ago
    Uhh, I don't know about that. Since getting airtags I've misplaced my car keys multiple times, left my wallet on an airplane, and had multiple airlines misplace my luggage. In that same time I've not had anything stolen.
    - hackernewds 2y ago
      Your anecdata is not data
      - peddling-brink 2y ago
        But it serves to counter a ridiculous sweeping generalization.
      - kibwen 2y ago
        Anecdata suffices to counter anecdata.
      - freedomben 2y ago
        It is when it's countering other anecdata. If anyone has actual data then by all means show it and that will trump the anecdata, but without that, anecdata is all we have.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Not for me. It’s cure for forgetfulness.
  - stephenr 2y ago
    I don't know where you live but that isn't at all true anywhere I've lived. I've had two reasons to need to "find" things with AirTags where I specifically didn't know where they were: - airline bungle, so luggage was left at a transit airport. - forgetting where something had been put down. But the most common usage is the opposite, positive confirmation: we've just left for the airport, check if everything says "with you" once you're a few hundred meters down the road. If the most likely reason for something to be "lost" is that it was stolen, maybe you should move somewhere with a less than apocalyptic level of petty crime.
- oblio 2y ago
  They weren't marketed but it was implied. If you forgot, they had to patch them a while after release due to stalking concerns so that "day one" point is moot.
  - thebruce87m 2y ago
    I watched the release live. They have altered the timings of the anti-stalking notifications but they were there on day 1. Edit: here is an article around the time of release describing how they work: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/apple-airtags-stalking/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/apple-a... > To discourage what it calls “unwanted tracking,” Apple built technology into AirTags to warn potential victims, including audible alarms and messages about suspicious AirTags that pop up on iPhones. To put Apple’s personal security protections to the test, my colleague Jonathan Baran paired an AirTag with his iPhone, slipped his tag in my backpack (with my permission), and then tracked me for a week from across San Francisco Bay. > I got multiple alerts: from the hidden AirTag and on my iPhone.
- beeboobaa3 2y ago
  It's interesting to think about how AirTags generally go against the wishes of the owner of the device. The AirTag has anti-stalking protection. An important feature, but not something the owner of the AirTag may want. iPhones share the location of nearby AirTags with apple. Good for the owner of those AirTags, but the owner of the iPhone may not want this.
  - Shank 2y ago
    > The AirTag has anti-stalking protection. An important feature, but not something the owner of the AirTag may want. Yeah, that’s like, the issue with trackers. If I buy an AirTag to stalk my ex girlfriend, why should Apple want to help facilitate that goal?
    - freedomben 2y ago
      You're right of course, but this represents a huge shift in the way we think about our computers now, and speaking only for myself I don't think I like it. It used to be that when you bought a computer, it was yours. It did your bidding, nobody elses. Security features it had were about keeping other people out, not keeping you out of your own device. Now, mostly IMHO thanks to Apple, the idea has really shifted. The owner of the device is a "threat" just like anybody else is. The device protects itself against unauthorized actions from the owner, and it does what the mother company wants it to do, regardless of the owner's desires. If the owner is trying to stalk somebody, then that's a better outcome than having the stalker enabled, but we don't get to pick and choose which things the device follows it's owners desires or the mother company's. If the mother company wants you using their chosen DNS servers, or exfiltrating user data for analytics, or showing you ads (Amazon especially), that's what will happen. Now that we've made it acceptable for companies to behave like this, they are going to (ab)use it to the max. I think this is a tragedy of the commons personally. People optimizing for individual use cases at the expense of the collective, leading to disastrous results for the collective.
      - CobrastanJorji 2y ago
        Isn't this a success of the commons? Apple decided on behalf of everyone else to use THEIR phones to find YOUR missing thing. That's a win for you as the owner of the AirPod. In order to make that decision palatable to the crowd, they tried to make sure your ability to use their phones without asking had minimal opportunity for abuse (they don't want you to be able to track them with their own phone).
atommclain 2y ago
Yeah, I think the point of these devices is for locating lost items, not stolen items. Trying to handle the stolen use case but not allowing nefarious tracking seems to be at odds with each other.
- pompino 2y ago
  Sure, but the owner of the product gets to choose what they use it for. "You're holding it wrong" strikes again. If Apple's position is - "then don't buy it", they can come out and say it. They certainly have that right.
  - happyopossum 2y ago
    > If Apple's position is - "then don't buy it", they can come out and say it. They certainly have that right. They have done that since day one, when AirTags shipped with anti-tracking features enabled...
- mschuster91 2y ago
  Depends on what you're trying to track if it's stolen. A compartment in something like a car or an eBike that allows removal only by using an actually high-security key (i.e. something that LockPickingLawyer can't pick) or power tools that would seriously compromise the structural integrity of the thing in question would be something I'd pay serious money for... but no manufacturer of anything I'm aware of has actually gone that far.
  - close04 2y ago
    VanMoof bikes connected to the Find My network if I remember correctly. I thought you can pay for access. But to disincentivize theft, any device would have to be built in such a way that swapping the electronics or discarding that tracking module makes the device you were protecting worthless. Lots of secure handshakes between paired components, very secure software kept up to date, etc. which sounds unrealistic in most cases. Together with that network access fee probably makes such solutions economically infeasible today.
kstrauser 2y ago
Yep. That ruins half the value of AirTags. It's a limitation that their competitors, like Tile, didn't have until very recently. Every time this comes up, someone butts in with "they're for lost items, not stolen ones!", which is technically accurate but pedantic beyond reason. "Stolen" is a special case of "lost" for most people. In both cases the object is out of the owner's possession. "Stolen" just means it's deliberately missing and not accidentally so. I understand, sympathize, and support the idea of making life harder for would-be stalkers. My gut instinct says non-notifying AirTags would make life harder for many more thieves than the self-tattling AirTags does stalkers. Apple and Google agree with each other that inconveniencing those losers outweighs abetting thieves. That's their decision to make. I'd still be irritated if I couldn't find my lost-with-the-help-of-a-thief bike because my AirTag told the thief I was looking for it.
- smeej 2y ago
  I think the idea is that thieves that have already been successful at removing the item from your possession are much less of a threat to your life than someone who is actively tracking where you are. It's a debate worth having, which one should be the priority, but I can appreciate the logic of doing it this way.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    I can, too. I can also think of counterexamples: if a person is broke, they use their bike to get to work, and someone steels it, that's going to give them a very, very bad week. There's some hard calculus there I'm glad I'm not in charge of. Blocking 1 stalker is clearly more important than blocking one sunglasses thief. I suspect that blocking 1,000 bike thieves would have a bigger societal benefit than blocking 1 stalker. These are hard questions. I can appreciate the challenges. And yet I'd still be highly peeved if I could my AirTag laying on the ground because it alerted a thief who then removed and discarded it.
    - barkbyte 2y ago
      Stalking is way more common than successfully recovering items with a tracker like this. It’s usually a bad idea to even try. I followed a tracker into someone’s yard only to discover that the thief had thrown the tracker over the fence and I was just trespassing.
FriedPickles 2y ago
It's possible to build your own tracker atop the Find My network without these anti-stalking features. The Find My network can even be abused for low bandwidth data transfer from any point in the world with an occasionally nearby iPhone. https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack
- neilv 2y ago
  Unfortunately, OpenHaystack is not as open as I'd hoped. > All you need is a Mac and [...]
  - sodality2 2y ago
    That’s because Apple themselves limit access to authenticated (but supposedly anonymous - aka doesn’t matter whose) Apple IDs before allowing access to the geodatabase
    - jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
      Not for long, since cross compatibility with android is apparently coming. IIRC, they need you running macos to get the data via a plugin for apple mail. If you only needed an appleID, it could likely be done in a web browser.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        The cross compatibility is only for anti-stalking features, and is probably implemented in such a way that you couldn't use it to implement a tracker that works in both systems.
        jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
        You're right. I think I misremembered a news article I read about a week or so ago, that I can no longer find.
    - 2y ago
m463 2y ago
I wonder if there will be a way for airports to disable airtags this way.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  They are already pretty worthless as far as air travel goes in my experience. Airtag indicated my bag was on the tarmac at the first airport pretty much until it dropped in front of me in the baggage carriage at the last airport. Effectively it gives me zero information I didn't have already from the old analog method of using ones eyes and following up with airline staff.
  - m463 2y ago
    I remember reading about airports wanting passengers to disable their airtags. I wonder if they would find a way to use this to disable ALL the airtags in an area. For example, put a UAL airtag on a plane, and use that to disable all the other airtags.
    - kalleboo 2y ago
      That was a case where Lufthansa was confused about the difference between (volatile) Li-ion rechargeable batteries and the (benign) Lithium single-use coin cells in the AirTags. They retracted their stance on them after a day or so. It was a fire hazard thing, not a "we don't want you tracking items" thing.
      - m463 2y ago
        hmmm... that might be what I read.
      - KennyBlanken 2y ago
        Lufthanasa, like other airlines, was pissed that customers were routinely catching their employees claiming their luggage was "lost" when it was sometimes even sitting a few dozen feet from the person who was claiming the luggage was lost, so they made up some obvious nonsense about them being hazardous. Unless you think a huge, high-end airline "got confused"? It wouldn't have been against regs even if ti was a lithium ion battery because it's so tiny. What do you think they do about the millions of electric toothbrushes and shavers people travel with that have much larger lithium ion batteries? They retracted it because it ended up causing a Striesand Effect, putting a lot of sunlight on how airlines do a very brisk business selling "lost" luggage.
happyopossum 2y ago
> That means someone can steal your stuff, and then disable the tracker so you can't find it This has always been the case with AirTags. They've had anti-stalking notifications since day one, and disabling one is as easy as a quarter test of the case to remove the battery.
lm28469 2y ago
> Most people and myself included were sticking these cheap tags on everything we own, and it was genuinely useful during travel or in scenarios where theft was a consideration. It has never been advertised for that has it?
ryukoposting 2y ago
Can you please describe what scenario you imagine an airtag would be useful in tracking down a stolen item in an airport? I ask because I'm at a loss. BLE from these little devices has ~40ft of range on a good day, and even if a mesh network were involved, I fail to see what the airtag could do that would help you recover your item. Sound an alarm? Great, the thief knows where it is now, and they can just yank it out and throw it in the trash. Give you GPS coordinates? Great, that'll really help after you find security, tell them what happened, convince them it's urgent, and explain to them what they're looking at when you show them the app. Of course that all assumes the airtag (or a nearby mesh device) has a useful GPS fix, and the thief hasn't already found the tag and thrown it in a trash can or something.
- radicality 2y ago
  Imagine you put an AirTag somewhere deep into your suitcase, and someone malicious steals it and then drives off with it. With the current model, the thief will get notified there’s an AirTag traveling with them, and they can play a sound, find it and remove it / disable it. Imo without these features it would be rather unlikely for a thief to find AirTags quickly or even realize it’s there. The ~40ft range is more than enough, the global mesh network of all iPhones is the whole point of the AirTags, there’s no “gps fix”.
  - ryukoposting 2y ago
    So we're in agreement about the technical situation at hand - rely on nearby devices' location data. This should work fine in most airports, sure. I'm still stuck on all of the friction involved in actually using airtags as a theft recovery device. Neither the tag or Apple's service can contact police or airport security on its own, so you're spending who-knows-how-long flagging down security, explaining the situation, and waiting for them to relay that message back to an appropriate authority who will go find the thief. Alternatively, you skip the "talk to security" part entirely and go find the thief yourself (assuming you're comfortable with that sort of confrontation). You're still dealing with a moving target - one that can very easily leave the airport entirely, forcing you to choose between sacrificing your bag and potentially missing your flight, a cab, etc. You also run into a proliferation issue. The more popular airtags become as a theft-recovery device, the more thieves will know to look for them and remove them from stolen items.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

thebruce87m 2y ago

> That means someone can steal your stuff, and then disable the tracker so you can't find it. This is by design. AirTags were never marketed as an anti-theft device. They had anti-stalking features from day one which were/are at odds with anti-theft. It was marketed as helping you find things that are lost, nothing more.

pompino 2y ago
Design doesn't matter after a point - you have to meet your users on their turf. Most people were using it for other reasons - and if Apple's stance is, fine - don't buy it, then so be it.
- asdfaoeu 2y ago
  There's two products here Bluetooth trackers and phones. People don't want to buy phones that expose themselves to tracking by other people.
  - pompino 2y ago
    Every phone is already being being tracked and logged. What youre really saying is that people often tolerate some tracking if done by CIA/phone company/Apple/Google/FB. We're just playing with semantics here. Tracking is either acceptable or not. The only real solution is to go off-grid.
    - tdeck 2y ago
      It's reasonable for a person to have a threat model that's more concerned about their violent narcissist ex attaching an AirTag to their car than about the CIA.
      - PurestGuava 2y ago
        It's astonishing how few people actually seem to realise this.
    - datadrivenangel 2y ago
      If the FBI wants to obliterate me, they can get a warrant and send goons to my house. The costs of preparing for that threat model are excessive, so I don't. If some scumbag ad company wants to track me, they can eat shit on my adblocker and not track me. The cost of preparing for that threat model is trivial, so I do.
    - wolfendin 2y ago
      CIA/phone company/Apple/Google/FB/some rando are all different, independent, situations; as a reasonable adult I have decided that some of them are acceptable, some of them are not.
- ezfe 2y ago
  It's been that way since day 1
  - pompino 2y ago
    No, not in a free society. For any product, users should be free to use it for any (legal) use they see fit. Artificially limiting the use of a product goes against the hacker culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture
    - sodality2 2y ago
      You’re free to use the purchased device. You’re not free to demand changes. It’s not like you’re unlocking functionality that should be built in. Changing this would require patching the firmware of every iPhone
      - iamthirsty 2y ago
        > You’re not free to demand changes. I mean, technically you are — doesn't mean anyone will listen.
    - criddell 2y ago
      Hacker culture would mean working around the limitation, not complaining that some consumer product doesn’t work exactly how you want it to work. FWIW, there are videos on YouTube showing you how to silence the speaker. No idea if they work or not, but it's hacker culture at work.
    - Uehreka 2y ago
      > For any product, users should be free to use it for any (legal) use they see fit. None of these companies ever agreed to be bound by that value, and aren’t under any obligation to adhere to the tenets of Hacker culture. Hackers as a group have failed to convince the public that these things matter, so as far as these businesses are concerned, they don’t. Like, I agree, it sucks when companies restrict what I can do with a device. But when that happens I don’t talk about it like they betrayed me, I knew what I was buying and decided to buy it anyway.
- madeofpalk 2y ago
  The device, from the beginning, was not designed as an anti-theft tracker. It’s always had features that made it unsuitable for this use case. At every point Apple has made it very clear they’re not interested in meeting users on that turf. Users can say they’re not interested in it because it doesn’t suit their needs - that’s completely fine.
- fkyoureadthedoc 2y ago
  > Most people were using it for other reasons Source? I just use them to find my keys and remote, didn't know it was popular to try and recover stolen property given the alerts when you're near not-your-airtag for any length of time.
  - macintux 2y ago
    There have been news articles since practically the day of release. I tracked stolen keys to a house a few miles away, but didn't feel like risking my life for them. There are any number of products allowing you to mount them inconspicuously.
  - pompino 2y ago
    Its not just popular, police departments have recommended it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/28/airtags-theft/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/28/airtags... https://www.axios.com/2023/05/24/apple-airtags-track-car-thieves-you-dont https://www.axios.com/2023/05/24/apple-airtags-track-car-thi... https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/apple-air-tags-travel-explainer-sfo-18335108.php https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/apple-air-tags-travel-... https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/police-urge-caution-in-using-apple-airtags-to-combat-theft https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/police-urge-caution-in...
    - superb_dev 2y ago
      To no one's shock, the police departments are giving poor advice
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      Police department recommendations are often wrong, and often based on either poor information about the domain the advice is being given in or actively-promoted (by police leadership) disinformation. Police agencies aren't systematic domain experts except in the application of force to obtain compliance, as well as not having an interest in accurate advice.
- CPLX 2y ago
  The killer use case here, as I think most people have figured out, is figuring out where your stuff is when it's in a system you don't have visibility into. Like if UPS says it's "on the way" from NYC to LA or something, and especially if the airline isn't sure where your luggage is. It's just spectacular for that. And of course where did I leave my keys and is my backpack in the car or at work stuff, but that's the obvious/advertised use.
sandworm101 2y ago
>> helping you find things that are lost, nothing more. So it is now on me to know whether my object is lost or stolen? Even if I magically knew all the details, that isn't a bright line rule. One person's "lost" luggage is another's stolen electronics. Clearly, more people are using these things to track down stuff that has been taken rather than find the remote control lost somewhere in their living room. Will apple allow people to disable the tracking of other people's iPhones too in the name of privacy? What if my wife leaves her phone in my car? Can I get tracking disabled on that phone so she cannot track my location?
- happyopossum 2y ago
  > So it is now on me to know whether my object is lost or stolen? This isn't new - AirTags have always been this way. The only thing changing today is the cross-platform and 'standard' aspect to it...
- microtherion 2y ago
  > So it is now on me to know whether my object is lost or stolen? No. AirTags let you track your objects whether they are lost or stolen. It's just that they also alert potential thieves to their presence, so any reasonably competent thief will be able to disable them. > Clearly, more people are using these things to track down stuff that has been taken rather than find the remote control lost somewhere in their living room. My use cases are to (a) find items that I misplaced or lost somewhere on my own. (b) track the whereabouts of luggage that got lost by an airline. These cases are not particularly hindered by anti-stalking mechanisms.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    > My use cases are to (a) find items that I misplaced or lost somewhere on my own. (b) track the whereabouts of luggage that got lost by an airline. You are technically not allowed AirTags in luggage because they contain li-ion batteries.
    - Jtsummers 2y ago
zarzavat 2y ago
Perhaps something was lost in translation then. The most likely reason to lose things is because they are stolen.
- nexus7556 2y ago
  Uhh, I don't know about that. Since getting airtags I've misplaced my car keys multiple times, left my wallet on an airplane, and had multiple airlines misplace my luggage. In that same time I've not had anything stolen.
  - hackernewds 2y ago
    Your anecdata is not data
    - peddling-brink 2y ago
      But it serves to counter a ridiculous sweeping generalization.
    - kibwen 2y ago
      Anecdata suffices to counter anecdata.
    - freedomben 2y ago
      It is when it's countering other anecdata. If anyone has actual data then by all means show it and that will trump the anecdata, but without that, anecdata is all we have.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Not for me. It’s cure for forgetfulness.
- stephenr 2y ago
  I don't know where you live but that isn't at all true anywhere I've lived. I've had two reasons to need to "find" things with AirTags where I specifically didn't know where they were: - airline bungle, so luggage was left at a transit airport. - forgetting where something had been put down. But the most common usage is the opposite, positive confirmation: we've just left for the airport, check if everything says "with you" once you're a few hundred meters down the road. If the most likely reason for something to be "lost" is that it was stolen, maybe you should move somewhere with a less than apocalyptic level of petty crime.
oblio 2y ago
They weren't marketed but it was implied. If you forgot, they had to patch them a while after release due to stalking concerns so that "day one" point is moot.
- thebruce87m 2y ago
  I watched the release live. They have altered the timings of the anti-stalking notifications but they were there on day 1. Edit: here is an article around the time of release describing how they work: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/apple-airtags-stalking/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/apple-a... > To discourage what it calls “unwanted tracking,” Apple built technology into AirTags to warn potential victims, including audible alarms and messages about suspicious AirTags that pop up on iPhones. To put Apple’s personal security protections to the test, my colleague Jonathan Baran paired an AirTag with his iPhone, slipped his tag in my backpack (with my permission), and then tracked me for a week from across San Francisco Bay. > I got multiple alerts: from the hidden AirTag and on my iPhone.
beeboobaa3 2y ago
It's interesting to think about how AirTags generally go against the wishes of the owner of the device. The AirTag has anti-stalking protection. An important feature, but not something the owner of the AirTag may want. iPhones share the location of nearby AirTags with apple. Good for the owner of those AirTags, but the owner of the iPhone may not want this.
- Shank 2y ago
  > The AirTag has anti-stalking protection. An important feature, but not something the owner of the AirTag may want. Yeah, that’s like, the issue with trackers. If I buy an AirTag to stalk my ex girlfriend, why should Apple want to help facilitate that goal?
  - freedomben 2y ago
    You're right of course, but this represents a huge shift in the way we think about our computers now, and speaking only for myself I don't think I like it. It used to be that when you bought a computer, it was yours. It did your bidding, nobody elses. Security features it had were about keeping other people out, not keeping you out of your own device. Now, mostly IMHO thanks to Apple, the idea has really shifted. The owner of the device is a "threat" just like anybody else is. The device protects itself against unauthorized actions from the owner, and it does what the mother company wants it to do, regardless of the owner's desires. If the owner is trying to stalk somebody, then that's a better outcome than having the stalker enabled, but we don't get to pick and choose which things the device follows it's owners desires or the mother company's. If the mother company wants you using their chosen DNS servers, or exfiltrating user data for analytics, or showing you ads (Amazon especially), that's what will happen. Now that we've made it acceptable for companies to behave like this, they are going to (ab)use it to the max. I think this is a tragedy of the commons personally. People optimizing for individual use cases at the expense of the collective, leading to disastrous results for the collective.
    - CobrastanJorji 2y ago
      Isn't this a success of the commons? Apple decided on behalf of everyone else to use THEIR phones to find YOUR missing thing. That's a win for you as the owner of the AirPod. In order to make that decision palatable to the crowd, they tried to make sure your ability to use their phones without asking had minimal opportunity for abuse (they don't want you to be able to track them with their own phone).

atommclain 2y ago

Yeah, I think the point of these devices is for locating lost items, not stolen items. Trying to handle the stolen use case but not allowing nefarious tracking seems to be at odds with each other.

pompino 2y ago
Sure, but the owner of the product gets to choose what they use it for. "You're holding it wrong" strikes again. If Apple's position is - "then don't buy it", they can come out and say it. They certainly have that right.
- happyopossum 2y ago
  > If Apple's position is - "then don't buy it", they can come out and say it. They certainly have that right. They have done that since day one, when AirTags shipped with anti-tracking features enabled...
mschuster91 2y ago
Depends on what you're trying to track if it's stolen. A compartment in something like a car or an eBike that allows removal only by using an actually high-security key (i.e. something that LockPickingLawyer can't pick) or power tools that would seriously compromise the structural integrity of the thing in question would be something I'd pay serious money for... but no manufacturer of anything I'm aware of has actually gone that far.
- close04 2y ago
  VanMoof bikes connected to the Find My network if I remember correctly. I thought you can pay for access. But to disincentivize theft, any device would have to be built in such a way that swapping the electronics or discarding that tracking module makes the device you were protecting worthless. Lots of secure handshakes between paired components, very secure software kept up to date, etc. which sounds unrealistic in most cases. Together with that network access fee probably makes such solutions economically infeasible today.

kstrauser 2y ago

Yep. That ruins half the value of AirTags. It's a limitation that their competitors, like Tile, didn't have until very recently. Every time this comes up, someone butts in with "they're for lost items, not stolen ones!", which is technically accurate but pedantic beyond reason. "Stolen" is a special case of "lost" for most people. In both cases the object is out of the owner's possession. "Stolen" just means it's deliberately missing and not accidentally so. I understand, sympathize, and support the idea of making life harder for would-be stalkers. My gut instinct says non-notifying AirTags would make life harder for many more thieves than the self-tattling AirTags does stalkers. Apple and Google agree with each other that inconveniencing those losers outweighs abetting thieves. That's their decision to make. I'd still be irritated if I couldn't find my lost-with-the-help-of-a-thief bike because my AirTag told the thief I was looking for it.

smeej 2y ago
I think the idea is that thieves that have already been successful at removing the item from your possession are much less of a threat to your life than someone who is actively tracking where you are. It's a debate worth having, which one should be the priority, but I can appreciate the logic of doing it this way.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  I can, too. I can also think of counterexamples: if a person is broke, they use their bike to get to work, and someone steels it, that's going to give them a very, very bad week. There's some hard calculus there I'm glad I'm not in charge of. Blocking 1 stalker is clearly more important than blocking one sunglasses thief. I suspect that blocking 1,000 bike thieves would have a bigger societal benefit than blocking 1 stalker. These are hard questions. I can appreciate the challenges. And yet I'd still be highly peeved if I could my AirTag laying on the ground because it alerted a thief who then removed and discarded it.
  - barkbyte 2y ago
    Stalking is way more common than successfully recovering items with a tracker like this. It’s usually a bad idea to even try. I followed a tracker into someone’s yard only to discover that the thief had thrown the tracker over the fence and I was just trespassing.

FriedPickles 2y ago

It's possible to build your own tracker atop the Find My network without these anti-stalking features. The Find My network can even be abused for low bandwidth data transfer from any point in the world with an occasionally nearby iPhone. https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack

neilv 2y ago
Unfortunately, OpenHaystack is not as open as I'd hoped. > All you need is a Mac and [...]
- sodality2 2y ago
  That’s because Apple themselves limit access to authenticated (but supposedly anonymous - aka doesn’t matter whose) Apple IDs before allowing access to the geodatabase
  - jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
    Not for long, since cross compatibility with android is apparently coming. IIRC, they need you running macos to get the data via a plugin for apple mail. If you only needed an appleID, it could likely be done in a web browser.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      The cross compatibility is only for anti-stalking features, and is probably implemented in such a way that you couldn't use it to implement a tracker that works in both systems.
      - jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
        You're right. I think I misremembered a news article I read about a week or so ago, that I can no longer find.
  - 2y ago

m463 2y ago

I wonder if there will be a way for airports to disable airtags this way.

kjkjadksj 2y ago
They are already pretty worthless as far as air travel goes in my experience. Airtag indicated my bag was on the tarmac at the first airport pretty much until it dropped in front of me in the baggage carriage at the last airport. Effectively it gives me zero information I didn't have already from the old analog method of using ones eyes and following up with airline staff.
- m463 2y ago
  I remember reading about airports wanting passengers to disable their airtags. I wonder if they would find a way to use this to disable ALL the airtags in an area. For example, put a UAL airtag on a plane, and use that to disable all the other airtags.
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    That was a case where Lufthansa was confused about the difference between (volatile) Li-ion rechargeable batteries and the (benign) Lithium single-use coin cells in the AirTags. They retracted their stance on them after a day or so. It was a fire hazard thing, not a "we don't want you tracking items" thing.
    - m463 2y ago
      hmmm... that might be what I read.
    - KennyBlanken 2y ago
      Lufthanasa, like other airlines, was pissed that customers were routinely catching their employees claiming their luggage was "lost" when it was sometimes even sitting a few dozen feet from the person who was claiming the luggage was lost, so they made up some obvious nonsense about them being hazardous. Unless you think a huge, high-end airline "got confused"? It wouldn't have been against regs even if ti was a lithium ion battery because it's so tiny. What do you think they do about the millions of electric toothbrushes and shavers people travel with that have much larger lithium ion batteries? They retracted it because it ended up causing a Striesand Effect, putting a lot of sunlight on how airlines do a very brisk business selling "lost" luggage.

happyopossum 2y ago

> That means someone can steal your stuff, and then disable the tracker so you can't find it This has always been the case with AirTags. They've had anti-stalking notifications since day one, and disabling one is as easy as a quarter test of the case to remove the battery.

lm28469 2y ago

> Most people and myself included were sticking these cheap tags on everything we own, and it was genuinely useful during travel or in scenarios where theft was a consideration. It has never been advertised for that has it?

ryukoposting 2y ago

Can you please describe what scenario you imagine an airtag would be useful in tracking down a stolen item in an airport? I ask because I'm at a loss. BLE from these little devices has ~40ft of range on a good day, and even if a mesh network were involved, I fail to see what the airtag could do that would help you recover your item. Sound an alarm? Great, the thief knows where it is now, and they can just yank it out and throw it in the trash. Give you GPS coordinates? Great, that'll really help after you find security, tell them what happened, convince them it's urgent, and explain to them what they're looking at when you show them the app. Of course that all assumes the airtag (or a nearby mesh device) has a useful GPS fix, and the thief hasn't already found the tag and thrown it in a trash can or something.

radicality 2y ago
Imagine you put an AirTag somewhere deep into your suitcase, and someone malicious steals it and then drives off with it. With the current model, the thief will get notified there’s an AirTag traveling with them, and they can play a sound, find it and remove it / disable it. Imo without these features it would be rather unlikely for a thief to find AirTags quickly or even realize it’s there. The ~40ft range is more than enough, the global mesh network of all iPhones is the whole point of the AirTags, there’s no “gps fix”.
- ryukoposting 2y ago
  So we're in agreement about the technical situation at hand - rely on nearby devices' location data. This should work fine in most airports, sure. I'm still stuck on all of the friction involved in actually using airtags as a theft recovery device. Neither the tag or Apple's service can contact police or airport security on its own, so you're spending who-knows-how-long flagging down security, explaining the situation, and waiting for them to relay that message back to an appropriate authority who will go find the thief. Alternatively, you skip the "talk to security" part entirely and go find the thief yourself (assuming you're comfortable with that sort of confrontation). You're still dealing with a moving target - one that can very easily leave the airport entirely, forcing you to choose between sacrificing your bag and potentially missing your flight, a cab, etc. You also run into a proliferation issue. The more popular airtags become as a theft-recovery device, the more thieves will know to look for them and remove them from stolen items.

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