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> 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 d
by 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 agoDesign 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 agoThere'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 agoEvery 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 agoIt'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 agoIt's astonishing how few people actually seem to realise this.
- datadrivenangel 2y agoIf 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 agoCIA/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 agoIt's been that way since day 1
- pompino 2y agoNo, 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 agoYou’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 agoHacker 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 agoThe 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 agoThere 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 agoIts 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 agoTo no one's shock, the police departments are giving poor advice
- dragonwriter 2y agoPolice 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 agoThe 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.
- zarzavat 2y agoPerhaps something was lost in translation then. The most likely reason to lose things is because they are stolen.
- nexus7556 2y agoUhh, 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 agoYour anecdata is not data
- peddling-brink 2y agoBut it serves to counter a ridiculous sweeping generalization.
- kibwen 2y agoAnecdata suffices to counter anecdata.
- freedomben 2y agoIt 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 agoNot for me. It’s cure for forgetfulness.
- stephenr 2y agoI 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 agoThey 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 agoI 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 agoIt'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 agoYou'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 agoIsn'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).