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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, some

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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    I think we can agree that victims of domestic abuse and stalking have a risk of physical harm and that physical harm trumps property rights / being peeved right? This is a 0-sum choice & erring on the side of not letting this product be used for stalking seems like a sane choice. There are stalking products you can go buy that are more expensive that can give you the theft protection you want. Apple's and Google's monitoring network is unfathomably large and can passively monitor any device anywhere in the world. The threat vectors they have to balance against abuse is completely different.
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      You say that right after I give an example of where property crimes can seriously mess up someone’s life. Yes, 1 person’s personal safety is more important than 1 person losing a convenience item. If it were a choice between 1 person’s safety and 1,000,000 persons’ transportation, I’d pick the latter every time. The choice Apple faced clearly isn’t 1 stalking victim against 1,000,000 people unable to get to work. I use that example to show that it’s not as simple as “safety vs annoyance”. Apple and Google ran the numbers and erred on the side of safety. That doesn’t make it an automatic or simple choice.
      - vlovich123 3y ago
        Think about it this way - without AirTags and with AirTags + anti-stalking, your bike theft scenario is unchanged. Without airtags and with AirTags without anti-stalking, your personal safety scenario is worse. Those are the discussions I remember when I worked on CoreLocation at Apple. It had nothing to do with running the numbers, at least pre-development. I would be slightly surprised if someone tried to put numbers to that - Apple is pretty values-based when it comes to those kinds of decisions. The stalking issues go well beyond personal safety. Police officers, judges, politicians and cops who now have to worry about someone chucking a $25 airtag in their car which is much easier to do innocuously and those people have power to craft regulations and laws. Abortion rights are even more contentious now & stalking comes up there. There just isn't a scenario where opting in the entire world-wide smartphone community into enabling mass stalking at a never before price point is a net positive - there just aren't enough poor people with stolen bikes to shift that equation. There's a reason AirTags destroyed Tile - Tile's network is laughably small & would always be that way compared with the reach you get at the OS level. That drastically shifts the threat model.
pompino 3y ago
Yes, I think the PR backlash for such features is too great that it spoils them for the rest of us. When people "misuse" any technology, it seems the consensus nowadays is that the responsibility is shared between the technology creator/owner and law enforcement. Personally, I'm not fully sold as this is mainly a sociopolitical question.
- skybrian 3y ago
  Thinking system-wide changes through is what public policy is all about, and the same should probably be true of shipping devices in the tens of millions. (That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Doing pilot studies is a good idea.)
- kstrauser 3y ago
  I think you're right. I get the push toward that consensus. There are plenty of makers (cough cough Purdue Pharmaceuticals) who make awful, abusable things and then say, hey, it's not our fault people are misusing them! It still sucks getting caught in the middle.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  It would 100% be used for stalking & be directly contributing to easier violence against victims. Not sure I buy the argument it's purely because of image PR reasons vs there being a genuine well-founded harm-minimization strategy for why it's designed this way.
  - pompino 3y ago
    You can call anything you do as a "genuine well-founded harm-minimization strategy", but nobody is out there banning knives and gardening shears and shovels and baseball bats and other tools that can contribute towards "easier violence" because of the cost to society. You either have an absolutist/ideological view on this, or you're willing to compromise. Ultimately its a matter of perception, and then too, some people are easier to convince than others.
    - 3y ago
bloppe 3y ago
It's a fundamental tradeoff. And who's affected in each case? The anti-stalking bias degrades the product for people who've bought an AirTag and become victims of theft. It's a limited population. People are unaffected by default. The anti-theft bias means everybody is a potential victim of stalking. If I have no interest in AirTags, anybody else can still tape one to the bottom of my car and track me wherever I go. Everybody is potentially affected. Even if theft is far more common than stalking, an anti-theft bias would be a tough position for Apple to defend if it means they're potentially facilitating stalking for the entire population. It may not be ideal, but I can understand it.
- IncreasePosts 3y ago
  You also have the situation where if air tags did not have the anti-stalking features, there would be far more stalkers in the world. I'm sure there's many people who would not buy a GPS logger and connected to someone's car, but they might "forget" an airtag in someone's car, were it not for the anti-stalking alerts. I suspect if Apple went the Anti-Theft route, thieves would not stop thieving, they would just start searching large stolen items for air tags before bringing it to wherever they may.
criddell 3y ago
Apple doesn't want stalkers and they definitely don't want any part of leading people into confrontations with thieves. AirTag isn't the right product for you. Buy a tracker from somebody else.
- trallnag 3y ago
  This so much. Confronting thieves is always a bad idea. I prefer to view it in a positive light. The thief probably needed the stolen item more than I did. The thief is happy, I am happy for the thief. The overall happiness in the world has increased!
  - meindnoch 3y ago
    Imagine being this cucked.
mft_ 3y ago
Not sure what I'm missing here, as Airtags have long worked like this - that as long as you had an iPhone or an Android phone with the anti-tracking app installed, you'd be notified of being stalked. So if your bike thief had an iPhone, they'd be able to find the tag anyway? AFAIK the only major difference is that it's now being baked into the Android OS so people don't need to actively download the app.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
There is a big liability issue for these companies if they say its for tracking stolen items. Anecdotally according to reddit threads, police don't care if you have the tracker showing its at the thiefs house, thats not enough evidence to do anything and its not an active crime with people in danger worth being prompt about. law enforcement also don't want you to confront the thief due to the risk of that situation escalating. If these companies start advertising for stolen items they are effectively encouraging vigilanteism and you can imagine how much of a legal headache that will be as soon as the first airtag user is shot dead.
- dhosek 3y ago
  It’s not the police can’t do it, it’s that they don‘t want to do it.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Airtag pinging a location that may not even be accurate is not a reasonable cause for search nor even enough information to know where to search in some cases. Imagine the airtag says it is in an apartment complex. Which of the hundreds of units in that building do you decide to barge through and search? All you have is a 2d map and 35ft resolution on a good day.
    - caf 3y ago
      It's not enough for a search but it's enough to knock on the door and ask.
      - kjkjadksj 3y ago
        How do you expect this to work out? "Hey did you steal my phone?" Again if its a multistory building you aren't finding the correct door.
    - dhosek 3y ago
      Yes, but it should be enough if the victim of the theft was able to walk into the store and see his bike there. If you ever have something stolen, ask the cops how much time and effort they’ll dedicate to finding the stolen goods. They do not care.
vundercind 3y ago
I believe you’ll find that tracking your stolen items is just a recipe for frustration when you tell the police where your shit is and they act like you’re the asshole when you expect them to do anything about it. (And no, this isn’t connected to current politics—I’ve not known cops to care about tracking down stolen good no matter how much evidence you can hand them, since at least the 90s)
phatskat 3y ago
> inconveniencing those losers outweighs abetting thieves This feels incredibly minimizing for people who have been stalked. Or people fleeing domestic abuse, human trafficking, or other forms of abuse where controlling a person’s movement is a large part of the harm being inflicted. Stalking covers a wide range of activity that impacts people who are usually in a vulnerable or dangerous situation. The people who would use tags to track people aren’t just “losers”, they’re pimps, rapists, murderers, abusive spouses, and so many other awful things. Inconveniencing them far outweighs someone stealing your luggage.

smeej 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  I think we can agree that victims of domestic abuse and stalking have a risk of physical harm and that physical harm trumps property rights / being peeved right? This is a 0-sum choice & erring on the side of not letting this product be used for stalking seems like a sane choice. There are stalking products you can go buy that are more expensive that can give you the theft protection you want. Apple's and Google's monitoring network is unfathomably large and can passively monitor any device anywhere in the world. The threat vectors they have to balance against abuse is completely different.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    You say that right after I give an example of where property crimes can seriously mess up someone’s life. Yes, 1 person’s personal safety is more important than 1 person losing a convenience item. If it were a choice between 1 person’s safety and 1,000,000 persons’ transportation, I’d pick the latter every time. The choice Apple faced clearly isn’t 1 stalking victim against 1,000,000 people unable to get to work. I use that example to show that it’s not as simple as “safety vs annoyance”. Apple and Google ran the numbers and erred on the side of safety. That doesn’t make it an automatic or simple choice.
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      Think about it this way - without AirTags and with AirTags + anti-stalking, your bike theft scenario is unchanged. Without airtags and with AirTags without anti-stalking, your personal safety scenario is worse. Those are the discussions I remember when I worked on CoreLocation at Apple. It had nothing to do with running the numbers, at least pre-development. I would be slightly surprised if someone tried to put numbers to that - Apple is pretty values-based when it comes to those kinds of decisions. The stalking issues go well beyond personal safety. Police officers, judges, politicians and cops who now have to worry about someone chucking a $25 airtag in their car which is much easier to do innocuously and those people have power to craft regulations and laws. Abortion rights are even more contentious now & stalking comes up there. There just isn't a scenario where opting in the entire world-wide smartphone community into enabling mass stalking at a never before price point is a net positive - there just aren't enough poor people with stolen bikes to shift that equation. There's a reason AirTags destroyed Tile - Tile's network is laughably small & would always be that way compared with the reach you get at the OS level. That drastically shifts the threat model.

pompino 3y ago

Yes, I think the PR backlash for such features is too great that it spoils them for the rest of us. When people "misuse" any technology, it seems the consensus nowadays is that the responsibility is shared between the technology creator/owner and law enforcement. Personally, I'm not fully sold as this is mainly a sociopolitical question.

skybrian 3y ago
Thinking system-wide changes through is what public policy is all about, and the same should probably be true of shipping devices in the tens of millions. (That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Doing pilot studies is a good idea.)
kstrauser 3y ago
I think you're right. I get the push toward that consensus. There are plenty of makers (cough cough Purdue Pharmaceuticals) who make awful, abusable things and then say, hey, it's not our fault people are misusing them! It still sucks getting caught in the middle.
vlovich123 3y ago
It would 100% be used for stalking & be directly contributing to easier violence against victims. Not sure I buy the argument it's purely because of image PR reasons vs there being a genuine well-founded harm-minimization strategy for why it's designed this way.
- pompino 3y ago
  You can call anything you do as a "genuine well-founded harm-minimization strategy", but nobody is out there banning knives and gardening shears and shovels and baseball bats and other tools that can contribute towards "easier violence" because of the cost to society. You either have an absolutist/ideological view on this, or you're willing to compromise. Ultimately its a matter of perception, and then too, some people are easier to convince than others.
  - 3y ago

bloppe 3y ago

It's a fundamental tradeoff. And who's affected in each case? The anti-stalking bias degrades the product for people who've bought an AirTag and become victims of theft. It's a limited population. People are unaffected by default. The anti-theft bias means everybody is a potential victim of stalking. If I have no interest in AirTags, anybody else can still tape one to the bottom of my car and track me wherever I go. Everybody is potentially affected. Even if theft is far more common than stalking, an anti-theft bias would be a tough position for Apple to defend if it means they're potentially facilitating stalking for the entire population. It may not be ideal, but I can understand it.

IncreasePosts 3y ago
You also have the situation where if air tags did not have the anti-stalking features, there would be far more stalkers in the world. I'm sure there's many people who would not buy a GPS logger and connected to someone's car, but they might "forget" an airtag in someone's car, were it not for the anti-stalking alerts. I suspect if Apple went the Anti-Theft route, thieves would not stop thieving, they would just start searching large stolen items for air tags before bringing it to wherever they may.

criddell 3y ago

Apple doesn't want stalkers and they definitely don't want any part of leading people into confrontations with thieves. AirTag isn't the right product for you. Buy a tracker from somebody else.

trallnag 3y ago
This so much. Confronting thieves is always a bad idea. I prefer to view it in a positive light. The thief probably needed the stolen item more than I did. The thief is happy, I am happy for the thief. The overall happiness in the world has increased!
- meindnoch 3y ago
  Imagine being this cucked.

mft_ 3y ago

Not sure what I'm missing here, as Airtags have long worked like this - that as long as you had an iPhone or an Android phone with the anti-tracking app installed, you'd be notified of being stalked. So if your bike thief had an iPhone, they'd be able to find the tag anyway? AFAIK the only major difference is that it's now being baked into the Android OS so people don't need to actively download the app.

kjkjadksj 3y ago

There is a big liability issue for these companies if they say its for tracking stolen items. Anecdotally according to reddit threads, police don't care if you have the tracker showing its at the thiefs house, thats not enough evidence to do anything and its not an active crime with people in danger worth being prompt about. law enforcement also don't want you to confront the thief due to the risk of that situation escalating. If these companies start advertising for stolen items they are effectively encouraging vigilanteism and you can imagine how much of a legal headache that will be as soon as the first airtag user is shot dead.

dhosek 3y ago
It’s not the police can’t do it, it’s that they don‘t want to do it.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Airtag pinging a location that may not even be accurate is not a reasonable cause for search nor even enough information to know where to search in some cases. Imagine the airtag says it is in an apartment complex. Which of the hundreds of units in that building do you decide to barge through and search? All you have is a 2d map and 35ft resolution on a good day.
  - caf 3y ago
    It's not enough for a search but it's enough to knock on the door and ask.
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      How do you expect this to work out? "Hey did you steal my phone?" Again if its a multistory building you aren't finding the correct door.
  - dhosek 3y ago
    Yes, but it should be enough if the victim of the theft was able to walk into the store and see his bike there. If you ever have something stolen, ask the cops how much time and effort they’ll dedicate to finding the stolen goods. They do not care.

vundercind 3y ago

I believe you’ll find that tracking your stolen items is just a recipe for frustration when you tell the police where your shit is and they act like you’re the asshole when you expect them to do anything about it. (And no, this isn’t connected to current politics—I’ve not known cops to care about tracking down stolen good no matter how much evidence you can hand them, since at least the 90s)

phatskat 3y ago

> inconveniencing those losers outweighs abetting thieves This feels incredibly minimizing for people who have been stalked. Or people fleeing domestic abuse, human trafficking, or other forms of abuse where controlling a person’s movement is a large part of the harm being inflicted. Stalking covers a wide range of activity that impacts people who are usually in a vulnerable or dangerous situation. The people who would use tags to track people aren’t just “losers”, they’re pimps, rapists, murderers, abusive spouses, and so many other awful things. Inconveniencing them far outweighs someone stealing your luggage.