7 ms·

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

by 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.
- vlovich123 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
      - kstrauser 2y ago
        We'll never know. The personal safety issues are important and I'd never argue otherwise. Having cheap, effective crime deterrence seems like it could be a nice thing if you could wave a magic wand and remove the stalking angle. Apple keeps adding features to those ends, like the new Stolen Device Protection updates, that shift the risk-reward math for device thieves. I could still buy a cheap used phone and stick a SIM in it, hide it in a victim's car, and use that to track them without alerting them to it. And still, we get nice tools like Find My because more people are likely to lose their phone or have it stolen than to stalk their exes with it. I understand the personal safety issues. They're important. I get it. That doesn't stop part of me from wishing I could use these cheap, convenient lost item devices to help me track down stuff that wasn't exactly accidentally lost.
- zeroimpl 2y ago
  Even if the tracker didn’t alert the thief, how hard is it for a thief to find a tracker on the bike on their own? I don’t think an AirTag is going to save too many bicycles. Seems like the calculus would only make sense when you are talking about big expensive items - cars, boats, RVs. But for those you probably want a non-bluetooth solution.
  - matsemann 2y ago
    The bikes getting stolen here are people's "cars". Electric cargo bikes with room for two children is what people use to get around. Getting that stolen ruins daily logistics for people. They cost up to $10k, which is a significant amount of money. People should really rethink the societal cost of bike thieving, they are both more expensive and more integral in how people move around. Not just children's toys. I only want AirTags or similar to guard against thieves. So if that is not going to work it's quite useless for me. Luckily for bikes, there is https://bikefinder.com/ https://bikefinder.com/
    - vel0city 2y ago
      So I've got the tools to cut that thick bike chain but I somehow can't pull device inside the handlebars out or destroy it? It looks like their special tool is just a star security bit. And also, would it really hold up to just being cut with whatever tools the thief used to cut your bike chain?

by smeej 2y ago

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.
vlovich123 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      We'll never know. The personal safety issues are important and I'd never argue otherwise. Having cheap, effective crime deterrence seems like it could be a nice thing if you could wave a magic wand and remove the stalking angle. Apple keeps adding features to those ends, like the new Stolen Device Protection updates, that shift the risk-reward math for device thieves. I could still buy a cheap used phone and stick a SIM in it, hide it in a victim's car, and use that to track them without alerting them to it. And still, we get nice tools like Find My because more people are likely to lose their phone or have it stolen than to stalk their exes with it. I understand the personal safety issues. They're important. I get it. That doesn't stop part of me from wishing I could use these cheap, convenient lost item devices to help me track down stuff that wasn't exactly accidentally lost.
zeroimpl 2y ago
Even if the tracker didn’t alert the thief, how hard is it for a thief to find a tracker on the bike on their own? I don’t think an AirTag is going to save too many bicycles. Seems like the calculus would only make sense when you are talking about big expensive items - cars, boats, RVs. But for those you probably want a non-bluetooth solution.
- matsemann 2y ago
  The bikes getting stolen here are people's "cars". Electric cargo bikes with room for two children is what people use to get around. Getting that stolen ruins daily logistics for people. They cost up to $10k, which is a significant amount of money. People should really rethink the societal cost of bike thieving, they are both more expensive and more integral in how people move around. Not just children's toys. I only want AirTags or similar to guard against thieves. So if that is not going to work it's quite useless for me. Luckily for bikes, there is https://bikefinder.com/ https://bikefinder.com/
  - vel0city 2y ago
    So I've got the tools to cut that thick bike chain but I somehow can't pull device inside the handlebars out or destroy it? It looks like their special tool is just a star security bit. And also, would it really hold up to just being cut with whatever tools the thief used to cut your bike chain?