Sigh. I get it there's been a few abuses of the technology... but it was literally already ripe for abuse anyway. Whether Apple intended this or not: The real

Sigh. I get it there's been a few abuses of the technology... but it was literally already ripe for abuse anyway. Whether Apple intended this or not: The real world primary use case for AirTags is still tracking stolen crap. I would to _not_ want to alert thieves to the presence of an attached tracker in that case. I guess tracking your lost luggage is likely a #2, but if you were to survey what people were actually using them for, I'm betting it'd be #1 above. The only way I can think of solving this is allowing a silent mode on the tracker that requires both a private key from the user (to avoid getting NSL'd) and a private key from law enforcement (Apple / Google already have law enforcement portals) and finally one-way hashing the keys and publishing the results to a public irrevocable block ledger. One could see if your key was on the list to see if you Airtag was silenced, but you couldn't pick out specific tags that were silenced. The law enforcement agency's keys would also be hashed and published, allowing us some transparency on who is requesting the most tag silences, so we could monitor the monitors. If this were bundled up in a blockchain, and the tags were programmed only to act on a blockchain, we could avoid abuse and gain a useful feature.