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Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

That's cool and all, but how do they handle a trainload of people all going the same direction sitting near each other? I mean public transportation is still a thing.

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They mentioned this exact scenario on their website[1]

> Of course, if you happen to be with a friend who has an AirTag, or on a train with a whole bunch of people with AirTag, don’t worry. These alerts are triggered only when an AirTag is separated from its owner.

1. https://www.apple.com/airtag/

So if my family has a single car and we share keys it's going to annoy each of us that isn't the owner of the tag.

If they are part of your "family" in the apple ecosystem maybe it figures it out?

Dunno.

Thats good, stops parents tracking their kids without notifying them

Parents just equip them with an iPhone or Apple Watch instead.

You still can tell if someone is tracking you. I'm not aware that Apple allows in any way for an apple watch or iphone to monitor the location without making the holder aware.

I don’t disagree, but this is not any comfort to the children of tech savvy parents. They’ll be tracked and they’ll know they’re being tracked and they won’t have recourse. AirTags are kind of irrelevant here.

And the problem is? At what point did it become wrong for parents to know where their children are? It's called responsible parenting.

I haven’t stated anything to be a problem; only given the lay of the land.

I guess I misread your intent. Apologies.

I plan on giving my child something they know is a tracker and something else that they don't.

... in both of those cases you can easily turn off tracking at any time.

You can lock the settings.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252651769

Did you register your marriage with Apple? :) Is this the future?

People other than the owner can stop alerts from any specific AirTag. This works well for the shared car keys scenario.

I assume “over time” means for a long enough period to eliminate the possibility that you’re on a train with other people.

Some train rides are quite long

I don't know what Apple is doing behind the scenes here, but if I were Apple, I would generate much more "signal" from "this AirTag is traveling with this one person that is not its owner" than from "this AirTag is traveling with forty people that are not its owner".

And maybe this tag is generating a stronger signal than any other and is registered to me. Apple is all about the user experience so I assume they have a solution, just curious what it is.

It has to be away from the owner to trigger the warning.

So after the owner accidentally leaves it on the train, someone will be notified to look for whatever item was so important that it needed to be tracked.

Indeed I much rather get an alert on my watch that I’m about to leave the train on the way home with my phone still on my seat.

The evolution will be smarter and stickier the more you invest in the ecosystem

When you get off the train, pick the one that sticks with you.

It only triggers if it’s not with the owner but is with someone else. I wonder what happens if you put your luggage on a train and sit down elsewhere on the train. Would it recognize that it is still, generally speaking, with the owner?

Airplane transport crews may come to hate Airtags. I can imagine a lot of beeping luggage.

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