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Comment by djrogers | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of comments here about how useless these protections are, because A or B already exist, or C works better for stalking.

I think most of those comments are missing the real point here. If an Apple product were ever used to stalk - or God forbid, harm - an individual, it would be a big national story. If a Tile or a Samsung tag (or an amazon gps tracker made for stalking) were used in the same way, it would likely only be mentioned in passing if the story were reported at all.

That's why it's so important for Apple to do this. Additional benefit - this may push other vendors to do similar things, pushing stalkers back to more tailored devices. That's still helpful, as it's a lot easier to show intent if someone uses a device like that (as opposed to 'whoops, I lost my airtag).

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Well, if it ridiculously easy to work around, they will probably get flak even earlier, harder, and be legislated to the ground more certainly than otherwise.

I spoke with Frank Wang on a few meetups in Shenzhen many years ago, back when DJI was still kind of a garage company.

Frank had big, nebulous ideas how he will be "engaging the civil society," "stakeholder negotiations," "industry wide self-governance body" blah blah blah to safeguard DJI from troubles.

I told him hiring lobbyists, and talking to officials, or even just making buzz about potential problems is a bad, bad idea.

Lawmakers can't ban things they don't know they can ban... unless you give them an idea.

Same thing with public reaction. People don't get outraged if they don't know why they should be.

In the end it came to that exact outcome, and drones are now in the process of being legislated to the ground, and effectively becoming unflyable by regular people without few kilograms of permits, and licenses.

He wanted to pride DJI on how government compliant, and safe his drones are, but instead just got them banned around every major city.

His customers got them banned by doing reckless things.

Really not.

Prior to the big buzz about drones, and DJI buying full page ads describing how their software can load no fly zones, avoid nuclear power stations, prisons, flight into people etc, nobody was ever concerned with some random Chinese gizmo.

And then he made people in places of power to read all kinds of scary things, to which they reacted in the most usual to them manner.

As a counter point, my flight was unable to land some years ago because some moron was flying his drone in the airport airspace.

Was it DJI drone?

Any examples?

https://dronedj.com/2019/11/24/drone-pilot-fined-20000-mccar...

I think in this case it's likely that Apple is drawing attention to the stalking concerns on purpose. Bring on the regulation and the public outrage! Just let it be directed at Tile for not doing this sooner.

> Bring on the regulation and the public outrage! Just let it be directed at Tile for not doing this sooner.

Public outrage seems to be based on a very low-res view of reality drawn from viral sound-bites, so I doubt that's how any public outrage would work.

Yeah, god forbids that a company may actually want to genuinely address an ethical problem, amirirte?

Especially because apple has a lot riding on their use of crowdsourcing even though they have a privacy stance.

Personally I think privacy and crowdsourcing cannot go together, no matter how much algebra and privacy boilerplate is thrown in.

Note that Tile already does this mesh network of crowdsourcing. The issue is that Apple pushes privacy so much that it's bound to be a bigger story when they mess up compared to others, as stated in the OP.

If someone slips an AirTag in your car to stalk you, your own phone would enable your stalker because by default it would automatically update the location of the AirTag, even if you are not an AirTag user.

It is a bit different if your stalker used Tile to track you. You'd have to download that app and opt in.

No, you wouldn’t. It would only be necessary for the stalker to do it and then slip the Tile in with your belongings.

Tiles can be marked lost until found by other users with the Tile app.

The main difference is Apple made it work way better and more accessible. Tile users are pretty rare in the wild.

Apple mostly got there because they already had so many phones. As Jobs would've said, Tile is a feature, not a product.

Unfortunately things start getting weird/potentially negative at scale, but at least Apple is trying to get ahead of the problem.

The problem is that there is some benefit in integrating almost any service into the growing Apple ecosystem and almost any product could conceiveably benefit from become an Apple feature. I think regulators need to draw the line somewhere to protect competition.

> your own phone would enable your stalker

No it wouldn't. If your phone can track an AirTag being used to stalk you, it can also alert you to this stalking.

> privacy and crowdsourcing cannot go together

Not to downplay the difficulty of these things, but cryptography literally enables things that seem impossible, so I wouldn't write it off that easily

Would it really help, though?

A stalker, not stupid and well-aware about the protection, visits iFixit for a picture of internals, takes a drill, and physically obliterates the buzzer, right through the case. Epoxy or superglue for protection from the elements.

So they plant an Airtag, it gets found by accident, shit hits the fan, Apple's name goes in the news, journalists start journalist things, people don't are outraged and demand Apple's repentance, AirTags made of diamond-covered vibranium, including a microphone to control the buzzing and stopping working if buzzer is broken. PR problem not solved, and the core problem of humans not understanding technology is not solved.

The assumption that all stalkers are smart and informed and skilled is not accurate.

Plenty of them are in fact stupid, followed some advice from discussion forum without really understanding what they are doing and that is that.

A less scrupulous competitor might even create a bunch of these and just plant them on random people. Instant scandal.

If you ask me, I'd say the odds that Apple makes a second revision of the AirTag within 4-6 years are pretty high. And that they end up deprecating/limiting the resolution of looking up the location of the first-gen devices.

That said, there is a foolproof way of preventing trackers from tracking you: like how the iPhone can warn you when a tracker than isn't yours is present (that's how the tracker works, after all!) then just make that feature open source and broadly available within Android. Poof, instantly you've reduced the need to worry about trackers to nil as both iOS and Android phones can thus warn users when trackers are following them and don't belong to them.

Because trackers must be registered, they actually become proof of stalking as much as they can harm individuals, if they can be caught in time of course.

> A stalker, not stupid and well-aware about the protection, visits iFixit for a picture of internals, takes a drill, and physically obliterates the buzzer, right through the case. Epoxy or superglue for protection from the elements.

You eliminate 95% of the potential stalkers. It is hard to remember that for most consumers the idea of drilling into a thing made of Apple black magic is a foreign idea.

On the other hand, I can virtually guarantee that even if a Tile or Samsung tag is used that way, occasionally the headlines will mention Apple in a negative light anyway.

It just comes with the mindshare, I guess.

Occasionally? More like unfailingly. I wonder if any journalist has ever written a story about worker condition in Foxconn factories without also mentioning Apple. It's like nobody in media cares about Chinese workers unless they're making Apple products. I suppose Foxconn workers who assemble Xboxes and PlayStations don't matter as much.

>If an Apple product were ever used to stalk - or God forbid, harm - an individual, it would be a big national story. If a Tile or a Samsung tag (or an amazon gps tracker made for stalking) were used in the same way, it would likely only be mentioned in passing if the story were reported at all.

it's weird to ascribe some kind of martyr-complex to how Apple is treated.

They're treated that way because they are by far the largest single corporation in the mobile game, not because the media has some sort of anti-apple fetish.

"..., it would be a big national story."

Lawsuit would follow.

Does any company have deeper pockets than Apple.

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