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Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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

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