The main complaint about it “tracking the friend” seems invalid. The tag isn’t “moving with him”, it’s sitting on a counter. That isn’t tracking, more accurately it’s basically a lost tag at that point.
If I attach it to your car to find out where you're parking your car, according to your logic it also presumably wouldn't trigger. But it's still a problematic and unintended use of the technology.
What if I merely want to find out where you live, not where you are at any point in time. This creates lots of problems for people at increased risk here that to me aren't answered sufficiently.
As a real me, I'd hope that one could bring the tag to the police, and law enforcement would be able to get the details on the person who owns it? Assuming the answer is "yes", this should deter most malicious use, as even with a burner iPhone/Apple account, the owner of that tracker would be exposing a big trail of their activities.
Or to remove the risk, you can drain the battery til it's got just enough to go a few more miles. Then, it'll keep pinging you the location and die when it gets to their house. With 3 days of leeway, you don't have to be too exact.
It's even easier if you know they aren't going to using their car at the destination. Like if they're going camping or something.
Much more reliable and accurate, zero chance to be found if you hide the device well.
People are inventing the weirdest scenarios to make AirTags be some kind of super stalking tool. =)
The low cost, simplicity, network ubiquity, and availability of these devices is different. Nobody what-if's cell phones (after all they can be used to coordinate terrible actions) because they provide a useful service to most people, as do cars (which require license and registration btw). Misuse is mostly obvious and punishable by law.
Employing a massive, worldwide, distributed network which can run trackers just for lost trinkets, with the nefarious uses so easily in reach (and defenses not available to anybody not on your fancy ecosystem) is a scary thing.
As for other products that exist, I have no defense except that their purchase is either obvious, their presence notable "oops, somebody dropoed an airtag here" (relatively innocuous) vs "oops, somebody dropped a gps tracker here".
I don't know how e.g: tile deals with this, but at the very least it doesn't get to piggy back on my resources by default to trace me home.
These kind of devices have been available for years, including from Samsung who has just as many phones out there as Apple. Of course as soon as Apple makes one – taking extreme pains to address privacy concerns – everyone pops up to armchair quarterback.
> These kind of devices have been available for years
Devices like Tile do not have access to a global network of iPhones. SmartTag only works with Samsung Galaxy devices, and we've yet to see if it works beyond the current model. Apple will make this work for everything. My old iPad from 2014 still receives software updates!
If I wanted to track someone to the point that I’d disable an AirTag speaker, I’d not bother with an AirTag.
Okay, but is that really different than driving down a random street, choosing a random house with a car in the driveway, and thus learning that that car parks at that address?
Knowing that the car you chose to put a tag on at the store later parked at a certain address is hardly that useful, isn't much easier than just following the car from the store one time, and presumably wouldn't upset most people because most people's security models don't rely on their home address being private and thus no one ever following their car home from the store.
Sure if you already know the person's car then just follow them.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/21/airtags-play-sound-afte...