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Comment by fjni | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a great question. And I don't have an answer for it. I do think it's much less clear though:

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.

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The difference is that a tag mailed to someone didn't follow them and their iPhone, it just shows up one day. In that case the person sending the tag obviously already knows where you live anyway. In your example, attaching it to someone's car (presumably while at work, shopping, etc) it will follow them home and their iPhone would see that tag the entire trip until they get home at which point it would notify the tracked person.

So I am an evil stalker, and I want to find out where my target lives. I know the Target has a Spouse. I stalk both, and spot that Target uses an iPhone, but Spouse uses an Android phone. I attach the AirTag to Spouse's bag/jacket, in hopes they'll bring it home. With luck, from the POV of Target's phone, the tag will look like it just "showed up one day", at least for a while. End of story.

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.

The AirTag will start making a sound after a while, and yes they have plans for working for law enforcement: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212227#sound

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.

The speaker is trivially disabled, and the AirTag continues to function.

> 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!

There are gps trackers for dogs (I mention these because they are extremely available) that use cellular data. They track much better, faster, more accurate.

If I wanted to track someone to the point that I’d disable an AirTag speaker, I’d not bother with an AirTag.

Another scenario is putting an AirTag on the bottom of someone's car, waiting for them to go home, going to their home, and taking the AirTag off. There's more risk here, but it's impossible to do.

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.

You could just hide an old iPhone with Find My enabled in the car. Or a $20 GPS tracker from Aliexpress.

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. =)

You've gained very little in that scenario over simply following their car home.

In your hypothetical scenario what have you (the stalker) saved other than the trouble of following one of the targets home once? Or placing any number of existing tracking devices (like a cheap smartphone) in one of their bags? Or, you know, looking them up in the phone book?

you know people don't only go home. they have affairs, they may be undercover agents, or they may be doing something they're not proud of (legal or not).

All those things are possible with tons of device on the market, and has been possible for years. I don't really know what your point is. Yes, this can be used in a bad way. Just like the car you purchase can be used in a bad way, to kill pedestrians. But what is the point of those what-if scenarios?

You can justify anything with that logic: Guns are just an improvement on skull bashing, and there's rocks readily available everywhere!

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.

Got it! The distinction being that the location changed while in the vicinity of one iphone. Thanks for clarifying!

> In your example, attaching it to someone's car (presumably while at work, shopping, etc) it will follow them home and their iPhone would see that tag the entire trip until they get home at which point it would notify the tracked person.

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.

I was only clarifying the difference between mailing someone a tag versus attaching a tag to someone or something they own.

Sure if you already know the person's car then just follow them.

If the airtag is away from its owner for 3 days it will play an audible sound when moved, so in your use cases the airtag would reveal itself to the user after 3 days. That still does not seem ideal though, 3 days is a long time. Also, in the article I'm guessing it didn't chime because it was never moved, which also seems like something they didn't think about.

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/21/airtags-play-sound-afte...

You can very easily open the tag up and disconnect the wires that connect to the speaker coil so it makes no noise.

No, in the case of attaching it to the car it is moving with you (and would thus trigger the alert). Your point still stands though that it can be used like that to find out where someone lives.

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