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Comment by laurowyn | Hacker News Reader

Good job nobody has posted a teardown of the device, with detailed notes on how to open it without damage and where the speaker is mounted. Otherwise anybody could prevent their airtags from beeping and alerting their stalking targets that they're being tracked.

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If you're going to go to that much trouble, at that point it would be easier to use one of the countless pre-existing GPS trackers on the market[1] (which don't have such privacy-aware features) to stalk a victim.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/GPS-Trackers/b?node=617650011

I took the speaker out of the one I keep in my street parked motorcycle. I don't need to speaker functionality for that. It's only for theft.

Took all of 3 minutes. Super convenient.

Unlike Airtags these don't participate in Apple's global location tracking network.

I think it's also important to consider that Apple getting into this market does a lot to normalize use of trackers and also make them commercially ubiquitous.

Yes, they participate in the even broader global location tracking network, called "GPS".

Which is much less accurate.

Those cost more and have a short battery life. For a government agency this might not be an issue (hook it up to the car battery).

But for a casual malicious user, airtags open up whole new worlds of abuse.

I do wonder if Apple will add monitoring of the speaker output to ensure it's still working. You could actually just do this with just the accelerometer: they might even be able to add it with a firmware update.

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