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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>this is obviously by design. You get the alert if the tag is planted on your person/vehicle and following you around, not if it happens to be sitting still in a location that you frequent.

So, if some guy hides it in your bag at the airport, with the intention of finding where you live, and you get to your home within the same day, you wont be notified about it for many days, or possibly months, if you leave your bag stationary at home.

Doesn't sound like a very good design.

>because other residents of an apartment building also own AirTags

How about just showing you a single alert (or stationary info page you could check optionally) "Airtag that's not yours travels with you, still here"?

You could then ignore it at public transport (where you expect others with airtags to be travelling along), but you could start getting suspicious if you still get that a "foreign airtag that travelled with you is still nearby" when you're at your home.

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> So, if some guy hides it in your bag at the airport, with the intention of finding where you live, and you get to your home within the same day, you wont be notified about it for many days, or possibly months, if you leave your bag stationary at home.

Isn't this iPhone only, too? So if you have an Android phone and live near people with iPhones, your location would be identified but you would never be notified.

>Doesn't sound like a very good design.

because there has to be a trade-off between usability and privacy. Something following you for a few hours (max trip for airport to home) could be a stalker, or could just be an airtag on your uber driver. Excessive alerts is counterproductive because people eventually tune them out, which makes them useless.

>How about just showing you a single alert (or stationary info page you could check optionally) "Airtag that's not yours travels with you, still here"?

You'll get that every time you're on a subway/bus.

>Excessive alerts is counterproductive because people eventually tune them out, which makes them useless.

You don't need excessive alerts, you just a place in the UI that the user can check and see if there's an alert or not. To make it even fancier, add a red dot to the "Find My" icon.

I don't understand why "excessive alerts" and the image of a constantly ringing iPhone is presented as the only possible way to notify the user...

>You'll get that every time you're on a subway/bus.

Yeah, so? As stated above, it could just be an entry "foreign airtag travelling with you" in some UI screen that you open and broswe -- tagged with the date and duration it happened. You can then blisfully ignore it (especially since it can also show "it's not here with you anymore" when you go to your destination).

>You don't need excessive alerts, you just a place in the UI that the user can check and see if there's an alert or not. To make it even fancier, add a red dot to the "Find My" icon.

Isn't this just spamming but slightly more discreet? If there's a red dot next to the "find my" icon every day you go home you're going to tune that out as well.

>Isn't this just spamming but slightly more discreet?

The original concern was about "excessive alerts" annoying the user with new popups/sound etc. This is unobtrussive.

It's potentially useful information, that can just show the last 2-3 entries, and consumed at will. So not really like spam.

>If there's a red dot next to the "find my" icon every day you go home you're going to tune that out as well.

Most of the time, and it can auto-tone itself down, so it's only shown when you should actually pay attention.

I gave the example of when you're back home, and the same airtags that were potentially "following" you on the subway (e.g. some strangers' airtag) - no longer follow you, so it's ok for the red dot to go back to green.

But if a foreign airtag is close consistently (the same foreign one), it could show the red dot.

>The original concern was about "excessive alerts" annoying the user with new popups/sound etc. This is unobtrussive.

And in the next sentence I said the problem is that users eventually ignore them, not that they're annoyed by them (although annoyingness is also a problem).

>It's potentially useful information, that can just show the last 2-3 entries, and consumed at will. So not really like spam.

A red dot is distracting in and of itself. I myself went out of my way to hide app store notifications entirely because it had no way to hide update notifications.

>I gave the example of when you're back home, and the same airtags that were potentially "following" you on the subway (e.g. some strangers' airtag) - no longer follow you, so it's ok for the red dot to go back to green.

>But if a foreign airtag is close consistently (the same foreign one), it could show the red dot.

I feel like this is in the class of features that are theoretically useful, but nobody but the most paranoid actually use. You don't see google/android IMSI catcher or rogue hotspot detection for instance, even though it might theoretically be useful.

Then don't create Airtags? Has anyone seen Jurassic Park? You were so busy thinking how you could, you didn't stop to ask if you should.

IMO, this is just proof that the impossible is being asked of Apple here.

Totally legitimate use case: you put an AirTag in your bag while at the airport. The bag is stolen and you use the tag to track the bag to the thief's home. You're able to recover your bag.

Illegitimate use case: you put an AirTag in someone else's bag while at the airport. That person takes it home and you use the tag to find out where they live.

In the first case, any form of notification to the thief would be non-ideal and go against the point of having an AirTag (tracking missing / stolen objects). In the second case, nothing but immediate notification would be sufficient. So unless tracking products are not to exist at all, there will have to be uses of them that are illegal but not technologically preventable.

>So, if some guy hides it in your bag at the airport

Sounds like a lot of work. If I wanted to (which I don't!) probably easier to sneak a peek at the luggage tag. Which may be privacy shielded but probably not and would only take a few seconds in any case to lift a flap up.

I live inside a giant faraday cage, so no problem

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