this is hardly a new attack when GPS trackers existed before
Now, there may be other solutions with some or all of those qualities to varying degrees, but the simple fact that the impression is popular necessarily means that it will see usage in cases where the perpetrator would otherwise not have committed the act.
In other words, "this isn't new technology" is a true but not terribly relevant sentiment.
Custom or semi-custom battery powered LoRa trackers have lesser batteryluve, are bulkier and much harder to get and deploy.
Basic triangulation is easy-ish, but requires multiple sites or a moving site to work toany degree. And those sites need to hear the tracking beacon.
Some countries might have some sort of construction where you need to provide some form of identification but that only applies to the most obvious avenues to buy a SIM-card for the public. It's not like the shady MFA-farms with the 100-modem appliances are fed by a person actually buying 100 SIM-cards without getting caught or something like that... (and then there is false identification which often is a crime by itself but misbehaving persons might not really care about that)
AirTags in this case are just blamed because they are actually detectable by normal users, and that makes it an 'impression' problem, not a new problem.
However, it's possible to damage the speaker, so it becomes silent, without damaging the AirTag itself.
I don’t deny that this behavior is bad, but the anti-Apple sentiment here is a bit strange given they provide mitigations unlike traditional gps tracking companies
It won't warn you of an AirTag someone attached to your car, unless you make it a habit to constantly press "scan" all day.
AirGuard (https://github.com/seemoo-lab/AirGuard) can do this for you, at the cost of battery life for having something scan for Bluetooth signals in the background all day. It's silly and honestly kind of sad that Apple's app doesn't provide this functionality.
Perhaps Google should add this functionality to Play Services. They already have an API capable of running Bluetooth background scans constantly in the form of the COVID contact tracing API, so the technology is nearly there already.
Wouldn't you only need to scan whenever you return to your car?
If you start scanning then and find that there are no tags, you only need to keep scanning if there are people around who might be able to sneak a tag on while you are there without you noticing.
Once you get in and start driving you can stop scanning unless your threat model includes people tagging your car in the middle of your trip.
Depends on where you live. I live in a fairly affluent area, and everyone has iPhones.