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Comment by educaysean | Hacker News Reader

Your argument isn't very convincing. AirTags are one of the few location tracker that the public can recognize by sight and identify its use. This makes AirTags much less effective for use by malicious actors than other generic black-plastic case electronics.

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My friend just had someone jack up his car and hack off a catalytic converter with a hacksaw in broad daylight, to steal it. How long does it take to place an airtag, 3 seconds? I think the chances of you being caught placing an airtag are slim to none.

A bit of an off-tangent: does your friend live in Seattle? Because catalytic converter and bike theft in broad daylight have become a staple here, but it is definitely not the norm in other cities.

So I wouldn't judge how easy it is to do something like that in general, based on a city where the prosecution is notorious for letting all kinds of criminals get released the morning after, which leads to the police not bothering with "minor" crimes like this (i.e., what's the point, if they will just get released the morning after and you waste both your time and the department time).

nah, it's a town in UK

I can't make sense of what's going on with prosecutions there, sometimes I hear about people getting away with major crimes, other times some poor sod gets charged for possessing 'material useful to terrorists', The Anarchist Cookbook, which you can buy on Amazon.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-5892603...

Catalytic converter theft is big everywhere, unfortunately. It's most common in larger cities, but it's worth the effort for thieves to travel out of town as well.

[catalytic converter theft map] is a productive search with some graphics, some dating back years: https://www.google.com/search?q=catalytic+converter+theft+ma...

Not intending any greater point about AirTags.

Cat theft, and petty property crime in general, is way worse in the cities that decline to prosecute which basically boils down to "the west coast and a few pinpoints on the east coast."

Citation?

I hear this opinion (or something like it, basically that property crime is only an issue in the west because city governments are not harsh/violent/punitive enough) repeated often.

My anecdata: I live in a city where cops can and do whatever they want to people without serious oversight. Petty theft is met with both maximum violence and prosecution. it does not seem to have much effect on crime rates.

cat theft?!

I would assume dogs have higher resale value on Craigslist

Washington, DC, does not decline to prosecute, but there was a rash of catalytic converter thefts in my neighborhood not that long ago. I'd have guessed that these thefts are tied to the popularity of hybrid vehicles, in particular Priuses.

It's only less effective if it's somewhere that can be seen. I think most people don't check the insides of their wheel wells more than, well, at all. In which case the device could be neon green and it wouldn't matter for the purposes of visual detection.

You clearly have near 0 relationship with the public. The public can't identify an AirTag; most have hardly heard of the thing. And even if they did, someone's story of dropping a thing would convince 99% of people who want to be doing anything else than running BS detection on some weird person they've happened upon.

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