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Comment by Schiendelman | Hacker News Reader

This is excellent news; Apple designed these to be difficult to use to stalk someone, and those features are working.

Hopefully this makes enough noise that Tile and GPS trackers are forced to implement similar features.

I don't think any of this is excellent news. I'm sure the beep can be easily dismantled, we've been through that with the required camera sound nonsense. And security/privacy conscious people keep Bluetooth and NFC off for security/privacy reasons.

There's articles all over the Internet on how to remove/disable the speaker on airtags. Doesn't look to hard to do either, no hardware sensing if this is the case so it just keeps on working.

> no hardware sensing if this is the case so it just keeps on working.

Even if there were, you could defeat it with just a resistor across the old speaker terminals.

How are airtags difficult to use to stalk someone with an android phone? Most don't know about it and don't install anything to prevent it.

Is the beeping not enough? I understand you don’t get a phone notification but it would be obvious as long as you’re near the tag.

I believe the assertion was that someone could disable the beeping.

However, I don't think a speaker is a requirement for Find My (I could be wrong). I don't think this has one: https://chipolo.net/en-us/products/chipolo-card-spot?cl=head...

One of the listed features is that it reaches 105 dB.

You are right. I searched for 'speaker', which didn't work :(

It shouldn’t be too difficult to remove the beeper from the device, or disable it somehow.

Once you figure out how to open the thing (there are videos of how to do this online, it's not that hard to do it destructively, and once you know where to pry, pretty easy to do it without breaking any of the plastic that holds it closed), you can remove the speaker without even needing to break anything, it's just held in place with glue.

Its not an ideal experience and I don't have the imagination to say what that is.

4 hours before notification if you have an iphone or the app on an android, which was lowered from the original plan

It merely announces stalking, rather than preventing it, yes?

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