Silenced AirTags with disabled speakers are popping up for sale online
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
It's not like these devices have GPS installed, they're reliant on devices around them to do the reporting.
Putting something in someone's car once is a lot easier than putting something in someone's car and then recharging it once every couple of days.
Samsung Trackers might have even more devices than Apple does
Tile
Samsung Trackers work only with some of their phones - there is absolutely no chance in hell that Samsung sold more of those than Apple has sold iphones globally. I'll eat my own hat if they did.
Tile or samsung for example wouldn’t be as accurate
It was very much a choise made by Apple to build and release it. Technology is not neutral.
But hey if you want to spend 80$ for something that was already available 2 years ago for 40$ you go ahead.
And how do you come up with these random price estimates, AirTags are available for under 40 and not for 80 usd. My god you’re full of yourself.
> How is this a privacy/security nightmare, when you literally get
Did you even read the article?
I may be full of myself, but you seem to take personal offense over an apple product. That's basically shilling and frankly pathetic, unless you get paid for it.
No need to get all defensive for the poor airtag, just explain why you think I'm wrong. Like the fruit company needs your protection anyway.
Apple AirTags make it popular so now people will be more careful.
Despite the abuse I think the education on the technology is a net benefit.
Of course, now that they have their own trackers, all Apple users are not only automatically opted into the Airtag network, they also made it almost impossible to opt out!
Talk about double standards.
I do think AirTags should have a button like the Samsung ones, tho.
Well, Apple Airtags use the massive network of iPhones to report the location of nearby airtags to Apple.
For people at risk, it is meaningless. Your crazy stalker will just drive around locations and confirm where you are remotely.
The whole controversy is both real and bullshit. It is very trivial for people to get tracking devices for modest amounts of money in high threat scenarios.
I think the issue with AirTags is the less malevolent, but creepy scenarios. And to be honest, the issue has existed for years with “Find My Friends”, which I’m sure is widely abused by family members and others to follow people around.
If you’re using it to find stuff you want the largest possible network
Ex. Headlines often focus on Apple when revealing some of Foxconn's worst labor practices. But stories about Foxconn using child labor to build Alexa devices, and the person who blew the whistle on that being tortured and put in jail for revealing it, went fairly under the radar in comparison. It's definitely a good thin that unethical labor practices being used to build our stuff is discussed, just the headlines and initial focus might lead laymen to believe one American hardware company is causing this, rather than most.
Apple is going to always be under the magnifying glass because they are just so much "bigger".
https://www.wbrc.com/2021/11/18/woman-discovers-tracking-dev...
https://www.insideedition.com/atlanta-woman-cant-find-apple-...
Would you expect people to sometimes get away with committing a crime like stalking? Yes. Would you expect every single person who commits stalking in this way to always, without exception, get away with it? Of course not. The parsimonious explanation is that the vast majority of these stories are simple misunderstandings, like someone accidentally dropping one somewhere.
The uniquity of technology gives real stalkers this nice excuse. How convenient!
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/17272409/how-stay-safe-apple-a...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/20/apple-air...
How many stalking victims never found out they are tracked because they used Android phones? How many perpetrators just covertly removed the AirTag after the attack? This device allows very clandestine surveillance by anyone.
I'm willing to grant that the number of people caught would be lower than the number of people who were actually successful -- we don't catch every murderer, for example. But isn't there one, just one, example of someone actually showing up? Nobody ever gets caught? Like I said, this is classic urban legend material.
A 5-day battery life is useless for keeping track of your bicycle, but more than enough for a stalker to find someone's home.
Of course, they were much less widely reported on by the press - so perhaps less known by stalkers? And only available via ebay, not off-the-shelf in reputable retailers.
This specific instance might be true, I don't know. But it seems incorrect to base an argument off Apple getting less/more coverage than a company like Amazon.
It's going to be very hard to use Tile to stalk people.
B) I don't trust the longevity of infrastructure financed by a shitcoin
Not sure if you've seen but Apple opened the Find-My network to other vendors: https://www.apple.com/ee/newsroom/2021/04/apples-find-my-net...
Apple's marketing must train in the Matrix for how good they are at dodging bullets...
I'm able to see both sides. We all like free things, but free things cost some body some thing some where. If the vendor/maker of a thing needs to pay a license to make it look free to the consumer, that doesn't seem egregious to me. After all, they'll just roll that into the price of the product.
The entire thing works so well precisely because there are so many Apple devices in the wild, and Apple is looking to capitalize on that.
But think about it, how am I wrong? We set these companies up, by law, to put profit first, then hope they also do the right thing.
Those are misaligned incentives at the very least.
If they don't provide the network: what value do the tags, you bought with money, provide?
If you buy from 3rd party and 3rd party doesn’t pay Apple, why should Apple provide the network?
Are there third party tracking device manufacturers with free access to these systems?
Are you talking about stolen or bootleg goods?
The latter is a much more complicated topic, for sure.
What more information do you need?
My first response to the first version of that loaded question: "_I wasn't saying they should_..."
You respond with: "If Company A builds a product/service, why should Company B be expected to utilize Company A's work without compensation?"
Am I to believe you're being genuine here? Should I really repeat myself again, in text, to save you a scroll up?
I didn't say that. I never implied that. I stated the exact opposite.
Why are you asking me to rationalize and explain a stance I've never taken, and don't have?
Only charged money for big transfers and the high frequency traders.
Dunno why it stopped. Seemed sensible to reward hodlers and incentivize use for microtransactions. Ultimately, liquidity comes from being able to trade a big thing easily for lots of small things.
Miners used to include zero-fee transactions in blocks when there was space available. Nowadays, most blocks are full or nearly so, so miners have a financial interest in mining transactions with the highest fee-per-byte first and ignoring anything which has a low or zero fee attached.
There was never any special handling for "infrequent" transfers.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Miner_fees#Priority_transactions
Maybe I got it wrong: I thought it meant how long the coins have been sitting around, but maybe it means how long the transaction has been sitting unmined to make sure no transaction is left behind?
But it seems I'm on the right track, in that input_age was a measure of how many confirmations, which suggests it's about how long it's been since the last time they were moved:
note1 here: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/95407/what-were-...
Edit: spelling
Of course, regulation is a bad word for a good number of the electorate so this will never happen.
What are other examples where specific protocols (open or not) are mandated by regulation ?
The number of RFCs that are required for basic things like email, storage, security etc are essential standards primarily because USG required contractors and vendors to adhere to those standards.
An open protocol would mean trackers could be built right into things, like a keychain flashlight with a tracker.
You also wouldn't need a phone to pick them up, an ESP32 could handle the relaying to WiFi, so something like a school's lost and found could have a fixed base station for $5.
Even better, devices could relay microscopic amounts of data through nearby nodes. It would be like the Things Network, but at a quarter of the cost and with zero new hardware to get started.
no.
The problem with blockchain-based applications right now is that the blockchain is not scalable in its write-access, so the extent to which such applications can be updated is quite limited.
Apple's getting a lot of flack because they're enormous, consumers are more aware, and they have a better network... but the fact that they did any stalker alerting is beyond anything the existing products in the market have done. I'd guess the product designers at Apple are probably constantly frustrated with this reality.
Apple coopted every single phone into a tracker essentially creating a biggest people following and tracking network in the world - plus they use UWB which massively more accurate than what Tile uses.
What Apple created would be Facebooks, NSAs and pretty much every spying entities wet dream to get fingers on.
>What Apple created would be Facebooks, NSAs and pretty much every spying entities wet dream to get fingers on.
The government already has this with cell phones, no?
No, Apple made it available to you. Police and intelligence agencies can buy this data from various entities or subpoena it.
Yeah it's a v1.0, but even so when Apple already has all this infrastructure up strikes me as an odd omission that significantly detracts from the utility for no good end. Even a basic "ignore this tag for a day/week/year/permanently" would at least help sand down a bit of the most irritating notification spam. And worth noting that this sort of thing is a genuine security/privacy issue too: in real security systems, the human factor matters a lot. If people get spammed with noise, they will inevitably end up ignoring it when an actual signal turns up. We've known this forever.
This is the company which ran out a credit card and payments infrastructure with serious fanfare— and, incredibly, no provisions for married people having joint accounts.
None, they added it later when dhh and Steve Wozniak made a stink about it.
OS X has always supported multiple user accounts and I can’t see that ever changing.
The I-devices on the other hand are explicitly positioned as personal devices. And I don’t really see that changing either.
Nowadays the price of macs has dropped to the point where some of the iPads and phones (!) are more expensive than the cheapest (and perfectly capable) macs (I do my development on a baseline MacBook Air because it’s so conveniently light). So they are still selling (relatively) low cost, multiuser machines.
So, crystal-ball-gazing time: I don't think this part is true for iPadOS, but it's going to take them a couple more years to really get it right.
Here's where I think they're skating: watches and phones are personal devices, Macs remain what they are (personal computers, I could define this but it doesn't seem necessary on HN), and iPads (and HomePods) are family devices.
"Modes" and Family Sharing are both brand-new, and I can see effort to merge the two concepts so that you can put the family iPad in "Alice mode" or "Bob mode". Instead of separate user accounts (in MacOS each user sees a personal set of applications, that will never happen on i-anything), iCloud just manages all the login stuff in the background so that each user sees the subset of the system they're allowed, with their personal data and user accounts swapped out transparently.
This is a bad fit for how apps and logins work... right now. But Apple is clearly trying to fix that, like I said, I think this will take a couple years at minimum before we actually see it.
- Macs: no change.
- iGadgets (phones, tablets, headsets, watches): will remain per-person
- "shared" devices (appletv, homepod, carplay, home iot devices) will take their settings from the per-person devices and will allow multiple per-person devices simultaneously. So the speaker will play songs / respond to requests from people whose phones are on the LAN; the car will take its default settings from the driver (how will it know?) but the passenger can control the map etc.
Lots of problems like this.
That's very strange, I wonder what is triggering it for you.
For my use case, tracking bags, kids on vacation and etc it has worked fine.
I realize that this might not be a common experience and that it could be just some particular quirk about how it works with my phone specifically. But I gave up after that.
Not on the same level, but Netflix auto-playing videos and previews is also annoying, and the option to disable it is purposely hidden on their website, not accessible through the app. Ugh.
I bought some Tiles and Trackrs and gave them to friends who agreed to help me test their usefulness, pretending that they had "stolen" these items from me. I would see if I could locate them a few days later when I "noticed them missing".
I got one ping from a Tile once when the friend had apparently stopped for gas, but none from their house. And zero at all from the Trackr. Apparently there just aren't enough users in my area for the networks to accomplish much?
By stealing battery from every iphone user and data from their cellular plan, Apple has built a find-me network that actually works. Therefore it also works for stalking. Therefore Apple is getting the criticism.
Isn’t this criticism a bit like arguing that binoculars/telescopes are bad because they allow people to peep into other peoples windows or cars deserve criticism because they allow you to tail someone(or run from authorities)?
Tools can basically always be misused.
Also tiles don't rotate their BT address so they're an ideal method for shops to track you.
Apple's method actually works because it doesn't need an app installed and they have mitigated the third party tracking problem.
But the lack of explicit Family cross-view when other devices automagically have it is nigh unto unforgivably bad. I have heard arguments made about privacy but they are not that coherent. Expose an "opt this device out of Family sharing" during config option or whatever.
That friends have attached two different tags to their kid's backpack so both spouses can track is total fail. :|
It’s impressively pointless. Maybe I should buy one and annoy people with it.
I wish we had a fully open alternative with the same global tracking network.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/9/22820381/tile-life360-loc...
It's commercial proprietary tech, I definitely wouldn't be using it if I considered my location history sensitive data.
I did it to one of mine to use it to track my bicycle if it ever gets stolen.
Maybe Apple's campaign is working: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/26/apple-doe...
But against a professional thief an AirTag probably won't do much.
There's a 3D-printed housing for one that sits between the frame and the water bottle holder. If someone does ever steal my bike, and checks for AirTags, I expect them to find this one
I have a second wedged inside the seat cavity. You have to take the seat off the seatpost rails to remove it
It's pretty common for thieves to have a lot of stolen stuff together, so if there is a second stalker notification I'm hoping they assume it's from another stolen item in their possession (having already removed the water bottle AirTag)
And for good reason. These devices are already getting popular with abusive spouses. It's worth planning for the worst case scenarios for these things, because they are real.
Realistically you have to be much more determined to buy an additional phone and another sim card + pay for the data vs simply using an airtag. If you're already that determined just buy a proper gps tracker.
You'd also have to find a way to recharge the iphone constantly, problem that you wouldn't have with an airtag. An airtag is much easier to hide too (bags, clothes, ...)
The fact that you can already track someone relatively easily doesn't mean that introducing a new small/cheap/easy to use tracking device is a good thing
It is the method of last resort, really. Ideally, people have enough success in their life that they do not have to resort to crime. If that fails we have some other protections: we lock our doors, etc. Lastly, if people still commit crime we try to prosecute them
It's not designed to be used like that
> Why do we have to gimp everything to make it difficult to use them to break the law?
Same reason you can't buy 1000kg of fertiliser at walmart, we don't wait for people to commit crime to do something.
Tile is inferior to an AirTag if you seriously want to stalk someone. The network is orders of magnitude smaller. Don’t know why anyone who owns an Apple device would bother with it at this point
I have a Tile attached to a generator at my house. Since I've disabled Tile on my phone in favor of AirTag, my generator hasn't been detected in over 31 days. Even with neighbors walking past my house constantly.
This describes how 99% of these "AirTags Used In Stalking Incident" stories come about.
But I expect someone familiar with returned items will say "Oh, someone forgot to remove their AirTag again. Throw it in the garbage." So hopefully no knocks at my door.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelin...
For government and law enforcement information requests, Apple complies with the laws pertaining to global entities that control our data and we provide details as legally required.
L. AirTag and Find My Network Accessory Program
To add AirTag or supported third-party products to the Items tab in the Find My app, customers must have an Apple ID, be signed into their iCloud account with Find My enabled, and register their AirTag or supported third-party products to their Apple ID.
With a serial number, Apple may be able to provide the paired account details in response to a subpoena or greater legal process.
>Apple may be able to provide the paired account details in response to a subpoena or greater legal process
Source of them actually doing this?
That story alone is horrifying and a reason by itself this thing should be illegal. Also, what you are doing is not ok.
I really don't know what you expect me to do. I did this by accident. I thought it was funny.
You seem to insist that you forgot to take the AirTag off, and that leaving it on was an accident. Well, you now know that you didn't and, since you don't plan to retrieve it, shouldn't surveil it for your idle whimsey. If you sold your home and forgot to remove a few of your indoor cameras, is it okay for you to continue to monitoring the home? The answer is obviously no. What you're doing is not different.
Just because feds aren't knocking at your door doesn't mean what you're doing is not gross. I definitely wouldn't call it funny.
Genuinely asking, I would love to find a better solution.
I highly doubt there's (much of) a market looking to buy AirTags without already owning the pre-requisite Apple hardware.
Mind you, I only ever use it to locate my wayward cat, so perhaps my use case isn't the most common. I don't seem to find any other need for it, though perhaps I should attach one to my keys.
A legitimate point is that the battery life isn't great. But that's not too hard to solve, if you tolerate a little more space for a bigger battery.
I'm sure there are even better options out there, that's just what I could come up with in under a minute. For anybody with more than idle curiosity, I imagine there are some pretty clever solutions available.
A big difference is that these GPS trackers broadcast their position continuously, wherever there is cell coverage. The AirTags only update their position when an Apple device (made after 2015) is within the relatively short bluetooth range of the tag.
Luckily the "only" is pretty good. There are Apple devices almost everywhere i'd need to track a lost bike/car/schoolbag.
The point is valid, though. AirTags do not enable something which wasn't already trivial to accomplish. At best it just makes it more visible to the general public, but stalkers have known how to use inexpensive GPS trackers for many years.
What's dishonest is the media pretending that this is some new capability that didn't already exist.
If the item has its own mobile network, i'm expecting an extra $20/mo for a phone plan (at which point, comparing to a fixed cost of an AirTag isnt valid.)
If it doesnt have a mobile network and relies on the mesh, then, is there any mesh available? Apple's mesh is global and pervasive.
And if it provides neither mobile support nor mesh, it isnt useful for anything except lost keys in a house.
The AirTags are awesome because ANY phone creates a mesh for them to broadcast.
UPDATE: per sister comment, see https://www.hologram.io/pricing/flexible-data
I'm sure you can get prepaid/IOT plans for less, eg. https://www.hologram.io/pricing/flexible-data
Some phone plans will give you additional data only sim card and only charge you the cost of the bandwidth (Google Fi does this). You can also get data only plans that are intended to used with Vending Machines and IoT devices (I guess a tracking device on the Internet is a IoT device).
I had an AirTag on my AirPod Pro's case that was stolen. I immediately notified Austin's police (APD) as I could see where it was going. Unfortunately, due to understaffing of 100-200 police officers and detectives, most calls unrelated to imminent threats of injury or death aren't being handle for days or ever. So, it's open-season on packages and property because APD can't or won't do its job, even if you tell them where stolen property is located. As long as a crime is nonviolent or the threat of violence has passed (with the exception of rape), ATX has the security measures of a third-world country. I met a UT campus police officer who refuses to live in or bring his family to ATX because of the risks and de facto lawlessness.
I live in a small town outside of Portland and it's not bad, we haven't cut the funding for our police.
I'd link an article, but googling 'police shortage' would seem to do the trick.
It's funny when people complain about HN being too US-centric, when in reality it's CA,NY/NJ, and MA centric. NJ is awash in money flowing from Wall St, so I don't feel bad that their cops make a decent wage.
Pay for officers in the US has only gone in one direction, and it's up. They have more resources than ever, more staff than ever. They are perhaps hit with Covid-related issues like everywhere, but "meh pay"? They're not teachers.
Or maybe you think everything has been terrible for the past 20 years. Maybe you think there's always been a police shortage.
MY GF filed a public assault (very minor) case like a year ago and there is still no success yet all persons identities are known. Police is horrible understaffed.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next 10 car smashings were the same crooks because the police department won't do its job. They keep letting the crooks go, and we wonder why there are so many thefts in SF these days. Well maybe don't let the crooks go!
That said though I wonder if AirPods are having success in other countries with more competent police.
For the US I really wish we could commercialize some kind of tracker that releases fart spray, honey, flour, ink, glue, and other annoying substances if stolen. If the police won't do their job we need to do it ourselves.
I assume you've seen this already, but just in case you haven't.
I don't think any of the substances I listed would match this description.
Lift the box, and immediate piercing sound blast. For < $10 in parts off AliExpress. Unit price could be a couple bucks max at volume.
I live in Downtown Austin, and this kind of picture simply does not fit with my day-to-day experience of Austin.
Cops are not objective sources of reality, neither is anyone else. More than a few grains of salt need to be taken when cops say stuff because they're steeped in a very different life than the average citizen.
Near as I can tell, there are good statistics available from the BLS about fatal on-job accidents, but not so good for definitions of "dangerous" that also include non-fatal injuries.
If we're talking pure fatalities, policing is dangerous (it's on that list), but it's much less dangerous than a bunch of other professions... such that you're about 2.3x more likely to die on-job as a delivery driver than as a police officer.
Spoiler: it’s that I can’t get psychedelics easily.
That's a pretty dramatic way to describe police not wanting to spend resources to get your $200 headphones back..
AirPods Max? Only $549. A MacBook? Only $2000. A car? Only $20000.
Does someone have to burn my house down for it to be worthwhile for the police?
Are you saying that police shouldn't bother investigating crimes that aren't felonies? Why even have misdemeanors at all then?
> What's the threshold over which you believe crime is no longer okay?
You completely missed the parent's point. It's not that they don't think crime should be "no longer be okay", it was addressing the the grandparent's point of "we're living in a third world country because my $200 AirPods got stolen" is simply out of touch with reality.
> Does someone have to burn my house down for it to be worthwhile for the police?
In third world countries this is pretty much how it works. As an American, going to Brazil or South Africa (for example), you're basically told "don't wear/carry anything of value". It's not that there is a chance that you'll get mugged, it's that it's likely it'll happen. I live in Austin and carry my AirPods on me all of the time. The likelihood that I experience what the OP experienced is so unlikely that it rarely crosses my mind. The grandparent's comment is hyperbolic drivel.
Fake news: there's actually very few places where this would be true. You are being told that because in these countries most people are poor and afraid of losing their hard earned money/stuff more than in America generally. Doesn't mean it's likely to happen at all. Most of the times directly violent crimes don't pay as well as drug dealing, and the criminals sure know it: there's favelas in Sao Paulo and Rio where if there's a thief on the territory, drug gangs will hunt him down: they know drug clients need to feel secure to go in there and spend money.
Once I had my car stolen near the uni I was attending, and also near a favela. One of my colleagues lived there, and I told him the fact: next day he told me drug gangs assured him, and he was assuring me, that they would investigate and if the thief was found to be a local resident they would find him and return my car. The car was found 2 days after the fact, in very bad condition with a hole underneath the motor (they were probably using it to go into ramps/offroad), by the police, in another favela a few miles away - by the looks of it, the thiefs didn't want to gain money on this: they took the car only to have drinks and fun and trash it, then abandon it.
Conversely, let's say I accuse an Uber driver of stealing a $1 bill I left in his car, is that a good use of police time? Where do you draw the line?
However, the big problem with spending resources to investigate a theft is that the vast majority of the time there will be no leads, and no way to pursue them.
My laptop was stolen out of my truck, window smashed and backpack gone. Unless I had video evidence or witness testimony to go off of.
There are only so many detectives and forensics experts and only so much time and they typically have multiple cases going on at a time.
Take a look at this phone thief at a concert [1].
Meanwhile, countries in America's league do not.
From what I can "better things" is mostly pulling people over (legitimately or otherwise) in order to hand out tickets to raise revenue. Catching criminals is what we're told they do, stealing from the public, making money, and protecting only the most wealthy seems to be their real job.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CYtk8HVr3SP/?utm_medium=copy_lin...
Police actually spend a tiny portion of their time on what you think they spend their time on.
Was the tracking good enough to reasonably narrow it down to a single person?
I think people expect too much of the police with a lot of these tracking devices/services. I don't have any experience with AirTags, but I know Apple's Find My can narrow down the location of e.g. a lost phone to a street corner. But if you're in a city there's a decent chance that there's more than one person on that street corner. The police can't/shouldn't stop everyone there and search them. Tracking a stolen item to a house is even harder (need a warrant). And an apartment is probably impossible because I doubt the tracking is good enough to narrow it down to a particular unit.
If you’ve never had something stolen before, let me flesh out your data point. The police almost never investigate theft of private property—if they do, it’s when there’s serial theft in an area. That’s anywhere in the US, in any year. They’re only there as a notary of sorts for your claim to the insurance company.
It’d be cool if police used the surveillance tech built into our products for our benefit, but that’s not how the world works. They’re not standing by for hot pursuit of your earbuds.
I had 2000ish dollar bicycle stolen, the police where I live took it very serious because the value. They ended up arresting the guy. They also find dozens of other bicycles that were stolen and in various levels of being parted out from what I was told.
Also note a tracker in a bike can definitely lead to it being recovered.
Not to mention the emotional factor isn't the only factor by far. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to have my car available to me on demand, rather than have to wait to make a claim with insurance and finding a replacement. Has nothing to do with my emotions.
Theft is not a problem at the volume you're suggesting it is a problem. Most people don't have most of their things stolen most of the time, and AirTags have absolutely nothing to do with addressing the threat of theft.
And yes, it absolutely has to do with your emotions; everything has to do with emotions, the entire concept of reacting unemotionally is literally not possible for a human being to successfully execute unless you have a severe mental disorder (you don't, I gather).
Violent reactions are really the only deterrent left to keep thieves at bay. If everyone was so laissez faire about it, well, I'd eventually expect my house to be emptied daily, and my insurance to cost about $30k a month.
I get your point that theft isn't currently -that bad-, but realize that using that info to justify thievery just keeps compounding the problem.
This is objectively false. There are laws, which are enforced by courts, that provide sufficient deterrent.
I cannot stress this enough; if you respond to property loss with violence, you deserve anything bad that happens to you.
Round and round we go. The OP of this chain was correctly stating that police rarely even investigate theft.
> if you respond to property loss with violence, you deserve anything bad that happens to you.
What a horrible thing to say. I don't think I'll reply here anymore, it's obviously going nowhere good.
There are a million things that can and often do go wrong already with our criminal justice system, but it does function, more or less, as a way of arriving at a just conclusion; your suggestion that we throw all of that out is, literally, barbaric.
I can't believe I have to say this, but society is worse off without laws and a just mechanism by which to enforce them.
Sounds like you're arguing with someone who doesn't actually exist. If this happens frequently, it might be a good idea to talk about it with someone who is there for you.
Yes, it was quite easy to quote where you said, "Throw out existing laws, revert to what is literally the definition of barbarism."
Ahmaud Arbery is a perfect example.
You can't both agree that violence without due process is acceptable, and then disagree with how someone applied their own set of morality to a situation that resulted in them using violence.
It's either/or, because the alternative is for you to have a say in their violence, at which point you're just re-creating a criminal justice system.
Yes, and if the judgment turns out to be flawed, then punish them accordingly. There are many instances of laws where the legality depends on circumstances bounded by reasonable judgment, such as self defense. I am legally allowed to kill someone if I fear for my life in some circumstances. The judicial system then determines if my fear was justified. Likewise, defending your own property with violence is legal, depending on circumstances and judgments which are validated in court. The case you referenced was obviously poor judgment.
Your original point is that property cannot be morally defended through violence. This is neither the actual law, nor does it make sense from any real world perspective.
And considering the stakes, it does not make sense to enforce post-hoc a punishment for incorrectly applying this imaginary "defense of property" law you've invented. People's lives are not something you can un-end.
This delegation is still force/violence is some form. Now unlike a private individual we hope... law enforcement does not go overboard with it.
You do realize there are loads of places in the world where people don't even lock their doors? And it's not cuz police are all over the place in those areas.
Perhaps material conditions are driving crime in many places...
In a place with no daily crime, EVERY crime is investigated thoroughly, and the perpetrator brought to justice with all the resources of the (very bored) local police.
Think of the small town where no crime of note ever happens, and suddenly someone's house is robbed. Do you think the residents just shrug it off? Of course not — it's the only thing the town will talk about for weeks!
There are different dynamics in small communities on account of everyone knowing each other, etc. But it's not because there are expert detectives looking through all the clues to recover your stolen Macbook or some smashed window.
Hell, loads of times small town dynamics mean people "know" who it is, and still nothing happens! Because crime and punishment isn't some sort of kanban board with a list of crimes and tickets not going closed until a perpetrator is in front of a judge.
Based on what they told me they sent two deputies to the house and politely (yet firmly) “requested” the phone back. It actually went exactly the way you would expect - we have probable cause to search the entire house for grand theft. Just give it back.
I went to the Sherrifs department an hour later and picked it up.
Good use of resources? Probably not. Faith in public servants for me? Absolutely. Hopefully a scary lesson learned for an offender or two on a path of criminality? I hope so.
But also, you guys don’t know what the Third World is like. But at least I can tell that Nextdoor and HN have some overlap.
Of course, no measure can beat physical access to the device but you could at least make the tampering about as expensive as building your own device from scratch.
Isn't it already linked to your Apple account? Take the AirTag to the cops, they ask Apple who it belongs to.
Why even involve the cops - if you have an airtag, you should be able to scan it's code and it reveals the account holder's name.
That's easy. If you find my house keys, I'd rather you couldn't just look up my address.
I don't know if Apple makes it easy or not, but I'd certainly like to be able to push a notification to the AirTag owner if I have found one of their things. At least so I can send them a message "I dropped this off at the local police station so you can pick it up" etc, or something along those lines.
Is this saying that Apple is relying on the unknown tag to announce itself by emitting a beep, and is that true?
I think you want your management device (e.g. phone) to alert you to the presence of such a thing, not that thing itself.
(Of course, you still need to find it.)
Not by itself, no. If you have an iPhone, you get notifications on your phone whether the AirTag ever beeps or not.
The official Apple app only alerts when users run a manual scan (not very useful).
The solution requires a lot more governance, and puts Apple in charge of a "court system" with a lot of support cases.
* Every Airtag must have a registered owner. People are limited to the number of tags they're allowed to purchase and use.
* If an Airtag is lost by its owner, they can request it be located. If the Airtag is a significant distance from the owner, Apple must intervene.
* Apple must ask the user if they suspect the article is stolen. If Yes, the user can provide a police report and will be provided the location.
* If they suspect they misplaced the item, but not stolen, things get complicated.
* If the location is mobile since the owner departed the tag, and is tailing other Android/Apple iPhones, Apple will probably need to tell the owner too bad so sad, get a police report first.
* If its location is static since it departed contact with the owner's phone, Apple makes a judgement call as to if they believe it's a stalking situation. If the tag is tailing another Android/iPhone user, Apple should allow that person to have a setting on their phone to passively allow this case, allowing users to consent to being tracked.
There are other obvious edge cases, but I think this at least a start to how this useful technology could avoid stalking but provide for a wider variety of use cases.
And of course this breaks the e2e promise that Apple made, which _prevents_ them from getting NSLs when the government wants to track somebody... so, I don't see a good way out of this.
It should be a serious crime to track someone without their knowledge. Something that police take seriously.
Apple support does not provide any details about the issue.
There’s a million GPS trackers for sale online that are near anonymous. The AirTag is a horrible device used to stalk people.
Every GPS tracker on the market needs a monthly subscription and your credit card info.
I can buy a lot of things and modify it to do bad things.
AirTag is an interesting choice as if you want to REALLY track someone I think an AirTag is a wonky choice. Very much a cheap-o 'best effort' kind of tracking.
How you do it depends on if your iPad is setup under a different apple ID or not (still can do it either way).
My father in law who is older and prone to wandering off, I put an airtag on him while on vacation temporarily when we were out and about, and set his phone to share his location to the whole family all the time just to be save. It's very handy that way.
As a member of my family account, his iPad does share its location. But only for 24 hours after the battery dies, at which point Apple will no longer show you were it was last found. And since it's only a WiFi iPad, it'll only report when attached to a network it knows about.
And even in perfect circumstances, it doesn't work worth a crap. My daughter 'lost' her iPad last night and asked me to beep it. So I did. "Find My" said "playing sound" for maybe 10 seconds and then just stopped, without any further notice. It told me it last saw the iPad two hours previously, so I told my daughter it may have run out of battery. She found it a couple minutes later in my wife's office. 80% battery. In our house, attached to our WiFi. She came up and played with it a while sitting behind me in my office. "Find My" still couldn't see it. This morning, about 10AM, while my daughter was in school and her iPad was sitting on the charger, it started beeping to be found. LMAO. Thanks Apple, for nothing.
They should put a rechargeable AirTag in the iPad somewhere. With all the usual features. Then I could tell you where my son's iPad is right now, and I could make it noisy, even though the battery died a few days ago and he doesn't know where it is. We think it might have gotten swiped by the neighbor kid, but we'll probably never find out since it's a game of eliminating possibilities, not positively finding the device. Since he didn't mention that it was missing until more than 24 hours after it was last seen, I can't even say for sure he lost it in our house somewhere. Such a misfeature.
Found the iPad. My daughter hid it and turned it off so it could not be located. A couple days ago I had asked her if she knew where it was. We have a thing where if I really need to know 100% the answer to a question, we'll lock pinkies and she can tell me anything and I agree there will be no consequences for what she confesses. A momentary free pass in return for a hard truth. She lied to me when I asked her point blank if she had done anything with the iPad or knew where it was. That hurts. She has a casual relationship with the truth (she is 11 years old, FWIW), and I had been trying to give her a way to get back into a more trustworthy relationship. To lie during a pinky promise... ugh. I've failed as a parent, LOL. There's no real reason to punish her, I guess, she's lost more than she realizes yet, I think.
Rant over. Parenting is occasionally such a PITA. I love my daughter but she causes me ongoing anxiety as a parent. My son (9 years old) is so compliant, by comparison he's a breeze.
My eldest is 13, and we don’t really see a reason for her to have a cellphone yet; it’s coming fairly soon, sure, but for now the 11” iPad Pro that I passed down to her is a much more functional device for her and carries less drama risk as she’s excluded from her peers’ SMS group chat where it seems like the majority of that sort of thing emanates.
When she does have a need for a cellphone, it’ll likely be one of the relatively inexpensive iPhone SEs or an older used iPhone that’s mostly useful for calls and texts.
As others have pointed out, you can buy small GPS trackers without anti-stalking features already, and those will only get smaller / better battery life over time.
In your opinion, what else could Apple do here, assuming you're familiar with the product?