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Comment by ribosometronome | Hacker News Reader

Apple gets a lot of focus on it that other companies do not.

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.

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Apple coopted every iPhone into a global surveillance network for the benefit of throwaway keychain tokens. That's why.

Every iPhone (and Android and dumbphone) was coopted into a global surveillance network from the very beginning.

Previously, it didn't help random creeps to find home address of a girl he saw in a grocery store. Now, with AirTags it is rather trivial. Thanks, Apple.

So trivial it never happens.

It was all over the tech news space back in November that a woman was alerted to one that was moving with her. Someone attached it to her car. And again in January.

https://www.wbrc.com/2021/11/18/woman-discovers-tracking-dev...

https://www.insideedition.com/atlanta-woman-cant-find-apple-...

You'll note that there's never ever a culprit in a single one of these stories, and nobody ever successfully carries out the crime by actually showing up to an apartment or cornering someone in their car. It's classic urban legend stuff.

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.

> simple misunderstandings, like someone accidentally dropping one somewhere.

The uniquity of technology gives real stalkers this nice excuse. How convenient!

Very convenient. So much so that there must be one story of someone actually being attacked rather than just finding an AirTag, right?

So you are claiming that nobody of the attacked females were stalked and found using AirTags?

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.

Did you read those articles? Neither of them actually shows someone showing up in a location as a result of using AirTags to track someone. They show someone finding an AirTag that wasn't theirs.

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.

To be fair to Apple, products like [1] - a battery-powered GPS tracker with mobile data connection - have been available for 10+ years.

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.

[1] https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/304109556891

It’s been trivial for decades. That’s not on apple.

> But stories about Foxconn using child labor to build Alexa devices ... went fairly under the radar in comparison

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.

Apple has scale. Tile has similar functionalities but it doesn't have a large network that Apple's IPhone has.

It's going to be very hard to use Tile to stalk people.

With more power, comes more responsibility.

Apple is going to always be under the magnifying glass because they are just so much "bigger".

For sure. I meant to add that sort of sentiment but spaced. There is definitely a level of "poor Apple, lets break out the tiniest violin for them". It's hard to cry over the world's largest public corporation getting more scrutiny than some others.

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