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Comment by micromacrofoot | Hacker News Reader

I'm not always a fan of Apple's decisions, but short of pulling AirTags off the shelves and scrapping the product entirely, they've gone far beyond any of their competition (Tile) with this stuff.

Ultimately, maybe we're better off just losing things sometimes.

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To be honest, I'd be fine if I just got notified at the instant that my AirTag became separated from my phone, and see the location when that separation occurred. They already have this feature, and it's the only thing I really need. I'm not going to go chasing after a thief myself, and I highly doubt the police will care that I have a tracker on my stolen keys. Even if I leave them on a bus, it's not like I'm going to chase down the bus. I'll just call the lost and found and let them know which bus I left them on.

Wouldn't this make unwanted tracking essentially impossible?

Let’s see how hard it is to neuter the sound generation within the AirTag itself. If it’s silent itself, an Android or no-device trackee is vulnerable.

There is not much tech that lacks unpreventable malicious use. Needs to be expected for pretty much anything.

Would it be possible to design the device to detect if the speaker has been tampered with? Perhaps having some sort of microphone on board to detect whether the speaker is functional would work.

This could be put into the speaker driver, to do something like an impedance measurement, to verify that something that looks like a speaker coil is still present. If you wanted to make something hard to defeat, you could measure the capacitance between the coil and case, as a deflection measumerent, to verify that coil was actually moving in a way that it should be. Both would probably add a relatively large amount of power consumption, completely change the design, and add a bunch of cost, where nobody would be interested anymore.

Trivial.

https://mashtips.com/remove-airtag-speaker/

Or just buy a pre-modded one.

https://uk.pcmag.com/mobile-phone-accessories/138509/silent-...

You don't have to actually do that. The devices aren't directly authorized by Apple. So long as you broadcast the right beacons over BT you can make any device findable by the Find My network.

Exactly - this seems like the kind of thing where the only way to really mitigate its abuse is to not have it at all.

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should." - Dr. Ian Malcolm

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