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Comment by post_break | Hacker News Reader

Just keep nerfing it Apple. They made the beeps louder with this new update too. So every time my wife borrows keys, my car, etc it's gonna go nuts. I guess I'm going to have to rip the speaker coils out of all of them at this point.

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TBH sharing keys is a nightmare even without airTags. Honestly recommend each spouse gets their own key to each vehicle. Once my wife had her keys stolen and we made do for a year sharing my car key and it was hell (because both of us prefer the EV to the minivan).

I don't track keys but I track my wallet and my wife does not need or ever ask for that.

Luckily keys are on the way out. Between a August Smart Lock and a Tesla I haven’t carried keys in years and I don’t miss that nightmare.

How are fobs different in this scenario?

You can drive your Tesla using your smartphone app or other devices.

unless if their servers go down, in which case you can't unlock your car

Or the cellular network goes down, which happens about once a year during a bad winter storm.

I may be incorrect, but I believe once you are near the car that it can connect via Bluetooth and operate over that local network, rather than going through the public internet and routing commands through Tesla's servers, but again, I could be misunderstanding how those features operate.

Proximity unlocking does not rely on LTE, and still works. Remote unlocking using the app would not work, because it relies on LTE. So the car can still be unlocked and used as normal in areas where there is no cellular reception. This is not some egregious oversight.

Or just buy them on eBay, pre-silenced.

I'm really not exactly sure what happened here in this "update", other than "FYI, we'll give out information after being subpoenad" and "we'll also include a dialog to say "don't track people with these"."

"So, basically nothing, then?"

It will alert people that they are being tracked even sooner than the threshold now, and it will now play an even louder alert tone.

The "alerting people that a tracking device may be moving with them" is a good thing, though they definitely buried the lede on that, I feel.

A louder tone? I thought a lot of the issue was that people using them nefariously were disabling the speaker entirely, or buying AirTags that others have helpfully pre-disabled for them.

It's nuts that there's no family sharing ability, which would moot this common issue.

Is there really no family sharing features? I see this complaint all the time, but I've never once had a warning despite my wife and I both having AirTags on our car keys ever since they were released. We've had our car complain when one pair of keys are left in it, but never a peep from the AirTags.

The issue is that it thinks you’re being tracked when someone else’s AirTag is near you for a period of time, but the owner isn’t. So if you’re with your wife and her keys, no problem. If you borrow her keys and leave the house without her, then it’s triggered.

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