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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

The airtag will start making noise if its away from its owner too long and moving around. When you find it you can bring it to a police station and they can use the serial number to get the owners details from Apple.

Sure its not bullet proof, but I really don't know they had any better options. Apple is currently by far the best at attempting to stop tracking of all the tracker tile products.

An end game solution would be all the OEMs working together one some anti tracking notification spec but that isn't easy to arrange.

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I've never used an airtag, but from what I've read, it is quite trivial to disable the speaker on a hardware level.

At this point people have worked out how to just reflash the firmware on the devices. It's just not really possible to make something impossible to abuse, its just up to the legal system now.

It's impossible to make a knife that isn't trivial to abuse but we accept that the utility makes it worth allowing them and use the legal system to go after the abusers.

The problem is that we probably do not agree on the usefulness of the device versus it's abuse potential.

It's not like someone gleefully commented that they are tracking their father with it without clarifiying if the father in question is aware ...

looks trivial on youtube, but has do be done very carefully, because you can easily damage it in the process

> An end game solution would be all the OEMs working together one some anti tracking notification spec but that isn't easy to arrange

Apple could just publish their spec so that Android can also implement it.

they did - however, the only devices able to seamlessly detect airtags are ios devices.

What's unique about iOS device hardware that enables them to seamlessly detect AirTags? Pretty much all Android devices have Bluetooth.

There are android apps that can detect AirTags. It’s just iOS is the only OS that has this built in and enabled by default.

Android manufacturers (Google and Samsung mostly) don't want to support Apple gear by default.

There are no technical reasons why they couldn't add all their phones to the Find My network. Only political.

There are technical reasons... Uploading data to Find My requires a connection to apple.com which is authentic (ie. Uses crypto keys from the apple device, and apple won't give those keys to an android manufacturer).

You really think Apple would say "no" if Samsung or Google said they want to connect their devices to the Find My network? They'd give the keys in a heartbeat.

But neither G nor S is willing to provide extra coverage for Apple nor do they want their phones connecting to a system they can't datamine.

Apple would totally say no.

Currently it's a unique selling feature of the Apple ecosystem. If every phone could do it, then Apple would lose this benefit, and Apple would still be paying for all the servers.

I think the crux of the issue is that G & S won't work with A because A runs things like a dictatorship. Which is ironic considering how many international standards/specs A uses for their devices.

Pretty sure Apple would make a special "Apple-Fi" incompatible with standard Wifi if they could get away with it.

There are also third party AirTag compatible trackers like the Chipolo. They are just as expensive as the AirTag so I’ve never seen the point.

If your Android phone can read NFC tags, tapping the tag with your phone will tell you who owns it.

> Apple is currently by far the best at attempting to stop tracking of all the tracker tile products.

What about not designing or selling products that can be used to violate the privacy of others?

From my POV Apple has bent over backward to prevent the "stalker" use case, to such a degree that it degrades the "stolen item" use case.

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