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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

Airtags are such a mess. My partner has one on his keys. First it would just notify me when he left his phone in the car. No way to permanently dismiss that notification. Hmm. Then it started notifying me all the time whether he has his phone or not. I have a near constant notification that I can only "ignore" for 24 hours. Then it started beeping at random times like in a theatre.

I would gladly agree to a waver so that I stopped getting those stupid notifications. I have no stalking concerns for myself. I'm at home almost all day and that is a secret to no one.

These things are probably going in the trash soon.

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That’s odd. My partner and I have two each and never have that experience. Like not at all. I wonder if the batteries are dying or the product is defective?

Another anecdote, my partner and I also have 2 each and we've never, not once, had that experience either in the nearly two years we've had them.

Which seems weird because you'd think it would definitely trigger the stalker warning.

Yes, it's very clearly a bug. It didn't happen for the first month, then wouldn't stop. Turning on and off location services on his phone fixes it for a bit.

To clarify, your phone tells you he left his phone behind? Or the airtag on the keys tells you that the phone was left behind? Cus the latter sounds awesome for my use case.

There's a product feature that notifies you when you leave your tagged item behind in a place that's not home.

There's another anti-stalking feature that notifies other people if an airtag not paired with their phone is not with the phone it belongs to.

But I'm encountering a bug where I get notified all the time, not just when the paired phone is not present. I know it's a bug because it only happens with one airtag, not the other.

Next up: people whining because crooks use AirTags to stalk them and Apple isn’t doing enough to stop it

Not sure why the derision is necessary. That's been a constant topic of discussion ever since AirTags released because it's a real concern that has multiple examples and has informed the design of the exact feature that the posted article is about.

Nothing is necessary of course, it’s just to counterbalance the ‘hurr durr Apple bad’ crowd which seamlessly gaslights between ‘AirTags are terrible stalking devices and Apple is responsible for all stalkers and stalking wouldn’t be possible were it not for the terror of the AirTag’ and ‘I don’t care about privacy and why is Apple giving these stupid notifications to counter stalker use of AirTags.’

There’s tons of tracking devices on the market and Apple made choices to make the use of AirTags private and with a certain level of protection against stalker use. It’s known before you purchase them, if you don’t like it, don’t purchase them.

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