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Comment by dinkblam | Hacker News Reader

i am unsure how AirTags can be recommended by anyone in any situation to prevent theft.

their "anti-tracking" features make them completely useless in any situation where theft is involved (or theft happens after loosing the item). the thief is alerted to their presence automatically and can disable them quickly. perfect for thieves!

AirTags can only be used for misplaced items, any utility for situations involving theft is completely negated by their "anti tracking" features.

another case where giving a 0.01% case too much attention makes the normal 99.99% use case completely impossible..

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I have a 'family' setup in our iphones for my wife and kids. My wife bought some airtags and put them in the cases for our kids expensive musical instruments, her keys, etc.

We are configured as a family to share apps, set screen times, etc, but I can't see where those tags are, only my wife can on her phone. Worse, I get warnings every time I use her car for the day, that it found an uknown airtag riding with me. Or when she rides with me in the passenger seat of my vehicle, and has her purse with her.

They are essentially less than worthless, and cause a ton of false alerts, so 3/4ths of our family have them blocked and ignore any airtag alert, because we assume its one of hers.

And if your kids are young enough not to have their own phone, when they go to school with an AirTag it'll start beeping a while later just to make sure nobody is stalking them.

It was a nice idea until all the people worried about stalking got involved. Never mind that a skilled stalker won't waste time or take the risk with an AirTag.

I'm glad someone brought this up. I'm the CEO of Tile and we launched an anti-theft feature for this reason. We allow you to turn off anti-stalking features if you agree to strict penalties for misuse and verify yourself with a real ID.

https://chrishulls.medium.com/tile-is-taking-a-different-app...

Apple in most cases already has our real ID. And stalkers are already determined to commit crimes. Agreeing to civil penalties isn’t going to deter someone who already doesn’t fear criminal imprisonment.

And those stalkers could just buy any other GPS tracker out there which would be more effective than an airtag anyways.

It's all just posturing by Apple and all to the detriment of 99.99% of their user base.

How much customer data are you giving to your corporate owners? How much are you selling to third parties? How much are your owners selling to third parties?

How do you verify the government ID used belongs to the person disabling the anti-stalker feature? There's a huge market for fake state IDs and stolen/leaked photos of various gov't IDs

Seems like a pretty unrealistic bar to set. You can use government ID to empty a bank account and air and tile stocking seems way lower Stakes.

Checking an ID in person is a bit different than uploading a picture of it. US IDs are designed for in person verification with security features like holograms, laser perforations and microprinting. Also don't think it's a high bar if they're allowed to use one ID to unlock multiple tiles

We just might not be able to see eye to eye on this

You can do a tremendous amount of banking with a scanned photo ID.

Furthermore, the use case we're talking about here is disabling third-party detection for a tile you already have.

Thank you for this. We switched back to Tile specifically because Apple's anti-stalking features make it impossible to eg; share keys. For any household with several cars this is an obvious must-have.

Not to mention most people want to, you know, be able to track something that got stolen.

Wow this should be higher up. Also, have you tried emailing someone in Adams' office?

> another case where giving a 0.01% case too much attention makes the normal 99.99% use case completely impossible..

But the 0.01% will give Apple horrible press, so it's more important than anything else.

The fact that tags aren't useful to you isn't the issue.

Yeah after buying a few AirTags early on, I've largely given up on them. Too much of a hassle as it tries not to be usable to stalk, so I can't use it for the other handy use cases.

Good for checked luggage or bags you might leave behind somewhere.

Best use-case by far. I was traveling internationally, and the airline left my luggage back in Europe. The airline had no idea where my bags were but, I was able to tell them exactly which terminal my bags got loaded onto. (where they lost signal) They looked up which flight departed that terminal at that time and were then able to route my bags to my final location and I had them within 24 hours.

What if the thieves don't have an iPhone?

thieves using Android can just install the "air tag anti tracking" app for Android.

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