Apple AirTags stalking led to ruin and murders, lawsuit says
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
But taking a step back and acknowledging the amount of heat Apple has gotten for releasing a legitimately useful product while we drown in an ocean of guns always makes me chuckle uncomfortably.
Shoplifting should be not ignored until first catch all the murderers. see "whataboutism"
Cars kill more people in the US than just about everything. Yet we still drive. I don't think the world agrees with you.
Meanwhile there are explicit legal protections for gun manufacturers despite the vast majority of murders in the US being with guns that people have no real reason to have (see: the rest of the civilized world, and its lack of active shooter drills and training)
Anyways, as a result of that I went on AliExpress and bought a small device which is supposed to be able to be mounted on things and track their location. You put a SIM card and an SD-card in it and it will report its location.
I didn’t get around to mounting it on the electric scooter yet. But something that stood out to me when it came in the mail is that it was declared as being something else and I was like, is this because people buy this thing and they don’t want their spouse to know what they bought or something. That’s a bit creepy, considering it’s a GPS tracking device.
Definitely a “they can’t inspect them all” aspect to it.
It's not FCC licensed so illegal to sell. Not carrier approved either so they'll get pissy if they figure that out. And likely the hardware design itself is stolen.
Con: The FCC will also be able to find your things!
The argument is rarely, 'ignore Y because of X' or similar. Rather its 'if were were to apply this standard correctly, we would have other priorities'.
So here that if we were to apply the 'regulate/remove objects which change the social environment to make it less safe' standard to prioritise our concern, I'd imagine find-my-device systems wouldnt rank highly: indeed, we might find these systems make it more safe.
So, in a complex series of tradeoffs where all actions have a cost (time, effort, etc.) the claim is about where one ought pay that cost.
I think its fine to show that the standards people have lead to contradictions.
Like in a city where homelessness is rampant, and the city government meets up and the first thing they talk about is littering ordinances or if there's enough sun/shade in the park, and then oops, all out of time to talk about homelessness - let's just put that on the agenda for next time right after we talk about changing trash pickup day.
To say, eg., "my country did X too!" when "Country B did X" could be whataboutism, or it could be pointing to an international game with its own rules that all players are complicit in -- such an observation is a kind of rebuke to moralism.
Here we can read this sort of reply to those who worry about airtags in a similar sort of way: what, exactly does the principle, "limit objects which make a social environment less safe" do if applied mechanically -- rather than as a sort of circumstantial moralism about some recent headline.
Perhaps often, then, whataboutism is really a kind of distaste for hastey moralism about circumstantial matters
How would regulating guns make tracking less problematic?
It's still a problem in societies which have gun regulations. You can murder someone without a gun, too. Stalking is there without guns too.
Let's just face the obvious: bringing up a huge and dramatic topic like gun regulation makes the issue which is the topic here look less dramatic. This is it. There isn't more to it. The argument makes no other senese here.
Alice has lost her pen that may have no ink in it. Alice has also lost her bank card. Alice has just spend hours searching for her pen. What does this say about Alice?
It says alice gets swept up in solving "problems" that arent even clearly problems (does she need a pen without ink?) all the while not even basically engaged in real problems.
Here: do airtags make society less safe, or more safe? Does it, eg., supress theft? Does it enable more criminals who would go on to other commit crimes to be caught early? (And so on..)
In other words what does our being hastily swept up in one downside of one piece of technology tell us?
Now, if you think airtags are serious threats to social saftey, the above doenst apply. But I dont read the guns point as procrasting whataboutism -- rather I read it as a claim that airtags are pens-without-ink and this is obvious when contrasted with a more actually pressing matter.
I read it as a claim that we're being sweptup in moralising about a non-moral problem
You can fix both problems at the same time.
If you consider arguments by certain groups advocating for the fix of the problem, they aren't even the same groups.
And yet it gets all the flak.
People are stupid.
But only if you own an iPhone, or have a specific Android app open.
No. Not if only. If they have been away from their paired phone for more than a few hours, they beep whenever they are moved.
And I remind you that all competing trackers have no anti-stalker functions at all.
All this while she’s been actively involved in a court case for establishing a restraining order against a domestic abuser of hers.
If Apple actually cared they’d allow you to disable from the app. As is they’re just paying lip service to the abused while actively aiding the abusers.
Then the value of the product would be zero, because thieves would disable it remotely.
The stupid beeping is already annoying if I happen to have BT off and jiggle my own keys.
But: how is that AirPod not running out of battery?
I don’t know about battery. She hasn’t seen a notification in a bit. Maybe it ran its course. A whole lot of unnecessary stress along the way though.
Far more than a few — I am away from mine all day and they don't beep when moved. Apple apparently says it's somewhere between 8 and 24 hours. Also, they don't have to be right up against the paired phone — if someone is stalking a neighbor in apartment building, they probably come close enough to fool the system.
Most importantly, it's trivial to disable the beeping: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/muted-airtags-danger#:~:text=....
It's the same for other trackers, ie Samsung SmartTags, just disconnect the internal speaker and you're good to go.
A tag that works as a silent car tracker and helps to recover your car is great. The same tag, but used to stalk someone else's car? Not that great.
I guess this is why we can't have nice things.
Google integrated this into Android, no need for an AirTags detection app anymore.
Most people don't have a specific competitors tracking app on their phone, so the network is much smaller and location updates much rarer.
On the other hand. Every iPhone is by default an airtag location reporter, not only making the network much larger, but also, importantly, making it very likely that the targets phone, if it's an iPhone, will actively be reporting on itself, bring effectively as good as a gps tracker.
While this doesn't rule out the possibility of another tracker being used for stalking, it does make it dramatically more important for Apple to solve this.
Some years ago a friend of mine bought a set of Tile trackers without knowing what they were. He then found out they were useless as anti-theft devices because no one in his area had the app. If his Tile was gone (along with whatever they're attached to), the chances of his tile being near a second Tile user were negligible. But Apple had the market power to overcome that issue.
I don't know how good other trackers are but I imagine a GPS tracker needs a battery and a SIM card, which would make them more expensive and with a limited battery life. If Apple truly managed to build a tracking device that's forever on and whose alarm can be easily disabled, I don't think it's a bad idea to wonder whether they've jumped too far into "bad for society" territory. Usually we would discuss these issues in the open, but nowadays lawsuits seem to be the only way to do it.
This was one of the few explicitly mentioned cases. And something tells me AirTags were not the problem here.
Even though airtags are tracking devices, they are legitimately useful.
Kinda reminds me of the NSO situation, where they supposedly only gave access for a specific set of legal reasons. Then the client decided to use it in a nefarious manner anyway.
I could buy a 2x4 and smack someone over the head with it. Then they get to sue home depot? No, I should be charged for smacking them over the head.
If the manufacturer becomes responsible for the actions of individuals the economy would immediately cease due to the litigation that would unfold.
So if you think the knuckle shaped screwdriver is actively harming the population, then you can go to court.