That means someone can steal your stuff, and then disable the tracker so you can't find it. Most people and myself included were sticking these cheap tags on everything we own, and it was genuinely useful during travel or in scenarios where theft was a consideration.
This is by design. AirTags were never marketed as an anti-theft device. They had anti-stalking features from day one which were/are at odds with anti-theft.
It was marketed as helping you find things that are lost, nothing more.
The AirTag has anti-stalking protection. An important feature, but not something the owner of the AirTag may want.
iPhones share the location of nearby AirTags with apple. Good for the owner of those AirTags, but the owner of the iPhone may not want this.
You can turn this off. Though, doing so is bidirectional: it also prevents your phone from sending out its own Bluetooth beacons when it’s not connected to the Internet, for other phones to pick up. Which might not be what you want. But if you’re worried about privacy impact, it probably is what you want.
Also keep in mind that the protocol already minimizes privacy impact by, among other things, encrypting the location coordinates with a key Apple doesn’t have.
Yeah, that’s like, the issue with trackers. If I buy an AirTag to stalk my ex girlfriend, why should Apple want to help facilitate that goal?
It used to be that when you bought a computer, it was yours. It did your bidding, nobody elses. Security features it had were about keeping other people out, not keeping you out of your own device.
Now, mostly IMHO thanks to Apple, the idea has really shifted. The owner of the device is a "threat" just like anybody else is. The device protects itself against unauthorized actions from the owner, and it does what the mother company wants it to do, regardless of the owner's desires. If the owner is trying to stalk somebody, then that's a better outcome than having the stalker enabled, but we don't get to pick and choose which things the device follows it's owners desires or the mother company's. If the mother company wants you using their chosen DNS servers, or exfiltrating user data for analytics, or showing you ads (Amazon especially), that's what will happen. Now that we've made it acceptable for companies to behave like this, they are going to (ab)use it to the max. I think this is a tragedy of the commons personally. People optimizing for individual use cases at the expense of the collective, leading to disastrous results for the collective.
One can debate whether anti-theft is a worthwhile trade-off for stalking, but because it's implemented as a peer-to-peer network, the consent of the owners of the other peers is relevant.
The huge shift here is that this feature exists in the first place - it's an on-by-default peer-to-peer network that runs on almost all phones, very few people know about and almost nobody would have consented to if they understood it could be used for stalking.
I've not heard that term before and can't find it, but I think I know what you mean. If it seems like I've gotten it wrong, then please let me know :-) Thanks that is a very interesting question. To some extent it may depend on perspective.
I don't think so, because this isn't the commons doing anything, it's just a dictator with all the power forcing people to make the right choices. At least in the case of government enforcement, there's (ostensibly at least) some rights you have and limits/restraints on the government, including democracy which keeps it in check against abuse.
When it's a private corporation like Apple or Amazon just making these decisions, you have little to no recourse (except maybe switch brands, but there aren't many viable options out there for most of these devices. It's not reasonable to point most people to the Pine Phone for example).
To be the opposite of Tragedy of the Commons, I would think it would need to be people self-organizing or self-regulating to prevent the tragedy. If a powerful overlord forces it, I think it's something else.
Yeah, but when your device can infringe on others, it's ok to curtail those features. No one has unlimited rights.
Cell phones already have volume limiters, too: https://www.theverge.com/23729051/ios-android-samsung-phone-...
Not great counter-arguments.
What? iPhones will prevent you from doing that? How?
> Cell phones already have volume limiters, too
I wonder if you've missed GP's point... Your volume limiting link looks like a feature that the user can control. That means that Apple isn't preventing iPhone users from violating other people's right to quiet in quiet areas.
And that link about the volume limit? Come on, dude. That's a volume limit which the user can configure to protect themselves from hearing damage. Not even close to what this discussion is about. It doesn't even apply to the speaker! Completely irrelevant.
I've had two reasons to need to "find" things with AirTags where I specifically didn't know where they were:
- airline bungle, so luggage was left at a transit airport.
- forgetting where something had been put down.
But the most common usage is the opposite, positive confirmation: we've just left for the airport, check if everything says "with you" once you're a few hundred meters down the road.
If the most likely reason for something to be "lost" is that it was stolen, maybe you should move somewhere with a less than apocalyptic level of petty crime.
you should probably move
Personally, I'm careful enough with my keys etc (and lucky enough) that I don't lose them - I lived for several decades before the invention of the airtag, and developed habits not to lose things.
On the other hand, bicycles getting stolen? That happens.
Singapore is the only place I’ve been where I didn’t worry about theft.
And while I don't know where you've been and what your tolerance level for "worrying about" theft is, I've never worried about theft anywhere but very touristy places in huge cities.
That gave me a good laugh.
It makes me wonder if she lived in one of those places earlier in her life (before I knew her) and might be more justified than it seems... ?
I don't think this is a good situation, mind you, but I think people in my circle still misplace things orders of magnitude more often than their stuff gets stolen.
- https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/681961/Common-lost-items-k...
- https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lost-and-found-the-...
The most likely reason to lose things is you're distracted, and fun fact: if you're a man you're more likely to blame someone else for it.
Edit: here is an article around the time of release describing how they work: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/apple-a...
> To discourage what it calls “unwanted tracking,” Apple built technology into AirTags to warn potential victims, including audible alarms and messages about suspicious AirTags that pop up on iPhones. To put Apple’s personal security protections to the test, my colleague Jonathan Baran paired an AirTag with his iPhone, slipped his tag in my backpack (with my permission), and then tracked me for a week from across San Francisco Bay.
> I got multiple alerts: from the hidden AirTag and on my iPhone.
Users can say they’re not interested in it because it doesn’t suit their needs - that’s completely fine.
Source? I just use them to find my keys and remote, didn't know it was popular to try and recover stolen property given the alerts when you're near not-your-airtag for any length of time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/28/airtags...
https://www.axios.com/2023/05/24/apple-airtags-track-car-thi...
https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/apple-air-tags-travel-...
https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/police-urge-caution-in...
Police agencies aren't systematic domain experts except in the application of force to obtain compliance, as well as not having an interest in accurate advice.
There are any number of products allowing you to mount them inconspicuously.
And of course where did I leave my keys and is my backpack in the car or at work stuff, but that's the obvious/advertised use.
Artificially limiting the use of a product goes against the hacker culture.
FWIW, there are videos on YouTube showing you how to silence the speaker. No idea if they work or not, but it's hacker culture at work.
None of these companies ever agreed to be bound by that value, and aren’t under any obligation to adhere to the tenets of Hacker culture. Hackers as a group have failed to convince the public that these things matter, so as far as these businesses are concerned, they don’t.
Like, I agree, it sucks when companies restrict what I can do with a device. But when that happens I don’t talk about it like they betrayed me, I knew what I was buying and decided to buy it anyway.
I distinctly remember friends at Apple being surprised, in the aftermath of San Bernadino, at the backlash they received for refusing to break the encryption on the shooter’s phone for the FBI [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption...
I mean, technically you are — doesn't mean anyone will listen.
This is a safety feature and its been there since day one.
If some scumbag ad company wants to track me, they can eat shit on my adblocker and not track me. The cost of preparing for that threat model is trivial, so I do.
So it is now on me to know whether my object is lost or stolen? Even if I magically knew all the details, that isn't a bright line rule. One person's "lost" luggage is another's stolen electronics. Clearly, more people are using these things to track down stuff that has been taken rather than find the remote control lost somewhere in their living room.
Will apple allow people to disable the tracking of other people's iPhones too in the name of privacy? What if my wife leaves her phone in my car? Can I get tracking disabled on that phone so she cannot track my location?
This isn't new - AirTags have always been this way. The only thing changing today is the cross-platform and 'standard' aspect to it...
No. AirTags let you track your objects whether they are lost or stolen. It's just that they also alert potential thieves to their presence, so any reasonably competent thief will be able to disable them.
> Clearly, more people are using these things to track down stuff that has been taken rather than find the remote control lost somewhere in their living room.
My use cases are to (a) find items that I misplaced or lost somewhere on my own. (b) track the whereabouts of luggage that got lost by an airline.
These cases are not particularly hindered by anti-stalking mechanisms.
You are technically not allowed AirTags in luggage because they contain li-ion batteries.
https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/hazmat/packsafe/reso...
The battery would be under the "In Equipment" column, not the "Spare" column.
When I recently pointed out to the lost luggage department at an airport that I knew for a fact that the luggage (or at least the tracker) was right at the airport, they did not appear to be surprised or concerned at all.
Clearly, adding “clearly” before a slight rephrasing of the unsupported assertion made upthread doesn't turn it into a supported claim.
This has always been the case with AirTags. They've had anti-stalking notifications since day one, and disabling one is as easy as a quarter test of the case to remove the battery.
Are you sure? It seems to me that the anti stalking features depend on the stalkee's / tief's software stack, not the stalker's stack.
Your phone can also refuse to send notifications about the location of a nearby tracker if it thinks it's being tracked, but if there are a bunch of other phones nearby that can relay that information there is nothing to stop them from doing so.
But the target's phone will still be notified that "Someone else's tracker is moving with you", won't it?
> All you need is a Mac and [...]
IIRC, they need you running macos to get the data via a plugin for apple mail. If you only needed an appleID, it could likely be done in a web browser.
But even with an unmodified tracker, it's quite hard to locate one in a car, because there is a lot of hiding spaces (especially if you put one in some hard-to-reach space such as under the carpet in the cabin etc...).
Using randomized or rolling addresses avoids detection to an extent, depending on how many randomized addresses one uses and how often they're rotated.
However, it's also trivial to detect randomized (or rolling) addresses due to the address being utilized for more than a single locality. Although, I'm not sure that either Apple or Google is actually doing the randomized detection even with this new patch.
Sounds like you responsibility - your belongings, you should know where they are or if they are missing.
How would you have survived before AirTags?
But to disincentivize theft, any device would have to be built in such a way that swapping the electronics or discarding that tracking module makes the device you were protecting worthless. Lots of secure handshakes between paired components, very secure software kept up to date, etc. which sounds unrealistic in most cases.
Together with that network access fee probably makes such solutions economically infeasible today.
Or I could just buy an AirTag on my own.
> But to disincentivize theft, any device would have to be built in such a way that swapping the electronics or discarding that tracking module makes the device you were protecting worthless.
Not really. It just needs to be so difficult to remove without a key that thieves physically cannot remove / disable the tag without threatening the stability of the bike, car or whatever.
Doesn't need to be perfect, all it needs to do is provide sufficient survival time against your average crackhead.
You’re proposing something that may be a paradox. The only way to make something physically hard to remove is to integrate it. Locks are proven to be ineffective for this purpose. When this ideal lock is invented you will simply lock your bike with it directly and achieve the goal of theft deterrence to begin with. No need for tracking if stealing the bike destroys it.
Getting an AirTag into a mechanically locked compartment of your bike is useless. You even mentioned LPL so you know any such lock will be bypassed in a matter of seconds, maybe even less time than it takes you to put the AirTag you just bought in there. So your theoretical protection model hinges on something that doesn’t exist yet: a lock that you can easily open to put an AirTag in and service it but that nobody else can unlock.
Car or e-bike manufacturers paying for access to any “find my” network means they can heavily integrate the expensive electronics in a way that makes removing the “tracker” part truly impossible (it’s on a main controller chip) or severely devalues the object if you do (the chip/board is prohibitively expensive and impossible to find on the open market). It’s more expensive and kills self repair but reliable anti theft might be worth it to you. Think of the iPhone model here.
At the end of the day the Find My network exists to be used by different manufacturers [0]. The unpickable lock doesn’t.
[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apples-find-my-networ...
There's two different types of "stolen items"... you got organized theft, stuff like people stealing cars that are then parted out in Eastern Europe [1]. And then you got stuff like people going for joyrides - this is something that can be solved by even a decently hidden AirTag.
[1] https://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/news/autoeinbruch-report...
And joy rides are the worst of all because the perpetrators aren’t around by the time you locate your car of bike. Locating it is actually the least of the worries, it’s usually crashed somewhere or thrown in the river.
But a phone, e-bike, or expensive camera, etc. are better served by integrated “Find My”. If it gets to Shenzen it’s lost anyway but otherwise removing the activation locks or location mechanism in practice will destroy the core of the device.
Locking an AirTag behind a mechanical lock cannot achieve the same. It takes a minute to pick or drill the lock and ditch the AirTag in an envelope to Shenzen. Think of LPL and what lock can prevent that. The lock is still the weakest link and if it can’t protect the bike directly, adding layers of complication directly relying on the same weak link seems pointless.
If Apple's position is - "then don't buy it", they can come out and say it. They certainly have that right.
They have done that since day one, when AirTags shipped with anti-tracking features enabled...
I ask because I'm at a loss. BLE from these little devices has ~40ft of range on a good day, and even if a mesh network were involved, I fail to see what the airtag could do that would help you recover your item. Sound an alarm? Great, the thief knows where it is now, and they can just yank it out and throw it in the trash. Give you GPS coordinates? Great, that'll really help after you find security, tell them what happened, convince them it's urgent, and explain to them what they're looking at when you show them the app. Of course that all assumes the airtag (or a nearby mesh device) has a useful GPS fix, and the thief hasn't already found the tag and thrown it in a trash can or something.
Imo without these features it would be rather unlikely for a thief to find AirTags quickly or even realize it’s there.
The ~40ft range is more than enough, the global mesh network of all iPhones is the whole point of the AirTags, there’s no “gps fix”.
I'm still stuck on all of the friction involved in actually using airtags as a theft recovery device. Neither the tag or Apple's service can contact police or airport security on its own, so you're spending who-knows-how-long flagging down security, explaining the situation, and waiting for them to relay that message back to an appropriate authority who will go find the thief.
Alternatively, you skip the "talk to security" part entirely and go find the thief yourself (assuming you're comfortable with that sort of confrontation). You're still dealing with a moving target - one that can very easily leave the airport entirely, forcing you to choose between sacrificing your bag and potentially missing your flight, a cab, etc.
You also run into a proliferation issue. The more popular airtags become as a theft-recovery device, the more thieves will know to look for them and remove them from stolen items.
Bury the tracker somewhere too inconvenient to locate and remove quickly, and they'll count on not removing it until later (or they'll just ditch it once it starts beeping).
It has never been advertised for that has it?
Every time this comes up, someone butts in with "they're for lost items, not stolen ones!", which is technically accurate but pedantic beyond reason. "Stolen" is a special case of "lost" for most people. In both cases the object is out of the owner's possession. "Stolen" just means it's deliberately missing and not accidentally so.
I understand, sympathize, and support the idea of making life harder for would-be stalkers. My gut instinct says non-notifying AirTags would make life harder for many more thieves than the self-tattling AirTags does stalkers. Apple and Google agree with each other that inconveniencing those losers outweighs abetting thieves. That's their decision to make. I'd still be irritated if I couldn't find my lost-with-the-help-of-a-thief bike because my AirTag told the thief I was looking for it.
These are hard questions. I can appreciate the challenges. And yet I'd still be highly peeved if I could my AirTag laying on the ground because it alerted a thief who then removed and discarded it.
Seems like the calculus would only make sense when you are talking about big expensive items - cars, boats, RVs. But for those you probably want a non-bluetooth solution.
I only want AirTags or similar to guard against thieves. So if that is not going to work it's quite useless for me. Luckily for bikes, there is https://bikefinder.com/
And also, would it really hold up to just being cut with whatever tools the thief used to cut your bike chain?
This is a 0-sum choice & erring on the side of not letting this product be used for stalking seems like a sane choice. There are stalking products you can go buy that are more expensive that can give you the theft protection you want. Apple's and Google's monitoring network is unfathomably large and can passively monitor any device anywhere in the world. The threat vectors they have to balance against abuse is completely different.
The choice Apple faced clearly isn’t 1 stalking victim against 1,000,000 people unable to get to work. I use that example to show that it’s not as simple as “safety vs annoyance”. Apple and Google ran the numbers and erred on the side of safety. That doesn’t make it an automatic or simple choice.
The stalking issues go well beyond personal safety. Police officers, judges, politicians and cops who now have to worry about someone chucking a $25 airtag in their car which is much easier to do innocuously and those people have power to craft regulations and laws. Abortion rights are even more contentious now & stalking comes up there.
There just isn't a scenario where opting in the entire world-wide smartphone community into enabling mass stalking at a never before price point is a net positive - there just aren't enough poor people with stolen bikes to shift that equation. There's a reason AirTags destroyed Tile - Tile's network is laughably small & would always be that way compared with the reach you get at the OS level. That drastically shifts the threat model.
I understand the personal safety issues. They're important. I get it. That doesn't stop part of me from wishing I could use these cheap, convenient lost item devices to help me track down stuff that wasn't exactly accidentally lost.
As for crime prevention, I think you’re overestimating how much of a benefit that would have. Stolen device protections remove the value from the stolen device. That’s not the case for your stolen bike - thieves don’t actually care if you can track the device because a) knowing where your stolen property is doesn’t actually aide in it getting recovered b) as long as they can move the stolen product along quickly enough the information becomes too stale to action on it (remember - police usually need a search warrant). My cousin’s car got stolen with AirTags in it but he got lucky in that the police did something about it - plenty of news stories of AirTags in cars with people trying to get the police to do something and the police not being able to for a variety of reasons. And that’s cars which are orders of magnitude more expensive than bikes that police won’t bother with. Look up VanMoof theft stories to convince yourself that tracking is useless: https://www.reddit.com/r/vanmoofbicycle/comments/zbexyr/upda...
There are also dedicated devices, such as this one - https://www.t-mobile.com/devices/iot/syncup-gps-tracker-devi... - and lots of companies in China make similar products.
There is a genuine need for anti-theft technology. Apple doesn't have to address that market, likely because they're afraid of brand damage, but stalkers already have plenty of options available.
It’s not just brand damage - passive tracking using every single smartphone opted into the tracking vs active tracking where you have to expend more battery AND pay for an ongoing cellular connection each month is a tangibly different use-case with different threat models.
This math doesn't make sense to me.
You can argue that you'd be more dilligent about recharging but I'd counter that at scale you'd be the outlier. On average I'd actually expect an average battery life when stolen closer to 0 because people wouldn't be diligently recharging them & reattaching them (i.e. either the battery life would be 0 or the device wouldn't be attached to the desired property).
A 14-day battery life would then mean an average of 10.5 days of protection, which isn't too bad.
> You can argue that you'd be more dilligent about recharging but I'd counter that at scale you'd be the outlier.
I don't know about this. For bicycle users, charging their rechargeable headlights and taillights regularly (typically once weekly) is very much a habit already. This is just another thing to charge at the same time, which is a time they aren't riding their bicycle.
That said, I'm saddened that the approach seems shortsighted, since it doesn't sound like it considered a holistic picture, but rather was based on a specific value judgement. This seems to put other issues, like the whiplash around the approach to CSAM into perspective.
If you ever have something stolen, ask the cops how much time and effort they’ll dedicate to finding the stolen goods. They do not care.
So if your bike thief had an iPhone, they'd be able to find the tag anyway?
AFAIK the only major difference is that it's now being baked into the Android OS so people don't need to actively download the app.
When people "misuse" any technology, it seems the consensus nowadays is that the responsibility is shared between the technology creator/owner and law enforcement. Personally, I'm not fully sold as this is mainly a sociopolitical question.
And I think you are taking a very US-centric view. For example, switchblades & similar quick-open knives aren't legal in many jurisdictions. So yes, many countries recognize that tools have a trade-off and are willing to legislate their usage depending on problems being observed.
It's very rare to find a true absolutist on any idealogy unless they're completely blinded - it's just that they draw the line further away than someone else / need a stronger argument to convince them. For example, I'm going to guess that you're not in favor of laissez faire with respect to nuclear weapons & tech - cause that shit is actually really easy and cheap to build these days & the sole difficulty is the regulations that surround it.
I use airtags to not just locate lost stuff, but also as a potential means to find stuff when stolen. Its not about me wanting a way to stalk someone, what a bizarre thing to say!
>It's very rare to find a true absolutist on any idealogy unless they're completely blinded - it's just that they draw the line further away than someone else / need a stronger argument to convince them.
Oh, I'm not a libertarian, I'm firmly pro-government. I'm just not pro-nanny state. I'm willing to compromise if the other side is too. However am I not allowed to complain, even a little?
Please describe how what you’re asking for is different than stalking the people who stole your stuff? More importantly, how would Apple/Google know how to differentiate between the two use-cases?
> However am I not allowed to complain, even a little?
You can always complain but your complaint is pretty non-sensical because this is private corporations making a decision and government isn’t involved, so it’s unclear how this is a nanny state. Go build your own tracker that meets your specifications?
100% indeed...
Stop your screeching that is feeding the asinine moral panic that has resulted in these things becoming worthless for tracking packages and stolen items.
2. Tile is a smaller target, so “I’ve never seen a news story” just means the reach of any such story is smaller.
3. Maybe Tile already has similar protections? It’s against their TOS [1]
4. Tile has been sued for stalking [2]
5. Tile is offering an anti-theft feature provided you have to use biometrics & give them a government ID and you have to agree that they’ll sue you if you use it for stalking [3]. So Tile too is clearly concerned about the stalking problem, they’re already being sued around it, & they’re a drastically smaller target than Apple and Google (no one is going to craft legislation around what Tile is doing). Apple is 3x the size of Tile by itself.
You can disregard it as moral panic but how would you distinguish that from a genuine concern of the potential for an abuse for a technology? Strict liability isn’t popular these days but it has ebbed and flowed as a doctrine. Failure to try to try to do a good faith attempt to prevent this problem would certainly land Apple and Google into hot water when a case of stalking inevitably happens using these devices.
[1] https://support.thetileapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/44102774937...
[2] https://whlawoffices.com/blog/why-was-tile-sued-for-tracking...
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/16/tile-takes-extreme-steps-t...
5. If Apple launched an AirTag Pro at twice the price with these controls but otherwise identical hardware, I'd be all over it. They're leaving money on the table.
Here's Tile adding anti-stalking features: https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/17/tile-launches-its-anti-sta...
So which is it? Is it unjustified moral panic with 0 evidence of harm & Tile isn't doing anything or are you just upset that these big companies aren't building the product you want to buy?
With 5 you're now shifting goal posts by introducing a non-sequiter to my point 5. I've clearly highlighted that Apple always balances money-making opportunities against their values around privacy & public safety. No one is forcing you to buy this product. You should also fully expect to see Tile utilize this standard so that they can leverage the reach of having every smartphone in the world scanning for these instead of just other Tile customers.
(That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Doing pilot studies is a good idea.)
The anti-stalking bias degrades the product for people who've bought an AirTag and become victims of theft. It's a limited population. People are unaffected by default.
The anti-theft bias means everybody is a potential victim of stalking. If I have no interest in AirTags, anybody else can still tape one to the bottom of my car and track me wherever I go. Everybody is potentially affected.
Even if theft is far more common than stalking, an anti-theft bias would be a tough position for Apple to defend if it means they're potentially facilitating stalking for the entire population. It may not be ideal, but I can understand it.
I suspect if Apple went the Anti-Theft route, thieves would not stop thieving, they would just start searching large stolen items for air tags before bringing it to wherever they may.
(And no, this isn’t connected to current politics—I’ve not known cops to care about tracking down stolen good no matter how much evidence you can hand them, since at least the 90s)
AirTag isn't the right product for you. Buy a tracker from somebody else.
This feels incredibly minimizing for people who have been stalked. Or people fleeing domestic abuse, human trafficking, or other forms of abuse where controlling a person’s movement is a large part of the harm being inflicted.
Stalking covers a wide range of activity that impacts people who are usually in a vulnerable or dangerous situation. The people who would use tags to track people aren’t just “losers”, they’re pimps, rapists, murderers, abusive spouses, and so many other awful things.
Inconveniencing them far outweighs someone stealing your luggage.
I get significantly better responsiveness from them at an Australian airport or Singapore airport than I do at Bangkok airport. That doesn't mean they don't work, it just means it's unrealistic to expect minimum wage baggage handlers in Thailand to have an iPhone in their pocket.
There's a good bit of separation between the cabin and the cargo hold. I imagine it could be pretty difficult to get a read from a low power tag deep in a bag in a pile of other luggage with several other big metal plates between.
I wonder if they would find a way to use this to disable ALL the airtags in an area.
For example, put a UAL airtag on a plane, and use that to disable all the other airtags.
Unless you think a huge, high-end airline "got confused"? It wouldn't have been against regs even if ti was a lithium ion battery because it's so tiny. What do you think they do about the millions of electric toothbrushes and shavers people travel with that have much larger lithium ion batteries?
They retracted it because it ended up causing a Striesand Effect, putting a lot of sunlight on how airlines do a very brisk business selling "lost" luggage.
Having dealt with battery regulations with airlines, couriers and postal services many times, yes, yes I do. They routinely fuck it up, even claiming that AA Alkaline batteries are too dangerous to ship.
... and lots of cases of "lost" luggage being due to the fact that decades after implementing paper tags, neither airlines nor bag/trolley manufacturers have gotten their asses together and worked on a standardized way to reduce instances of tags simply getting ripped off during handling.
Like, it wouldn't even be that hard. Place a long, wide recess maybe 2mm deep along the entire trolley, where the tag can be stuck in and is guarded that way against conveyor belts or other bags ripping off the tag.
And maybe invent a system where you have to scan your boarding pass and the tag barcode to leave the baggage claim area to reduce the amount of cases where people have taken the wrong bag.