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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
you should probably move
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Artificially limiting the use of a product goes against the hacker culture.
I mean, technically you are — doesn't mean anyone will listen.
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...
This is a safety feature and its been there since day one.
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.
There are any number of products allowing you to mount them inconspicuously.
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.
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.
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.