I don’t think anyone is making a claim that we should live with this according to first principles. I think people are saying this trade-off currently exists because it doesn’t seem to be economically or technologically feasible to solve both well.
How do you propose making an improvement to tracking technology that reduces theft while at the same time not assisting stalking?
One idea: if you report your AirTag as stolen, then it can continue to track the item, but you lose the ability to see where it is. In so doing you hand off tracking capability to some authority. This could be an improvement to the extent that the authority is trustworthy and well behaved. Unfortunately, such properties are not guaranteed across the globe. This would create more incentives for bribery for example.
It would be if stalking happened at the same frequency as property theft, but the rates are ridiculously lopsided.
So much property theft happens that we don't bother reporting almost any of it.
But I'd really, really not like to find out someone was following me around.
I bet Apple could produce some really interesting data from these tools and others that could be used to proactively target stalkers and investigate them before their actions escalate to violence.
Let's get Tom Cruise in here and whoop some ass!
But the impact of the two activities is also lopsided:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_matrix
Stalking can potentially result in rape and death, even if there's a low probability of stalking happening in general.