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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

Especially because apple has a lot riding on their use of crowdsourcing even though they have a privacy stance.

Personally I think privacy and crowdsourcing cannot go together, no matter how much algebra and privacy boilerplate is thrown in.

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> privacy and crowdsourcing cannot go together

Not to downplay the difficulty of these things, but cryptography literally enables things that seem impossible, so I wouldn't write it off that easily

Note that Tile already does this mesh network of crowdsourcing. The issue is that Apple pushes privacy so much that it's bound to be a bigger story when they mess up compared to others, as stated in the OP.

If someone slips an AirTag in your car to stalk you, your own phone would enable your stalker because by default it would automatically update the location of the AirTag, even if you are not an AirTag user.

It is a bit different if your stalker used Tile to track you. You'd have to download that app and opt in.

No, you wouldn’t. It would only be necessary for the stalker to do it and then slip the Tile in with your belongings.

Tiles can be marked lost until found by other users with the Tile app.

The main difference is Apple made it work way better and more accessible. Tile users are pretty rare in the wild.

Apple mostly got there because they already had so many phones. As Jobs would've said, Tile is a feature, not a product.

Unfortunately things start getting weird/potentially negative at scale, but at least Apple is trying to get ahead of the problem.

The problem is that there is some benefit in integrating almost any service into the growing Apple ecosystem and almost any product could conceiveably benefit from become an Apple feature. I think regulators need to draw the line somewhere to protect competition.

> your own phone would enable your stalker

No it wouldn't. If your phone can track an AirTag being used to stalk you, it can also alert you to this stalking.

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