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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Are airtags still useful for eg. tracking a stolen bike? Or will it now alert the thief within minutes that the bike contains a tracker?

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I don't think you can simultaneously limit unwanted tracking and still track thieves surreptitiously. Basically both are "unwanted tracking" by the "victim".

Well now the airtags give the thief a way to locate the airtag and remove it--in addition to telling them that the air tag is there.

Destroy the speaker and hide the device inside a tire, steerer tube, or other such place?

I mean the thief will get notified, but what are they going to do? Dismount tires, disassemble steering assembly, remove the grips, undo the saddle, bottle mount, Garmin mount, bash guard, lights, etc? This all takes time and skill, it can’t be done on the spot and if they dragged the bike home or to a fence they have already disclosed the location.

Would those locations actually work? A tire is a physically violent place, and a steering tube looks a lot like a faraday cage.

Only one way to find out!

Also this: https://www.amazon.com/EFEALL-Anti-Theft-Protection-Compatib...

And this: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/various/fork-cork-inspired-s...

There's an entire market for this (and I own two for this express purpose): https://www.etsy.com/listing/1015753561/the-original-apple-a...

Now you've increased the motivation for thieves to carry EMP guns with them... they already do that to deactivate merchandise loss prevention tags (RFID).

There are details not exposed outside of NDA, but my suspicion is that there is a requirement that MAC rotation happen more slowly, like every 15 minutes, and it is a bluetooth MAC and the actual GPS/cell based 'movement' which together trigger an alert.

If a bike's Find My support randomized its MAC on every broadcast, it may very well not be possible to tell that it is not a new device each time. That might not be allowed per the licensing agreement, and that might be something that Apple has heuristics to detect and alert on.

I believe an AirTag stops randomizing some broadcast identifier when it’s separated from its owner. The AirTag by itself has no location awareness. But when an iDevice sees the same separated AirTag at multiple locations it fires the alert.

Airtags were never supposed to be used to track stolen things, but to retrieve lost things.

People complaining about airtags being nerfed were misusing them in the first place

Surely you can see how that would be a poor design choice. It's quite a common use case for tracking devices like the AirTag.

How is that a poor design? How would you design it to not alert the thief but alert someone they are being stalked?

You can only have 1. Can’t have both.

It is poor design only if we are calling this misuse. For the record I don't think Apple is doing anything of the sort. They knew exactly how these AirTags would be used, so they wouldn't blame the user as misusing the tags.

You can use a fork as a spoon but you don't get to complain about how bad it performs. Nowhere in Apple's marketing is the airtag advertised as a device to track stolen things

That doesn't really change anything. Throughout the design phase Apple was fully aware that a large portion of users would use AirTags this way.

> People complaining about airtags being nerfed were misusing them in the first place

I sense the "you're holding it wrong" philosophy never really changed at Apple.

That may be the case, but not in this case. AirTags had anti stalking built in from the start and were specifically marketed for lost items over stolen items.

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