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Comment by warning26 | Hacker News Reader

Hot take: There is no conceivable way to make Airtags safe, and they should be banned entirely.

The problem is that by leveraging Apple devices to get worldwide geolocation and data service effectively for free, they make tracking trivially easy in a way that no other entity could.

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Should all GPS trackers be banned then? The problem with AirTags is they're accessible; these problems have always existed with any kind of GPS tracking.

GPS trackers require that you sign up for cell service, which is a non-trivial obstacle to overcome, and opens the user up to tracking by law enforcement.

Thanks to Apple's usage of their own proprietary network, both difficulties are automatically negated.

You need to link your telephone number to use an AirTag indirectly - i.e. You need an AppleID to link the AirTag to, and you are required to provide a telephone number in order to create an AppleID (which is validated via SMS).

In principle, Apple has the ability to match the AirTag to a phone number (if they do this or not, I don't know).

To add to this, anyone can scan an AirTag that they've found, with NFC, and get the serial and last four digits of the owners phone number.

Serious question – which commercially available GPS tracker can be used for this purpose? I have been looking for one for years (not for stalking, I promise) and absolutely nothing fits the bill. They are all large (impossible to slip into, say, a purse), expensive, have minimum $20/mo subscriptions (with credit card registration), require you to register a SIM card, and have a battery life measured in days.

Now you just have to walk into an Apple Store with $20 cash and set up a fake Apple ID.

They tend to be larger and more expensive, because they generally need to contain a GPS receiver to know their location and a cell phone transmitter and data plan to transmit that location.

Invoxia

It is non trivial to setup an apple id without tying it to your identifiable information. Using an airtag to track someone will notify them if they have any apple products or check with a non apple phone.

Vodafone curve is a commercially available gps tracker that is about the same size and cost of an airtag. A vodafone sim is £3 a month, and you can sign up for a pre paid sim card without a credit card or providing identifiable info. There is a bike version that ties into a bike tail light for charging. The battery life can be much longer this way.

There are non cell based ones like the See.Sense AIR, the battery life is generally much longer

$4 GPS Tracker https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Mini-Car-GSM-GPRS-GPS...

$5 Pre-Paid SIM https://www.amazon.com/SpeedTalk-Mobile-Tracking-Locators-Wi...

I think one (more expensive) answer is to use the best tracking service that currently exists: Google Android OS. Buy a small android phone [1]. Put it in power save mode, to reduce power draw, and drop it in.

This would be much less alarming than some tracking device or an AirTag, especially if you put some innocent looking picture on the Home Screen, so it looks like some kid dropped their phone in their purse, on accident.

Reading this comment thread, I assume many here would agree that we should ban all small smartphones.

[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/best-small-android-phones-7...

Regardless of how convincing you can be that banning them would be a good idea, under what legal framework could they conceivably be banned (at least in the United States)? You can literally buy guns just as easily in many places in the United States (granted, guns are more expensive). Maybe the FCC could make try to argue that they have the authority?

I don't see how you can ban AirTags without also banning products like Tile

The key difference is in Apple's market penetration -- Tile tried to build something like Apple's Find My Network™ but it was largely useless because it only worked if random people near the tag were running the Tile app in the background.

I understand why people are concerned about AirTags and not Tile. What I'm saying is, it seems difficult to ban a given implementation of a technology based solely on the number of users. I don't think a framework even exists for us to say "Tile cannot allow their app to be installed on more than X number of smartphones".

Presumably any new ban would also cover Tile.

Or any GPS enabled device that also has a cellular connection

You might as well say the same for any product that can be misused by criminals. I use crowbars to lift heavy objects, but they can also be easily used for leveraging open doors that I have no legal access to...

mmm the free part

maybe they should make airtag operators accumulate freely tradeable data credits and iPhones reject relaying location data without a balance of credits

helium network works this way

for airtags it would make bad behavior more expensive and maybe another way to track bad actors or disable their ability to be a bad actor.

or not. just saw the free part

What is unsafe about airtags that is unique?

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