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Comment by kevinmchugh | Hacker News Reader

Don't the anti-stalking features of AirTags make them poorly suited to anti-theft uses? If I were a professional bike thief I'd have an iphone just to get notified when I've stolen a bike with an airtag on it

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If the AirTag is well hidden enough, I wonder how many bike thiefs would just cut their losses and leave the bike behind at this point.

The AirTag will beep if it's been separated from its owner for long enough, so presumably the thief would be able to find it relatively quickly once that happens.

It is easy to disable the beep. I did it to one in about 5 minutes with basically an exacto knife.

Oh, interesting. So it disables entirely (i.e., it's only good as a theft detection device now)?

Its only real use, I think, is to find something that's been lost. They report their presence to all iPhones - including that of a thief. They do that to protect against use by stalkers.

Its still useful for its original purpose - especially if your phone has the UWB stuff so you can play the "warmer, warmer" game. Just one less trick up its sleeve.

You can mutilate the tag to disable the speaker. It won't disable the alert on others' phones (including the thief), but it may be a blessing more than a curse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32159861

How does that work? And why would the iPhone do that?

Anti-stalking? Seems they overlooked a huge flaw during product design that nulled a whole potentially billion $ product.

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