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Comment by dewey | Hacker News Reader

There's so many battery powered GPS trackers (with even longer battery life) and these don't have any "reporting" mechanism. I don't really understand the criticism against AirTags. Just because they are affordable, or because Apple drama brings many clicks?

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Read the article and you'll notice that the AirTag gave the stalker plausible deniability. You don't accidentally lose a GPS-tracker — find one of these in your car and you'll know someone is stalking/tracking you — but for an AirTag (or similar product) it's much easier to claim that the stalker uses them for their own possessions, and that they simply lost that one. The stalker in the article (partly) got away with that excuse: he claimed to have just lost the AirTag when he put the child seat back in the car of his ex with whom he has shared custody.

This time. But it was reported, found, identified to him. With another tracker they might never have found out.

Unless you have criminal connections it is hard to purchase a GPS tracker without leaving a trail. In this case the ex husband was a clear suspect.

Why does it matter about covering your purchasing tracks? I presume most stalkers believe their targets won’t find the device. If it was found, how are you going to easily know what it is and then identify the owner?

AirTags don’t let you cover any tracks at all. A GPS tracker is easy to buy, without any nefarious connections.

As per the article, a good lawyer can raise sufficient reasonable doubt about Airtags to acquit their client. You may have bought five and "accidentally" lost one. However, it is harder to claim plausible deniability when you purchase a GPS tracker. Of course you can buy GPS trackers everywhere, however, you will leave an evidence trail that is easy for the police to find. Most GPS trackers on Amazon are also much larger in size and more difficult to conceal.

Yes the less specialized something is the harder it is to prove what the intended use case was.

I know guns kill way more people each year than baseball bats, but there were a few people killed with baseball bats last year. It's way easier to buy a baseball bat without leaving evidence, plus it's much easier to claim plausible deniability if you get caught with one, so let's regulate baseball bats.

  > claimed to have just lost the AirTag

If only there were some way to find a lost AirTag.

They only needed plausible deniability because AirTag allows to easily determine it's owner. The ordinary GPS tracker doesn't.

>or because Apple drama brings many clicks?

Most likely this. There was a lot of controversy over a Foxconn factory a few years back, which assembled products for pretty much all big electronics companies. Most of the articles had "iPhone factory" in the headline.

More that, imho, revealed a problem. People were stalking with Tile's before Apple came around. you just had no way to know that unless you happened to notice that your device happened to make a consistent Bluetooth connection (and you were setup with Tile in the first place).

Most battery powered trackers have a battery life of about a week. AirTags last a year. That's possible because they're pretty much passive and Apple's network of iPhones does the actual tracking. No other company can do this.

Plenty of motorcycle gps trackers have battery life in the year range. You don’t need it to send live location data, just a ping every few minutes

You clearly haven't researched Tile. They've been around forever, and last a long time as well.

At least in the US, you're mistake if these are the same problem. The amount of people who have tile software install in the US are nowhere near the amount of iphones out and about (over 50% of phone users).

I did, I found no evidence that their network exists at all in my country.

This isn’t fair, but AirTags are superior (and more of a tracking threat) because the number of iPhones dwarfs the number of phones Tile is installed on.

As a user of tile, I never ran into a problem with not knowing (after 20-30 minutes) where the device was. Simply that it took a while for someone with the tile app installed to randomly wander into range.

I don't understand, you say the reporting mechanism mitigates all the issues?

Airtags are convenient, user friendly. So they are widely used even if there might be technically better alternatives. They would not work as well without half of the planet having iphones. So criticizing Apple is fair.

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