But taking a step back and acknowledging the amount of heat Apple has gotten for releasing a legitimately useful product while we drown in an ocean of guns always makes me chuckle uncomfortably.
Shoplifting should be not ignored until first catch all the murderers. see "whataboutism"
Meanwhile there are explicit legal protections for gun manufacturers despite the vast majority of murders in the US being with guns that people have no real reason to have (see: the rest of the civilized world, and its lack of active shooter drills and training)
Anyways, as a result of that I went on AliExpress and bought a small device which is supposed to be able to be mounted on things and track their location. You put a SIM card and an SD-card in it and it will report its location.
I didn’t get around to mounting it on the electric scooter yet. But something that stood out to me when it came in the mail is that it was declared as being something else and I was like, is this because people buy this thing and they don’t want their spouse to know what they bought or something. That’s a bit creepy, considering it’s a GPS tracking device.
Definitely a “they can’t inspect them all” aspect to it.
It's not FCC licensed so illegal to sell. Not carrier approved either so they'll get pissy if they figure that out. And likely the hardware design itself is stolen.
Con: The FCC will also be able to find your things!
The argument is rarely, 'ignore Y because of X' or similar. Rather its 'if were were to apply this standard correctly, we would have other priorities'.
So here that if we were to apply the 'regulate/remove objects which change the social environment to make it less safe' standard to prioritise our concern, I'd imagine find-my-device systems wouldnt rank highly: indeed, we might find these systems make it more safe.
So, in a complex series of tradeoffs where all actions have a cost (time, effort, etc.) the claim is about where one ought pay that cost.
I think its fine to show that the standards people have lead to contradictions.
Like in a city where homelessness is rampant, and the city government meets up and the first thing they talk about is littering ordinances or if there's enough sun/shade in the park, and then oops, all out of time to talk about homelessness - let's just put that on the agenda for next time right after we talk about changing trash pickup day.
To say, eg., "my country did X too!" when "Country B did X" could be whataboutism, or it could be pointing to an international game with its own rules that all players are complicit in -- such an observation is a kind of rebuke to moralism.
Here we can read this sort of reply to those who worry about airtags in a similar sort of way: what, exactly does the principle, "limit objects which make a social environment less safe" do if applied mechanically -- rather than as a sort of circumstantial moralism about some recent headline.
Perhaps often, then, whataboutism is really a kind of distaste for hastey moralism about circumstantial matters
How would regulating guns make tracking less problematic?
It's still a problem in societies which have gun regulations. You can murder someone without a gun, too. Stalking is there without guns too.
Let's just face the obvious: bringing up a huge and dramatic topic like gun regulation makes the issue which is the topic here look less dramatic. This is it. There isn't more to it. The argument makes no other senese here.
Alice has lost her pen that may have no ink in it. Alice has also lost her bank card. Alice has just spend hours searching for her pen. What does this say about Alice?
It says alice gets swept up in solving "problems" that arent even clearly problems (does she need a pen without ink?) all the while not even basically engaged in real problems.
Here: do airtags make society less safe, or more safe? Does it, eg., supress theft? Does it enable more criminals who would go on to other commit crimes to be caught early? (And so on..)
In other words what does our being hastily swept up in one downside of one piece of technology tell us?
Now, if you think airtags are serious threats to social saftey, the above doenst apply. But I dont read the guns point as procrasting whataboutism -- rather I read it as a claim that airtags are pens-without-ink and this is obvious when contrasted with a more actually pressing matter.
I read it as a claim that we're being sweptup in moralising about a non-moral problem
You can fix both problems at the same time.
If you consider arguments by certain groups advocating for the fix of the problem, they aren't even the same groups.
Cars kill more people in the US than just about everything. Yet we still drive. I don't think the world agrees with you.