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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Yep. That ruins half the value of AirTags. It's a limitation that their competitors, like Tile, didn't have until very recently.

Every time this comes up, someone butts in with "they're for lost items, not stolen ones!", which is technically accurate but pedantic beyond reason. "Stolen" is a special case of "lost" for most people. In both cases the object is out of the owner's possession. "Stolen" just means it's deliberately missing and not accidentally so.

I understand, sympathize, and support the idea of making life harder for would-be stalkers. My gut instinct says non-notifying AirTags would make life harder for many more thieves than the self-tattling AirTags does stalkers. Apple and Google agree with each other that inconveniencing those losers outweighs abetting thieves. That's their decision to make. I'd still be irritated if I couldn't find my lost-with-the-help-of-a-thief bike because my AirTag told the thief I was looking for it.

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I think the idea is that thieves that have already been successful at removing the item from your possession are much less of a threat to your life than someone who is actively tracking where you are. It's a debate worth having, which one should be the priority, but I can appreciate the logic of doing it this way.

I can, too. I can also think of counterexamples: if a person is broke, they use their bike to get to work, and someone steels it, that's going to give them a very, very bad week. There's some hard calculus there I'm glad I'm not in charge of. Blocking 1 stalker is clearly more important than blocking one sunglasses thief. I suspect that blocking 1,000 bike thieves would have a bigger societal benefit than blocking 1 stalker.

These are hard questions. I can appreciate the challenges. And yet I'd still be highly peeved if I could my AirTag laying on the ground because it alerted a thief who then removed and discarded it.

Stalking is way more common than successfully recovering items with a tracker like this. It’s usually a bad idea to even try. I followed a tracker into someone’s yard only to discover that the thief had thrown the tracker over the fence and I was just trespassing.

I think we can agree that victims of domestic abuse and stalking have a risk of physical harm and that physical harm trumps property rights / being peeved right?

This is a 0-sum choice & erring on the side of not letting this product be used for stalking seems like a sane choice. There are stalking products you can go buy that are more expensive that can give you the theft protection you want. Apple's and Google's monitoring network is unfathomably large and can passively monitor any device anywhere in the world. The threat vectors they have to balance against abuse is completely different.

You say that right after I give an example of where property crimes can seriously mess up someone’s life. Yes, 1 person’s personal safety is more important than 1 person losing a convenience item. If it were a choice between 1 person’s safety and 1,000,000 persons’ transportation, I’d pick the latter every time.

The choice Apple faced clearly isn’t 1 stalking victim against 1,000,000 people unable to get to work. I use that example to show that it’s not as simple as “safety vs annoyance”. Apple and Google ran the numbers and erred on the side of safety. That doesn’t make it an automatic or simple choice.

Think about it this way - without AirTags and with AirTags + anti-stalking, your bike theft scenario is unchanged. Without airtags and with AirTags without anti-stalking, your personal safety scenario is worse. Those are the discussions I remember when I worked on CoreLocation at Apple. It had nothing to do with running the numbers, at least pre-development. I would be slightly surprised if someone tried to put numbers to that - Apple is pretty values-based when it comes to those kinds of decisions.

The stalking issues go well beyond personal safety. Police officers, judges, politicians and cops who now have to worry about someone chucking a $25 airtag in their car which is much easier to do innocuously and those people have power to craft regulations and laws. Abortion rights are even more contentious now & stalking comes up there.

There just isn't a scenario where opting in the entire world-wide smartphone community into enabling mass stalking at a never before price point is a net positive - there just aren't enough poor people with stolen bikes to shift that equation. There's a reason AirTags destroyed Tile - Tile's network is laughably small & would always be that way compared with the reach you get at the OS level. That drastically shifts the threat model.

We'll never know. The personal safety issues are important and I'd never argue otherwise. Having cheap, effective crime deterrence seems like it could be a nice thing if you could wave a magic wand and remove the stalking angle. Apple keeps adding features to those ends, like the new Stolen Device Protection updates, that shift the risk-reward math for device thieves. I could still buy a cheap used phone and stick a SIM in it, hide it in a victim's car, and use that to track them without alerting them to it. And still, we get nice tools like Find My because more people are likely to lose their phone or have it stolen than to stalk their exes with it.

I understand the personal safety issues. They're important. I get it. That doesn't stop part of me from wishing I could use these cheap, convenient lost item devices to help me track down stuff that wasn't exactly accidentally lost.

Buying an old phone or watch and using FindMy is a compelling counter argument. The problem is that the cost of that is meaningfully higher - it’s a $25 one time purchase vs ~$50-100 + a recurring ~$30/month. The size of the device is another one - the phone or watch is substantially bigger than an AirTag (or how small an AirTag could become over time). Finally, a phone or watch has a much shorter battery life to support tracking. You could trade off accuracy for a much longer battery life, but you’re still capped to maybe a couple of days or even a week if you really know what you’re doing. That’s compared with ~1 year of unattended AirTag use.

As for crime prevention, I think you’re overestimating how much of a benefit that would have. Stolen device protections remove the value from the stolen device. That’s not the case for your stolen bike - thieves don’t actually care if you can track the device because a) knowing where your stolen property is doesn’t actually aide in it getting recovered b) as long as they can move the stolen product along quickly enough the information becomes too stale to action on it (remember - police usually need a search warrant). My cousin’s car got stolen with AirTags in it but he got lucky in that the police did something about it - plenty of news stories of AirTags in cars with people trying to get the police to do something and the police not being able to for a variety of reasons. And that’s cars which are orders of magnitude more expensive than bikes that police won’t bother with. Look up VanMoof theft stories to convince yourself that tracking is useless: https://www.reddit.com/r/vanmoofbicycle/comments/zbexyr/upda...

Smart watches are not meaningfully larger than airtags if you take the wristband off, and a cheap prepaid plan for $5 or $10 would be more than sufficient. You also don't need FindMy because the cell network itself can triangulate.

There are also dedicated devices, such as this one - https://www.t-mobile.com/devices/iot/syncup-gps-tracker-devi... - and lots of companies in China make similar products.

There is a genuine need for anti-theft technology. Apple doesn't have to address that market, likely because they're afraid of brand damage, but stalkers already have plenty of options available.

As I said, the battery model is drastically different for active trackers. 7 days of surreptitious monitoring vs 1 year changes the risk profile of noticing these trackers / how many you can have before the logistics of recharging all of them wears on you. And if you’re unlikely to recharge each of these every single day, your protection drops on average to 3.5 days.

It’s not just brand damage - passive tracking using every single smartphone opted into the tracking vs active tracking where you have to expend more battery AND pay for an ongoing cellular connection each month is a tangibly different use-case with different threat models.

> And if you’re unlikely to recharge each of these every single day, your protection drops on average to 3.5 days.

This math doesn't make sense to me.

I'm assuming you're waiting until the end of the 7 day battery life to recharge it (e.g. you recharge every Sunday) and I'm assuming the probability of a theft is uniformly random throughout the week. Thus, on average, you'd expect stolen devices to only have half the battery left because there's equally many stolen on the first day (7 days of battery left) as on the last day (0 days), equally many stolen on the second day (6 days left) vs penultimate day (1 day left) etc etc. At scale, that would average out to stolen property having attached devices having half the advertised battery life.

You can argue that you'd be more dilligent about recharging but I'd counter that at scale you'd be the outlier. On average I'd actually expect an average battery life when stolen closer to 0 because people wouldn't be diligently recharging them & reattaching them (i.e. either the battery life would be 0 or the device wouldn't be attached to the desired property).

I don't think people would only charge when the battery runs out. More likely people would charge weekly, say on a weekend night or during their weekly WFH day or something like that.

A 14-day battery life would then mean an average of 10.5 days of protection, which isn't too bad.

> You can argue that you'd be more dilligent about recharging but I'd counter that at scale you'd be the outlier.

I don't know about this. For bicycle users, charging their rechargeable headlights and taillights regularly (typically once weekly) is very much a habit already. This is just another thing to charge at the same time, which is a time they aren't riding their bicycle.

Thanks for sharing your experience at Apple. It's really valuable to understand exactly how decisions are made at big tech companies, especially for sensitive issues like this.

That said, I'm saddened that the approach seems shortsighted, since it doesn't sound like it considered a holistic picture, but rather was based on a specific value judgement. This seems to put other issues, like the whiplash around the approach to CSAM into perspective.

That isn‘t enough reason to make these things useless. A knife can be used to kill someone and to cut meat. And we still haven’t removed the sharp edge, have we?

Even if the tracker didn’t alert the thief, how hard is it for a thief to find a tracker on the bike on their own? I don’t think an AirTag is going to save too many bicycles.

Seems like the calculus would only make sense when you are talking about big expensive items - cars, boats, RVs. But for those you probably want a non-bluetooth solution.

The bikes getting stolen here are people's "cars". Electric cargo bikes with room for two children is what people use to get around. Getting that stolen ruins daily logistics for people. They cost up to $10k, which is a significant amount of money. People should really rethink the societal cost of bike thieving, they are both more expensive and more integral in how people move around. Not just children's toys.

I only want AirTags or similar to guard against thieves. So if that is not going to work it's quite useless for me. Luckily for bikes, there is https://bikefinder.com/

So I've got the tools to cut that thick bike chain but I somehow can't pull device inside the handlebars out or destroy it? It looks like their special tool is just a star security bit.

And also, would it really hold up to just being cut with whatever tools the thief used to cut your bike chain?

There is a big liability issue for these companies if they say its for tracking stolen items. Anecdotally according to reddit threads, police don't care if you have the tracker showing its at the thiefs house, thats not enough evidence to do anything and its not an active crime with people in danger worth being prompt about. law enforcement also don't want you to confront the thief due to the risk of that situation escalating. If these companies start advertising for stolen items they are effectively encouraging vigilanteism and you can imagine how much of a legal headache that will be as soon as the first airtag user is shot dead.

It’s not the police can’t do it, it’s that they don‘t want to do it.

Airtag pinging a location that may not even be accurate is not a reasonable cause for search nor even enough information to know where to search in some cases. Imagine the airtag says it is in an apartment complex. Which of the hundreds of units in that building do you decide to barge through and search? All you have is a 2d map and 35ft resolution on a good day.

It's not enough for a search but it's enough to knock on the door and ask.

How do you expect this to work out? "Hey did you steal my phone?" Again if its a multistory building you aren't finding the correct door.

Yes, but it should be enough if the victim of the theft was able to walk into the store and see his bike there.

If you ever have something stolen, ask the cops how much time and effort they’ll dedicate to finding the stolen goods. They do not care.

Not sure what I'm missing here, as Airtags have long worked like this - that as long as you had an iPhone or an Android phone with the anti-tracking app installed, you'd be notified of being stalked.

So if your bike thief had an iPhone, they'd be able to find the tag anyway?

AFAIK the only major difference is that it's now being baked into the Android OS so people don't need to actively download the app.

Yes, I think the PR backlash for such features is too great that it spoils them for the rest of us.

When people "misuse" any technology, it seems the consensus nowadays is that the responsibility is shared between the technology creator/owner and law enforcement. Personally, I'm not fully sold as this is mainly a sociopolitical question.

Thinking system-wide changes through is what public policy is all about, and the same should probably be true of shipping devices in the tens of millions.

(That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Doing pilot studies is a good idea.)

I think you're right. I get the push toward that consensus. There are plenty of makers (cough cough Purdue Pharmaceuticals) who make awful, abusable things and then say, hey, it's not our fault people are misusing them! It still sucks getting caught in the middle.

It would 100% be used for stalking & be directly contributing to easier violence against victims. Not sure I buy the argument it's purely because of image PR reasons vs there being a genuine well-founded harm-minimization strategy for why it's designed this way.

You can call anything you do as a "genuine well-founded harm-minimization strategy", but nobody is out there banning knives and gardening shears and shovels and baseball bats and other tools that can contribute towards "easier violence" because of the cost to society. You either have an absolutist/ideological view on this, or you're willing to compromise. Ultimately its a matter of perception, and then too, some people are easier to convince than others.

Countries like the UK are absolutely banning knives, forks, etc.

I really don't understand your argument here. No one is banning you from building stalking devices. Apple and Google have chosen by themselves not to do that & are working to standardize their particular implementation (which you can also see in this thread there's a lot of support for). That's very different from banning knives and gardening shears.

And I think you are taking a very US-centric view. For example, switchblades & similar quick-open knives aren't legal in many jurisdictions. So yes, many countries recognize that tools have a trade-off and are willing to legislate their usage depending on problems being observed.

It's very rare to find a true absolutist on any idealogy unless they're completely blinded - it's just that they draw the line further away than someone else / need a stronger argument to convince them. For example, I'm going to guess that you're not in favor of laissez faire with respect to nuclear weapons & tech - cause that shit is actually really easy and cheap to build these days & the sole difficulty is the regulations that surround it.

>I really don't understand your argument here. No one is banning you from building stalking devices

I use airtags to not just locate lost stuff, but also as a potential means to find stuff when stolen. Its not about me wanting a way to stalk someone, what a bizarre thing to say!

>It's very rare to find a true absolutist on any idealogy unless they're completely blinded - it's just that they draw the line further away than someone else / need a stronger argument to convince them.

Oh, I'm not a libertarian, I'm firmly pro-government. I'm just not pro-nanny state. I'm willing to compromise if the other side is too. However am I not allowed to complain, even a little?

> Its not about me wanting a way to stalk someone, what a bizarre thing to say!

Please describe how what you’re asking for is different than stalking the people who stole your stuff? More importantly, how would Apple/Google know how to differentiate between the two use-cases?

> However am I not allowed to complain, even a little?

You can always complain but your complaint is pretty non-sensical because this is private corporations making a decision and government isn’t involved, so it’s unclear how this is a nanny state. Go build your own tracker that meets your specifications?

And yet tiles have been out for something like a decade and I've never seen a news story about them being used for stalking.

100% indeed...

Stop your screeching that is feeding the asinine moral panic that has resulted in these things becoming worthless for tracking packages and stolen items.

How would anyone know they're being stalked that way if the device explicitly doesn't notify the person it's stalking?

1. You need to go compare the reach of how good Tile’s tracking is vs literally nearly every smartphone being opted-in transparently into tracking these tags. This is drastically different.

2. Tile is a smaller target, so “I’ve never seen a news story” just means the reach of any such story is smaller.

3. Maybe Tile already has similar protections? It’s against their TOS [1]

4. Tile has been sued for stalking [2]

5. Tile is offering an anti-theft feature provided you have to use biometrics & give them a government ID and you have to agree that they’ll sue you if you use it for stalking [3]. So Tile too is clearly concerned about the stalking problem, they’re already being sued around it, & they’re a drastically smaller target than Apple and Google (no one is going to craft legislation around what Tile is doing). Apple is 3x the size of Tile by itself.

You can disregard it as moral panic but how would you distinguish that from a genuine concern of the potential for an abuse for a technology? Strict liability isn’t popular these days but it has ebbed and flowed as a doctrine. Failure to try to try to do a good faith attempt to prevent this problem would certainly land Apple and Google into hot water when a case of stalking inevitably happens using these devices.

[1] https://support.thetileapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/44102774937...

[2] https://whlawoffices.com/blog/why-was-tile-sued-for-tracking...

[3] https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/16/tile-takes-extreme-steps-t...

3. Tile doesn't (or at least didn't as of when I replaced my last one with an AirTag). I don't put much weight in the TOS bit; I'm sure it's against Apple's, too.

5. If Apple launched an AirTag Pro at twice the price with these controls but otherwise identical hardware, I'd be all over it. They're leaving money on the table.

Here's a news story about stalking: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/06/business/apple-airtag-law...

Here's Tile adding anti-stalking features: https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/17/tile-launches-its-anti-sta...

So which is it? Is it unjustified moral panic with 0 evidence of harm & Tile isn't doing anything or are you just upset that these big companies aren't building the product you want to buy?

With 5 you're now shifting goal posts by introducing a non-sequiter to my point 5. I've clearly highlighted that Apple always balances money-making opportunities against their values around privacy & public safety. No one is forcing you to buy this product. You should also fully expect to see Tile utilize this standard so that they can leverage the reach of having every smartphone in the world scanning for these instead of just other Tile customers.

It's a fundamental tradeoff. And who's affected in each case?

The anti-stalking bias degrades the product for people who've bought an AirTag and become victims of theft. It's a limited population. People are unaffected by default.

The anti-theft bias means everybody is a potential victim of stalking. If I have no interest in AirTags, anybody else can still tape one to the bottom of my car and track me wherever I go. Everybody is potentially affected.

Even if theft is far more common than stalking, an anti-theft bias would be a tough position for Apple to defend if it means they're potentially facilitating stalking for the entire population. It may not be ideal, but I can understand it.

You also have the situation where if air tags did not have the anti-stalking features, there would be far more stalkers in the world. I'm sure there's many people who would not buy a GPS logger and connected to someone's car, but they might "forget" an airtag in someone's car, were it not for the anti-stalking alerts.

I suspect if Apple went the Anti-Theft route, thieves would not stop thieving, they would just start searching large stolen items for air tags before bringing it to wherever they may.

I believe you’ll find that tracking your stolen items is just a recipe for frustration when you tell the police where your shit is and they act like you’re the asshole when you expect them to do anything about it.

(And no, this isn’t connected to current politics—I’ve not known cops to care about tracking down stolen good no matter how much evidence you can hand them, since at least the 90s)

Apple doesn't want stalkers and they definitely don't want any part of leading people into confrontations with thieves.

AirTag isn't the right product for you. Buy a tracker from somebody else.

This so much. Confronting thieves is always a bad idea. I prefer to view it in a positive light. The thief probably needed the stolen item more than I did. The thief is happy, I am happy for the thief. The overall happiness in the world has increased!

Imagine being this cucked.

> inconveniencing those losers outweighs abetting thieves

This feels incredibly minimizing for people who have been stalked. Or people fleeing domestic abuse, human trafficking, or other forms of abuse where controlling a person’s movement is a large part of the harm being inflicted.

Stalking covers a wide range of activity that impacts people who are usually in a vulnerable or dangerous situation. The people who would use tags to track people aren’t just “losers”, they’re pimps, rapists, murderers, abusive spouses, and so many other awful things.

Inconveniencing them far outweighs someone stealing your luggage.

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