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Comment by JoshTko | Hacker News Reader

The challenge is how you prevent such features being abused by like stalkers

Whitelisting law enforcement so when the owner of the air tag declares it stolen nobody other than a whitelisted law enforcement org could view its location and when they did that creates an audit log?

^ exactly.

And since the user has the original key, it'd have to be voluntary surrender. After you turn your key in, you lose access.

The best part is the whole thing could be reviewable and added to a public immutable ledger, encrypted, to make the whole process, transition, and access transparent for courts later. Wouldn't it be great if more investigations happened that way?

And if you don't trust law enforcement, thats your prerogative, no need to use the feature.

What happens when law enforcement members are the stalkers?

This implies a level of trust in law enforcement. As a US citizen, hard pass.

They have access to guns, stingrays and flock cameras. They tap every email, message and phone call you make. You wouldn't even know if you are subject to warrantless surveillance as it might be illegal to tell you under the patriot act.

I'm pretty sure being able to access an Airtag that was put into stolen mode by the owner is the least of your concern. I'm not even sure what failure mode you are worried about because you didn't elaborate.

Please don't think I'm trying to be all high and mighty because I live in the UK and am surveilled even worse than you are (although at least our police are very rarely armed).

I concur, but you don't have to use that feature if you don't trust LE.

It would be nice if this could tie in to actively altering enforcement when it's turned on, maybe even require sharing with authorities for it to be enabled: the stalker would have to collaborate with police in order to stalk the victim.

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