News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:I mailed an AirTag and tracked its progress by coldtea on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @09:45PM (#27125758)
>Isn't this just spamming but slightly more discreet?

The original concern was about "excessive alerts" annoying the user with new popups/sound etc. This is unobtrussive.

It's potentially useful information, that can just show the last 2-3 entries, and consumed at will. So not really like spam.

>If there's a red dot next to the "find my" icon every day you go home you're going to tune that out as well.

Most of the time, and it can auto-tone itself down, so it's only shown when you should actually pay attention.

I gave the example of when you're back home, and the same airtags that were potentially "following" you on the subway (e.g. some strangers' airtag) - no longer follow you, so it's ok for the red dot to go back to green.

But if a foreign airtag is close consistently (the same foreign one), it could show the red dot.

Re:I mailed an AirTag and tracked its progress by gruez on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @11:06PM (#27126150)
>The original concern was about "excessive alerts" annoying the user with new popups/sound etc. This is unobtrussive.

And in the next sentence I said the problem is that users eventually ignore them, not that they're annoyed by them (although annoyingness is also a problem).

>It's potentially useful information, that can just show the last 2-3 entries, and consumed at will. So not really like spam.

A red dot is distracting in and of itself. I myself went out of my way to hide app store notifications entirely because it had no way to hide update notifications.

>I gave the example of when you're back home, and the same airtags that were potentially "following" you on the subway (e.g. some strangers' airtag) - no longer follow you, so it's ok for the red dot to go back to green.

>But if a foreign airtag is close consistently (the same foreign one), it could show the red dot.

I feel like this is in the class of features that are theoretically useful, but nobody but the most paranoid actually use. You don't see google/android IMSI catcher or rogue hotspot detection for instance, even though it might theoretically be useful.