Nothing to see here, all totally normal and expected and I should be grateful that there is an app to defend myself proactively against such tracking. I should also do the same for Microsoft, Huawei, Samsung, Sony, ... tracking tags. If that eats my phone battery this is just a small price to pay to assure my daughter won't be kidnapped or my house broken in as the attacker conveniently knew I wasn't home.
May I suggest we also all proactively wear tinfoil helmets to ensure Tesla's 'level 5 self-driving cars' don't kill us? You know, totally not the responsibility of the manufacturer to make sure their products are safe for all.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.trac...
This one is first-party from Apple.
I don't think there's any good way for Apple to fix this. On the other hand, it's been possible to do something similar for a long time, just not this easy, and at this price point. You could suggest that the AirTag disable tracking if it move along with the same phone for more than 15mins, but that's would mean you could steal anything with an AirTag and just keep moving for that period of time.
The Android app also isn't helpful, because many don't know that they need to install it, nor should they have to. Nor does it help say elderly people with no smartphone.
It's a product where Apple really didn't consider the real world implications. It's a neat device, and I'm sure it's well intended, but it's not fit for the world we're currently living in.
Exactly; it's unfortunate, but this sort of product should really be made illegal, just due to the many ways it can be misused.
All that making GPS tracking devices illegal would do is to eliminate all the positive-sum uses of the technology, while creating literally no additional barrier for people already willing to break the law.
It’s the “then only criminals will have guns” thing, but much more clear-cut, because while making your own gun from general-purpose input components requires a machine shop and an unethical person with machining skills to run it (and so making guns illegal really does make guns harder to acquire — though not impossible), making a GPS tracker from general-purpose input components can be done in your own living room without even a soldering iron.
For one, there are some important differences between AirTags and a GPS tracker. AirTags don't use GPS (at least, on the tag itself). They're tracked by all the Apple devices around them, and they can use lower power (perhaps even passive) methods. A GPS tracker requires some kind of uplink. A tracker using GPS would need to be larger, and have a shorter battery life for a given size. AirTags are also innocuous to buy and not immediately alarming to see in someone's possession.
The argument that anyone is capable of building a GPS tracker in their living room seems unlikely to me. I think this is far beyond the capabilities of 99.9% of people (although it's a fairly straightforward and very fun project for people interested in Arduino).
All this said, I am mostly in agreement that the arguments against AirTags seem fairly weak. Especially because I assume Apple has a way to easily determine who placed the AirTag, and that they would face serious consequences.
If anyone provides a device? It’s also traceable to the owner/person watching it.
None of these things are possible/done for the myriad of GPS trackers out there. Apple has made it very risky and frankly dumb to use them for this purpose.
You're correct, it's been easier.
> at this price point
You're right, it's been cheaper.
> do something similar for a long time,
You're right, it's been similar except that the other methods were far harder for the victim to detect.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/50145/airtag-teardown-part-one-y...
Do you see the danger
Most abuse, abductions, and harm to kids comes from those close to them who already have access to them, not some rando somewhere.
Putting everyone into ‘oh my god, some rando is going to kidnap and kill your kid’ just amps up the already insane anxiety overload everyone is in.
The predators aren’t hiding in the bushes, they are already in the house.
Just because something happens at a lower frequency than something else doesn't mean we shouldn't protect against it or that it is not a danger to a particular person.
The fact that most abductions happen by family members has nothing to do with OPs point.
And if someone wants your particular kid for some reason, then they'll probably get them without Apple's assistance.
So when it comes to children, abuse at home is several (if not many) magnitudes more likely than a stranger trying to track and abduct your children.
But let's look at some statistics:
https://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm Bathtub: 341 Assault by sharp object: 1,805
From that, assuming their data is correct, for every one person that falls in a bathtub and then drowns, there are 5 that are killed via assault with sharp object. The latter includes premediated and not, the number of those from a 'rampage' would be a fraction.
So, if you change the side of street you are walking on to avoid walking near someone homeless out of fear they would go on a random stabbing rampage, and if you do not also have traction stickers attached to your bathtub, then you are exhibiting rational irrational fear.
I'm not afraid of homeless and black people, I'm afraid of clinically insane people. The kind which are not legally responsible for their actions.
And why did you pick "Assault by sharp object: 1,805" instead of "Assault by firearm: 10,801" or just "Assault: 16,765"? Maybe because that changes the odds from 1 vs 5 to 1 vs 50.
> And why did you pick "Assault by sharp object: 1,805" instead of "Assault by firearm: 10,801" or just "Assault: 16,765"?
The example was a 'stabbing rampage', that was specifically to try and find the number of knife attacks in the US resulting in fatality, and out of those number where someone is randomly attacking people in public.
Overall, we are still dealing with pretty small numbers whether it's 1 vs 5 or 1 vs 50 (50x improved chance of winning the lottery is still nearly negligible odds). In the case of knife attack, based on these numbers, it would be at most 1 in 5.
The ultimate point is the statistics do not back up many of these fears. For example in response to an actual knife rampage I observed a lot of chatter about getting a concealed carry permit etc.
These same statistics show that assault by firearm is way more likely than by knife, and having more guns around is more likely to have examples where they are used. Hence, the irrational fear of a knife rampage is prompting people to carry a gun, which then dramatically increases the chance of an accidental shooting in their own household, suicide, and/or assault where that person gets into a confrontation they could have walked away from but instead had road rage and shot someone else.
Household, accidental shootings are relatively common, and suicide is exceptionally common, yet all that seems like less risks for firearm possession compared to needing the firearm to actually protect yourself from a knife attack, which is at most 5 times more likely than slipping and drowning in your own bathtub.
In the case of a bathtub, it's common and does not have the same confirmation bias we get from headlines of rampages, yet it poses a fairly similar danger to you as someone going on a knife rampage.
There is a saying, Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics. Or "tell me what you want the conclusion to be and I'll tell you what statistical method to apply to the data". Also known as "torturing the data".
In the case of bathtub fatality, the majority of them are either very young or very old (kind of like covid):
> Drowning occurred most often in a bath tub for persons under 1 year of age and for adults aged 85 and over
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db149.htm
If you adjust for age, that will make the bathtub/knife odds even worse.
But on a more meta level, how do you feel about Nassim Taleb. My sense is that you don't like him, because he talks a lot about so called "irrational logic of fearing terrorists more than bathtubs", and he calls this behaviour extremely rational.
To me that sounds somewhat different from irrational rational fears and also as somewhat reasonable. Irrational rational fear attributes greater danger to an unlikely event due to ignorance of how unlikely that event is. While Nassim Taleb's thesis (AFAIK) acknowledges the events are extremely unlikely but posits a system is more robust if such events can be handled. That seems to make some sense to me, but I would be concerned if such counter measures become prohibitive. For example, I suspect we no longer need to restrict knives on airplanes. No plane is ever again going to be hijacked with just a knife. We should though continue screening for bombs and plastic explosives, an attacker would be more likely and be more interested to depressurize the cabin and try to crash the plane and kill those onboard via a bomb than to hijack it (where everyone now knows they should rush a hijacker no matter the cost).
A good analogy, a computer system that can handle errors that occur in 0.001% of cases is more robust than one that cannot. Particularly with large numbers thrown at it. The contra-point though is that real life is not large numbers, worrying more about a 0.001% probability compared to a 0.1% probability is generally misguided, particularly when a person believes that 0.001% probability is more like 10%.
Though, that is where conditional probability kicks in and here is why I agree regarding "damn lies and statistics". Hence, even if the odds are 1 vs 500 or 1 vs 5000, these are all negligibly frequent events for the average person. Though, if you are over 85, in a bathtub, perhaps on some new medication, recently recovered from a surgery, and there is nobody else at home, then I would suspect odds of dying in that bathtub are far greater than they would be otherwise.
As another example, it's kinda the same for Texas Hold'em, the odds of a 4 of a kind are generally low - but if the first 3 flop cards are all the same rank, the odds of someone having a 4 of a kind suddenly become reasonably quite good.
So, I think the interesting conversation is around conditional odds and when as humans we accurately recognize those conditions. For example, many cyclists ride to the extreme right of roads fearing getting hit from behind. The statistics for that do not support that behavior, it's really rare for a driver to hit a cyclist from behind ("eyes on the road"). It turns out the majority of those kinds of collisions occur at night and when the cyclist has no lights on their bicycle. Meanwhile that misconception of the danger puts the cyclist in a more dangerous location, the further to the edge of the road the less visible from turning traffic (the real danger to cyclists), greater danger from road debris, pot holes, bad pavement, and getting doored and pedestrians popping out from between cars and getting doored (tl;dr, it's much safer for a cyclist to be a couple feet into the lane than immediately adjacent the gutter). Though the irrational rational fear has that person riding next to the gutter, putting them in greater overall danger.
A bathtub you have control over may not be especially risky. The stat itself probably includes unsupervised kids, elderly, etc. Take those out because they don't apply to me.
You don't have as much control over strangers. And any given homeless person may or may not be judged as especially risky - that's up for the person there to decide. There's also little downside to just avoiding them entirely.
To me, it seems like it can be completely rational.
Individual events don't happen with dice like you seem to be implying.
Meanwhile, you don't fully control if you slip in a bathtub, a person ascribes much less risk to the bathtub than they should (due to lack of confirmation bias and lack of knowledge of the risk stats, bathtubs are surprisingly riskier than you think; but if you put it in the context of what is the chance of a fall, you would start to think the odds are not that bad - and any serious fall with that many hard surfaces around can easily have a very bad outcome. So it's more consider the risk of any fall, now compare that to the statistics of 'stranger danger'. The point is that everyday common events, your car, your bathtub, your daily commute, can pose magnitudes more risk than even the shadiest of homeless person).
Edit: Yes, I know there’s an app. Do you think more than 1% of victims will have it installed?