Design doesn't matter after a point - you have to meet your users on their turf. Most people were using it for other reasons - and if Apple's stance is, fine - don't buy it, then so be it.

It's been that way since day 1

No, not in a free society. For any product, users should be free to use it for any (legal) use they see fit.

Artificially limiting the use of a product goes against the hacker culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture

> For any product, users should be free to use it for any (legal) use they see fit.

None of these companies ever agreed to be bound by that value, and aren’t under any obligation to adhere to the tenets of Hacker culture. Hackers as a group have failed to convince the public that these things matter, so as far as these businesses are concerned, they don’t.

Like, I agree, it sucks when companies restrict what I can do with a device. But when that happens I don’t talk about it like they betrayed me, I knew what I was buying and decided to buy it anyway.

> Hackers as a group have failed to convince the public that these things matter

I distinctly remember friends at Apple being surprised, in the aftermath of San Bernadino, at the backlash they received for refusing to break the encryption on the shooter’s phone for the FBI [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption...

Do you think online protests or discussing these issues results in any tangible outcomes? (I do)

You’re free to use the purchased device. You’re not free to demand changes. It’s not like you’re unlocking functionality that should be built in. Changing this would require patching the firmware of every iPhone

> You’re not free to demand changes.

I mean, technically you are — doesn't mean anyone will listen.

Hacker culture would mean working around the limitation, not complaining that some consumer product doesn’t work exactly how you want it to work.

FWIW, there are videos on YouTube showing you how to silence the speaker. No idea if they work or not, but it's hacker culture at work.

Using a tech device to find and disable hidden trackers is pretty "hacker culture".

So why are you trying to artificially limit the use of my phone to alert me to other people's tracking devices?

I can use a steak knife as a screwdriver but I wouldn't expect it to be good in that role.

The reason apple designed it this way is so that someone can know if they are being tracked. If an air tag not associated with your phone is close by for a certain period of time, then it notifies you that you are being tracked.

This is a safety feature and its been there since day one.

There's two products here Bluetooth trackers and phones. People don't want to buy phones that expose themselves to tracking by other people.

Every phone is already being being tracked and logged. What youre really saying is that people often tolerate some tracking if done by CIA/phone company/Apple/Google/FB. We're just playing with semantics here. Tracking is either acceptable or not. The only real solution is to go off-grid.

It's reasonable for a person to have a threat model that's more concerned about their violent narcissist ex attaching an AirTag to their car than about the CIA.

It's astonishing how few people actually seem to realise this.

If the FBI wants to obliterate me, they can get a warrant and send goons to my house. The costs of preparing for that threat model are excessive, so I don't.

If some scumbag ad company wants to track me, they can eat shit on my adblocker and not track me. The cost of preparing for that threat model is trivial, so I do.

CIA/phone company/Apple/Google/FB/some rando are all different, independent, situations; as a reasonable adult I have decided that some of them are acceptable, some of them are not.

The device, from the beginning, was not designed as an anti-theft tracker. It’s always had features that made it unsuitable for this use case. At every point Apple has made it very clear they’re not interested in meeting users on that turf.

Users can say they’re not interested in it because it doesn’t suit their needs - that’s completely fine.

> Most people were using it for other reasons

Source? I just use them to find my keys and remote, didn't know it was popular to try and recover stolen property given the alerts when you're near not-your-airtag for any length of time.

Its not just popular, police departments have recommended it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/28/airtags...

https://www.axios.com/2023/05/24/apple-airtags-track-car-thi...

https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/apple-air-tags-travel-...

https://www.govtech.com/public-safety/police-urge-caution-in...

To no one's shock, the police departments are giving poor advice

Police department recommendations are often wrong, and often based on either poor information about the domain the advice is being given in or actively-promoted (by police leadership) disinformation.

Police agencies aren't systematic domain experts except in the application of force to obtain compliance, as well as not having an interest in accurate advice.

There have been news articles since practically the day of release. I tracked stolen keys to a house a few miles away, but didn't feel like risking my life for them.

There are any number of products allowing you to mount them inconspicuously.

The killer use case here, as I think most people have figured out, is figuring out where your stuff is when it's in a system you don't have visibility into. Like if UPS says it's "on the way" from NYC to LA or something, and especially if the airline isn't sure where your luggage is. It's just spectacular for that.

And of course where did I leave my keys and is my backpack in the car or at work stuff, but that's the obvious/advertised use.

>> helping you find things that are lost, nothing more.

So it is now on me to know whether my object is lost or stolen? Even if I magically knew all the details, that isn't a bright line rule. One person's "lost" luggage is another's stolen electronics. Clearly, more people are using these things to track down stuff that has been taken rather than find the remote control lost somewhere in their living room.

Will apple allow people to disable the tracking of other people's iPhones too in the name of privacy? What if my wife leaves her phone in my car? Can I get tracking disabled on that phone so she cannot track my location?

> So it is now on me to know whether my object is lost or stolen?

This isn't new - AirTags have always been this way. The only thing changing today is the cross-platform and 'standard' aspect to it...

> So it is now on me to know whether my object is lost or stolen?

No. AirTags let you track your objects whether they are lost or stolen. It's just that they also alert potential thieves to their presence, so any reasonably competent thief will be able to disable them.

> Clearly, more people are using these things to track down stuff that has been taken rather than find the remote control lost somewhere in their living room.

My use cases are to (a) find items that I misplaced or lost somewhere on my own. (b) track the whereabouts of luggage that got lost by an airline.

These cases are not particularly hindered by anti-stalking mechanisms.

> My use cases are to (a) find items that I misplaced or lost somewhere on my own. (b) track the whereabouts of luggage that got lost by an airline.

You are technically not allowed AirTags in luggage because they contain li-ion batteries.

AirTags are allowed in checked bags.

https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/hazmat/packsafe/reso...

The battery would be under the "In Equipment" column, not the "Spare" column.

Nor do AirTags contain lithium ion batteries, they use standard non-rechargable CR2032 cells.

CR2032 batteries are lithium batteries, so they do fall under the rules for "Spares" (no to checked baggage). They are permitted "In Equipment" for checked baggage. They are on the "Lithium Metal" row as one of the three example photos.

For the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion_manganese_oxide_ba...

At some point, airlines were raising concerns, but the rules have changed.

When I recently pointed out to the lost luggage department at an airport that I knew for a fact that the luggage (or at least the tracker) was right at the airport, they did not appear to be surprised or concerned at all.

> Clearly, more people are using these things to track down stuff that has been taken

Clearly, adding “clearly” before a slight rephrasing of the unsupported assertion made upthread doesn't turn it into a supported claim.

Perhaps something was lost in translation then. The most likely reason to lose things is because they are stolen.

Uhh, I don't know about that. Since getting airtags I've misplaced my car keys multiple times, left my wallet on an airplane, and had multiple airlines misplace my luggage. In that same time I've not had anything stolen.

Your anecdata is not data

But it serves to counter a ridiculous sweeping generalization.

Anecdata suffices to counter anecdata.

It is when it's countering other anecdata. If anyone has actual data then by all means show it and that will trump the anecdata, but without that, anecdata is all we have.

Not for me. It’s cure for forgetfulness.

I don't know where you live but that isn't at all true anywhere I've lived.

I've had two reasons to need to "find" things with AirTags where I specifically didn't know where they were:

- airline bungle, so luggage was left at a transit airport.

- forgetting where something had been put down.

But the most common usage is the opposite, positive confirmation: we've just left for the airport, check if everything says "with you" once you're a few hundred meters down the road.

If the most likely reason for something to be "lost" is that it was stolen, maybe you should move somewhere with a less than apocalyptic level of petty crime.

I was told airtags stop working when the tag moves along with an iphone (for privacy reasons). This would happen on an airline.

Nonsense.

- https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/681961/Common-lost-items-k...

- https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lost-and-found-the-...

The most likely reason to lose things is you're distracted, and fun fact: if you're a man you're more likely to blame someone else for it.

> The most likely reason to lose things is because they are stolen.

you should probably move

There’s not many places in the world where theft isn’t a concern. Just small villages where everybody knows each other, and repressive countries.

Singapore is the only place I’ve been where I didn’t worry about theft.

There's a big difference between "theft isn't a concern" and "theft is the main reason things are lost". A place where you're more likely to get your things stolen than you are to misplace them is definitely a place with above-average crime rates.

And while I don't know where you've been and what your tolerance level for "worrying about" theft is, I've never worried about theft anywhere but very touristy places in huge cities.

Theft is a concern where I live in Brooklyn but its an order of magnitude less likely that I lose something to theft vs me misplacing it

Perhaps zarzavat just isn't prone to losing things.

Personally, I'm careful enough with my keys etc (and lucky enough) that I don't lose them - I lived for several decades before the invention of the airtag, and developed habits not to lose things.

On the other hand, bicycles getting stolen? That happens.

> The most likely reason to lose things is because they are stolen.

That gave me a good laugh.

It sounds silly, but I understand where he's coming from. I used to live in Philadelphia. You couldn't leave your bag down on the subway without someone running off with it right before the doors closed.

Wild. a family member of mine has paranoid schizophrenia and if something isn't where she thinks it should be she immediately jumps to "it was stolen." Even if the glasses are on her head or the phone is literally in her hand, she'll declare it was stolen and get upset.

It makes me wonder if she lived in one of those places earlier in her life (before I knew her) and might be more justified than it seems... ?

I know lots of people think that when they can't find something; it doesn't mean it is schizophrenic behavior in and of itself. I remember as kids discovering that other friends of mine also jumped to that conclusion. To my knowledge, none of us then or are now schizophrenic.

Sure. I also live in a place where you can't leave your belongings unattended even for a short time without a high risk of them getting stolen. But there's a simple solution to that: don't leave your belongings unattended, ever. Everyone I know who lives where I live knows that, and the incidence -- at least among my friends -- losing things to theft is super low.

I don't think this is a good situation, mind you, but I think people in my circle still misplace things orders of magnitude more often than their stuff gets stolen.

I've lost my car keys hundreds of times and they were stolen exactly 0 of those times.

They weren't marketed but it was implied. If you forgot, they had to patch them a while after release due to stalking concerns so that "day one" point is moot.

I watched the release live. They have altered the timings of the anti-stalking notifications but they were there on day 1.

Edit: here is an article around the time of release describing how they work: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/apple-a...

> To discourage what it calls “unwanted tracking,” Apple built technology into AirTags to warn potential victims, including audible alarms and messages about suspicious AirTags that pop up on iPhones. To put Apple’s personal security protections to the test, my colleague Jonathan Baran paired an AirTag with his iPhone, slipped his tag in my backpack (with my permission), and then tracked me for a week from across San Francisco Bay.

> I got multiple alerts: from the hidden AirTag and on my iPhone.

It's interesting to think about how AirTags generally go against the wishes of the owner of the device.

The AirTag has anti-stalking protection. An important feature, but not something the owner of the AirTag may want.

iPhones share the location of nearby AirTags with apple. Good for the owner of those AirTags, but the owner of the iPhone may not want this.

> The AirTag has anti-stalking protection. An important feature, but not something the owner of the AirTag may want.

Yeah, that’s like, the issue with trackers. If I buy an AirTag to stalk my ex girlfriend, why should Apple want to help facilitate that goal?

You're right of course, but this represents a huge shift in the way we think about our computers now, and speaking only for myself I don't think I like it.

It used to be that when you bought a computer, it was yours. It did your bidding, nobody elses. Security features it had were about keeping other people out, not keeping you out of your own device.

Now, mostly IMHO thanks to Apple, the idea has really shifted. The owner of the device is a "threat" just like anybody else is. The device protects itself against unauthorized actions from the owner, and it does what the mother company wants it to do, regardless of the owner's desires. If the owner is trying to stalk somebody, then that's a better outcome than having the stalker enabled, but we don't get to pick and choose which things the device follows it's owners desires or the mother company's. If the mother company wants you using their chosen DNS servers, or exfiltrating user data for analytics, or showing you ads (Amazon especially), that's what will happen. Now that we've made it acceptable for companies to behave like this, they are going to (ab)use it to the max. I think this is a tragedy of the commons personally. People optimizing for individual use cases at the expense of the collective, leading to disastrous results for the collective.

Isn't this a success of the commons? Apple decided on behalf of everyone else to use THEIR phones to find YOUR missing thing. That's a win for you as the owner of the AirPod. In order to make that decision palatable to the crowd, they tried to make sure your ability to use their phones without asking had minimal opportunity for abuse (they don't want you to be able to track them with their own phone).

> Isn't this a success of the commons?

I've not heard that term before and can't find it, but I think I know what you mean. If it seems like I've gotten it wrong, then please let me know :-) Thanks that is a very interesting question. To some extent it may depend on perspective.

I don't think so, because this isn't the commons doing anything, it's just a dictator with all the power forcing people to make the right choices. At least in the case of government enforcement, there's (ostensibly at least) some rights you have and limits/restraints on the government, including democracy which keeps it in check against abuse.

When it's a private corporation like Apple or Amazon just making these decisions, you have little to no recourse (except maybe switch brands, but there aren't many viable options out there for most of these devices. It's not reasonable to point most people to the Pine Phone for example).

To be the opposite of Tragedy of the Commons, I would think it would need to be people self-organizing or self-regulating to prevent the tragedy. If a powerful overlord forces it, I think it's something else.

> It used to be that when you bought a computer, it was yours. It did your bidding, nobody elses. Security features it had were about keeping other people out, not keeping you out of your own device.

Yeah, but when your device can infringe on others, it's ok to curtail those features. No one has unlimited rights.

Cameras (including iPhones with cameras) are allowed to be sold, even though you can point them at someone's bedroom window and infringe on their right to privacy. That's just one example. Another example is my right to peace and quiet in the quiet area of a train. Yet iPhones will happily blast noise out of their speakers there, and I have experienced many iPhone users doing so. When can I expect the phones to ship with a volume limiter?

Yes, but you can't point them up skirts, or walk up to their bedroom window (you have to be at the public sidewalk/street).

Cell phones already have volume limiters, too: https://www.theverge.com/23729051/ios-android-samsung-phone-...

Not great counter-arguments.

> but you can't point them up skirts, or walk up to their bedroom window (you have to be at the public sidewalk/street).

What? iPhones will prevent you from doing that? How?

> Cell phones already have volume limiters, too

I wonder if you've missed GP's point... Your volume limiting link looks like a feature that the user can control. That means that Apple isn't preventing iPhone users from violating other people's right to quiet in quiet areas.

What are you even talking about? There's nothing about a camera that prevents someone from putting it in a tree.

And that link about the volume limit? Come on, dude. That's a volume limit which the user can configure to protect themselves from hearing damage. Not even close to what this discussion is about. It doesn't even apply to the speaker! Completely irrelevant.

That's a very problematic argument though. My the same logic you could say "people shouldn't have free speech because they might say something mean.

There are already limits on free speech so that's not a great counter argument.

There can be legal consequences to some speech, but our voice boxes haven't been flashed with firmware that limits our ability to use certain words. This is not at all analogous to what Apple is doing with iPhones. To be the same, it would have to listen/parse everything you say and filter out the offensive parts so other people don't hear them. It would also need strong technical measures to prevent you from flashing your own voice box firmware that allows you to bypass Apple's restrictions. If you can point to an implementation like that, then you may have a point, but I'm entirely unaware of the existence of such a thing.

Yes and no.

One can debate whether anti-theft is a worthwhile trade-off for stalking, but because it's implemented as a peer-to-peer network, the consent of the owners of the other peers is relevant.

The huge shift here is that this feature exists in the first place - it's an on-by-default peer-to-peer network that runs on almost all phones, very few people know about and almost nobody would have consented to if they understood it could be used for stalking.

> iPhones share the location of nearby AirTags with apple. Good for the owner of those AirTags, but the owner of the iPhone may not want this.

You can turn this off. Though, doing so is bidirectional: it also prevents your phone from sending out its own Bluetooth beacons when it’s not connected to the Internet, for other phones to pick up. Which might not be what you want. But if you’re worried about privacy impact, it probably is what you want.

Also keep in mind that the protocol already minimizes privacy impact by, among other things, encrypting the location coordinates with a key Apple doesn’t have.