At a meta-level, we don't think the bad behavior of a very very small number of abusive should degrade the product for tens of millions of good actors. Theft is unfortunately extremely prevalent and a key reason why customers by trackers - we think the greater good is to responsibly support this use case.
We have put safeguards in place that make it tough to use our products to stalk, and while nothing is perfect, the only complaints of stalking we have received are from people who were allegedly stalked by Tiles that did NOT have the anti-theft feature turned on. By adding this ID scanning friction, which includes a liveness check, we have empirical data that the bad actors go elsewhere.
Considering the multiple examples listed in the lawsuit [1] that the CEO is aware of, there are certainly stalking instances that they know about. Just none that they know of since 2022 (when they introduced the anti stalking features) with the anti stalking features disabled.
[1] See links on page 13: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.41...
Emphasis on known. The whole point of stalking is to hide the device and not get caught. How would a typical victim even discover it? Or even if they figured out they were stalked, that it was with a Tile device and thus report it?
ID scanning is easy to defeat. This is just ripe for abuse and it's good that Apple/Google took measures to block stalking, even at the expense of anti theft use cases.