> 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.