They have to be separated from their owner. When your Airtag is home it knows you're home and it doesn't mark the Airtag as separated from the owner, you can also extend this to your office or other places you mark as "safe". So no, you can't harass them unless they misconfigure their home address.
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Apple Releases 'Tracker Detect' App to Prevent Android Users From Being Tracked by AirTags
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If products only got used for the purpose their makers intended, literally the entire computer and information industry would never even have existed. For that matter, almost no industry would ever have existed. The ‘not it’s intended purpose’ line is an absurd argument, especially in this context.
Nope, just the Apple one. The other 49 don't care about your privacy and nobody cares that they don't.
What about the AirTags in people’s luggage when they’re tracking on a plane, train, bus, ship, etc.? They’re not at home, but there is probably a pile of other people’s tags within range of any jerk using this disabling software and for hours at a time. I’ve traveled with Tiles I’m my bags for years and now switched to AirTags. Even if you buy the completely ignorant ‘not intended for anti theft use’ nonsense, this is an ideal use case for tracking tags. Now any idiot in the vicinity is going to be able to set off the alarms and disable the tracking on everyones luggage. The existence and use of this disabling software is essentially the social etiquette equivalent of cell phone jammers.
The intended purpose of AirTags is to find stuff you lost, not stuff that was stolen from you.
People act like thieves only use Android phones and this gives them the one tool they needed to be better thieves.
Putting AirTags on your own kids to prevent their disappearance was one of the best potential uses for AirTags in the first place. Disabling them is not going to do anything to stop stalkers - it’s only going to eliminate one of the most potentially effective tools for finding missing children.
Sure. So let's write to Ford and tell them that their cars are useless when trying to fry an egg on the warm engine. Perhaps we can complain to Dell their laptops are pretty poor boat anchors. I wonder if Sony would adjust the PS5 to make it a better bitcoin miner? All great ideas.
Outside of your home, lost items quickly become stolen items. So where’s the stolen item tracker then? Because why not buy one device for both?
And yet Tile just refreshed their lineup with new design & anti-stalking feature. And sure, you can drop an iPod touch or an old iPhone in their bag if you have one lying around and hope they don't notice the iPod touch or iPhone "surreptitiously" placed there. Or, as you said, "spend more money" for a GPS tracking tag.
Or spend $29 on an Airtag or $99 on 4 of them. That seems much easier and cheaper than the alternatives.
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Disable them? How? If you read the article you're replying to, you need to remove the battery to disable it. I think someone will notice the guy going through everyone's luggage and the pile of batteries next to them...
Pro-parenting tip: don't trust your child's safety to a keychain finder.
Most of the time I am out of bluetooth range of one or more of the items in which I keep an Airtag.
Because that's not what they're intended for. One can't criticize Apple for its product not working effectively for a purpose it isn't intended to fulfill.
Airtags should be discontinued or redesigned. I think the usefulness isn’t valuable enough to overcome the harm. “Let’s put an easy to use discrete tracking devices in the hands of the public and connect them to a massive network to help them not “lose” things. What could go wrong?”
The person I was responding to was criticizing Apple for making AirTags less useful for recovering stolen items. My point is that Apple doesn't care, because AirTags were never intended to fulfill that purpose. So Apple is going to focus on making AirTags better at tracking lost items—the purpose Apple explicitly created them to fulfill—while making them less effective at illicitly tracking people. If that makes AirTags less effective at tracking stolen items, then so be it.
Airtags should work like this: they don’t do anything in terms of telling you their location until you ask the network to. Then they make a sound for a while so anyone near them knows about it.
Granted it won’t stop the use for driveway car theft, but thieves have all sorts of trackers for that.
And it won’t help you with someone who stole your item as they will remove the tag. But Apple says they aren’t to be used for that.
An option could be to activate a theft alert mode where you are not told the location of the item and it makes no noise, but the popo are instead notified with you as a contact. That way, you have to be pretty brazen to use it nefariously and get the fuzz involved…
Granted it won’t stop the use for driveway car theft, but thieves have all sorts of trackers for that.
And it won’t help you with someone who stole your item as they will remove the tag. But Apple says they aren’t to be used for that.
An option could be to activate a theft alert mode where you are not told the location of the item and it makes no noise, but the popo are instead notified with you as a contact. That way, you have to be pretty brazen to use it nefariously and get the fuzz involved…
First, that's a stretch. The computer industry arguably did evolve because some people thought outside the box, sure, but it's not as though the modern computer just randomly came into existence because someone thought, "what if we used punchcard very differently".
Second, yes, AirTags will be used in ways not intended by Apple. It doesn't follow that AirTags are a bad product, or that Apple lacked foresight. For theft in particular, Apple doesn't consider them an anti-theft device. In fact, they designed them in ways to make them a poor anti-theft device, because they weighed it against privacy concerns. They wanted to mitigate a scenario where you drop AirTags into someone else's coat pocket or backpack without them noticing, so they made them particularly easy for a potential stalking victim to notice. That same design decision does indeed mean that a thief, too, could easily notice the AirTags, and therefore easily destroy them if need be.
Hence: the use cases a product was and wasn't designed for matter.
That‘s the whole point. The technology to easily and secretly track somebody is so pervasive and attainable now, that there is no stopping it. Using this red herring argument to ruin the effectiveness of AirTags just disables one of the best anti crime tools that honest folks had available to them. Stalkers were already going to do their stalking. Where was all this hysteria all these years that Tile and other trackers have been out there? And why do all you anti theft prevention people keep peddling the ‘insurance will just take care of it‘ mantra? I can assure you there is an awful lot of loss to theft that occurs with serious consequences that can not be mitigated by insurance, yet very little is effectively done to prevent or remediate it. Until tracking tags came along.
I think the reality is that the cat's out of the bag for tracking devices. Apple can't do anything about the existence of other trackers out there. You can use cellular trackers, you can use GPS trackers that silently record their location to a file and they just plug into the computer to see where it's been. You can use satellites to track things. Each has their pros and cons. But there's no shortage of options. So Apple generally is working to balance the two sides, anti-stalking vs tracking features. It's a tough balancing act! And even in getting rid of the product entirely, it just means stalkers will go somewhere else to stalk. Or just follow people, no tech needed!