eloquent_beaver t1_j9lj2al wrote on February 22, 2023 at 9:09 PM

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Apple is convinced my dog is stalking me. A vital AirTag safety feature is incorrectly notifying me every day. by MayoFetish

That's just Apple artificially defining how people should use a product that's otherwise self-evidently applicable to a broad domain of use-cases.

Apple can say "We don't want people using AirTags for anti-theft or pet tracking," but people do and will continue to, because they're perfect (but for the annoying notifications that bother legitimate users and alert thieves) for anti-theft and that sort of stuff.

bigsquirrel t1_j9msxvi wrote on February 23, 2023 at 2:23 AM

Or it’s apple trying to walk an extremely tight line of something with so much potential for abuse and adding functionality. They’re fucked either way. Shit, this dude is getting alerts about his dog and it’s “news” on a major website FFS. Imagine if the add the family feature and it’s abuse ends up used for stalking. Which as others have pointed out would be very simple.

It’s just not as simple as “let people do what they want”.

eloquent_beaver t1_j9mucmf wrote on February 23, 2023 at 2:33 AM

No other GPS or bluetooth tracker does it, because it's not an in-scope problem for item trackers. Tiles, dog trackers, smart watches, Android phones, and hundreds of GPS tracker products never had any issue with this because no one ever cared. Apple made it into a problem. Kind of like their iCloud photos scanning feature—nobody asked for it, but Apple decided to make it an issue, and by virtue of their declaring it a huge problem, it suddenly was one for a vocal minority.

People who wanna do dumb criminal stuff can use any number of cheap, effective tools (any of the non-Apple products listed above will do), and it's their and law enforcement's problem.

But people don't like perfectly useful products being artificially handicapped for a truly marginal amount of additional hypothetical safety. People are going to continue to put AirTags and Tiles on their airport luggage and on their bikes and cars, because they want to be able to track their stuff down when it gets stolen.

bigsquirrel t1_j9mv2e2 wrote on February 23, 2023 at 2:39 AM

Apple decided everything they do is under much more scrutiny than most other manufacturers, this ridiculous article on a major news outlet is a perfect example. They did this for some simple reasons, to avoid lawsuits and regulation or more simply put $$$. “We’ll Timmy did it and he didn’t get into trouble” isn’t exactly a great argument in court.

Maybe those other manufacturers should have the same functionality but they can’t. Apple can, and in the case of litigation they’re covering their ass.