The good + evil duality of human nature is impossible to avoid. What would make AirTag as a product so amazingly awesome is what makes it so dangerous in the wrong hands.
It comes down to the product maker having to decide where to move the slider between the two extremes to achieve what they believe is a reasonable balance. No matter where they set the slider it will never be perfect.
An amazingly crafted kitchen knife that excels at cutting chores is equally adept as a weapon to inflict injury when in the wrong hands.
The shortcomings of AirTags is a human problem, not a product problem. Like humans, it can never be perfect.
This is a relatively new concept for humanity and it’s very good that some people want to examine all the consequences and try to determine how best to make abuses harder to accomplish.
Isn't Apple the only maker of this type of product that is actually doing that? They've come out of the gate with some preventative measures already in place. I suspect they will have a lot of back-end data and AI that they'll use to continually add to and improve those measures as they go. In fact, those measures already actually sacrifice the effectiveness of the devices for theft recovery; the user has a limited time before the thief is alerted to possible detection.
It's totally valid to ask the questions, but where is the accountability for the others who have brought similar tech to market without even attempting to address those kinds of issues? They've had actual years to come up with solutions to that issue, but appear to have done nothing at all.
I have not personally checked. It may be that Apple putting out product like this has brought the concept to attention more than the other similar products (bigger name & more popularity leads to more eyes & more critique). It’s certainly worth inquiring with both the media entities who report on this issue and the companies making the competing products.
I did look at the websites for the main competitors, and they make no mention of the issue, much less measures they've taken to address it. So that's kind of the point. Apple enters the market with these things, actually takes measures to discourage or thwart misuse, and still they're criticized for something the already established competitors have apparently done absolutely nothing about at all. You yourself posted a dozen-plus critiques of Apple here for unleashing AirTags on an unsuspecting public, and yet you haven't even made a cursory check of the others to see if they've done anything at all about potential misuse by stalkers, much less done anything better.
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