WTH

sflocal said:

Stalkers abusing this is a valid concern.  I'm hoping to see what the real-world issues are when it comes out.  I live in San Francisco and garage break-in's are common here.  AirTags would be perfect for tagging some of my high-priced items in case of theft.  To think that a stranger's iPhone would get a prompt of an unknown AirTag would seem to me like message overkill has me thinking there's a practical solution to prevent stalking, yet give victims of theft a useful and accurate location for the police.

It all depends on how long the user has to be in the vicinity of the AirTag in order for it to send an alert.  Being around the AirTag for a few hours shouldn't trigger it; otherwise you'd get alerts just by being near coworkers or friends every day, which would be overkill.  If there is (for example) a 72-hour delay before the AirTag starts to alert nearby users, then that's all the time I need to locate my stolen property and report it to the police.  The devil is always in the details.

If a stalker wants to track you, they'll have much better (and more anonymous) tools to do it with than an AirTag.  Apple is trying to head off any criticism about potential abuse,  but this technology is eventually going to be embedded into a lot more than Apple products.

smiffy31 said:

So these are more for lost items than stolen items.  If a thief has an iPhone and gets informed that the stolen item is following them, they can use the instructions to disable the stole items tag !

Which would make them completely useless for what most people would want to buy an AirTag for - to track a stolen item.  So basically Apple would cede that segment of the market to Tile, which is already used for exactly that purpose.

I really hope Apple doesn't deliberately cripple one of its most interesting products in that way.

sflocal said:

I'm looking forward to this product.  I believe it will be popular to help find lost/stolen luggage at the airport, hunt down burglars, etc... 

The AirTag will be huge, and I say that as a current Tile owner.  The Tile is great in concept, but in practice there aren't enough Tile users running the app in the background to make the recovery network effective.  AirTags won't have that limitation.  You'll have people hiding AirTags in their cars, as a form of poor man's LoJack.  In time, AirTag functionality will be built into the electronics of anything that is worth stealing.  It'll make things very hard on criminals when they can't steal anything without ripping it apart before they're caught.

Caffiend said:

f the Apple Tag will be able to transparently and and securely use the vast network of iPhones would be amazing; but, I have to admit I'm skeptical; even more so if the devices catch on just based on the volume of things.

I, too, own several Tiles.  They're useful, and I have one hidden in each of my cars, but I've learned their limitations.  There aren't enough people running the Tile app to make them very effective as an anti-theft device.  Case in point:  a few weeks back we had a Silver Alert on the local news where a man in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's got disoriented and lost on the way to a doctor's appointment.  Fortunately the family had the foresight to put a Tile in his car.  They got a ping from the Tile around 11 p.m. in the downtown area, more than thirty miles north of the doctor's office, and then nothing.  Then a day later they got a ping from a neighborhood in a small city 150 miles north of his home.  The police located him asleep in his car, and the family was able to bring him home safely.  The Tile probably saved his life, but he could have been found much sooner if the Tile network had better coverage.

If the Airtag does no better than a Tile in terms of network coverage, then Apple is wasting their time bringing them to market.  That isn't a mistake Apple typically makes.  I'm betting that the Airtag will in fact leverage the "Find My" network very effectively, so that every iPhone, iPad, and MacBook will add to the coverage.  Assuming the Airtag fits into Apple's long-term strategy for augmented reality, then we may see some real "gee whiz" demonstrations of their capabilities.

dewme said:

It's obviously not intended for security or theft protection because the tag could be easily removed.

Not if it is hidden in the vehicle.  People already use Tiles for this very purpose, but they don't work that well because there are relatively few people running the Tile app on their phones, so you rarely get a "hit" even if you're tracking the Tile in an urban area.

The Airtag will be a Tile on steroids, pinging every iPhone within range through the "Find My" framework.  It'll be nearly as effective as a GPS tracker, but without subscription fees, cellular access, or a battery that needs recharging every two weeks.

Once people get an idea what Airtags are capable of, I expect that they'll be hidden in just about any object that is worth protecting.  I further expect that the functionality of an Airtag will eventually be incorporated into the electronics of trucks, automobiles, motorcycles, etc.  Sure, you could rip out the electronics of a car and render it untrackable (and non-functional), but that isn't something that a car thief is going to do if he wants a working vehicle.  You can also expect a lot of companies to sell products to assist you in securely hiding an Airtag on / in a vehicle.  

Where I live, we have an ongoing epidemic of gang members stealing cars, driving them while committing more crimes, then abandoning each vehicle for another stolen car.  Airtags are going to upend that cycle.  When your average car owner is able to immediately share the latest location update of his or her stolen vehicle with the police, it's going to be a whole lot tougher for the criminals to move around the city.

I always assumed that Amazon would do this first, by tying in some sort of tracker with their Ring doorbell system.  But despite rumors of a Ring tracker, it has never happened.  Now Apple is going to dominate this market, thanks to the popularity of the iPhone.