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Feels oddly concerning and complicit that MacRumors would willingly say “yeah we knew it existed but we didn’t want to publicize it” to let them slip it into the market in the first place.

If only journalists wanted to try to do their job instead of regurgitating Bloomberg’s trash rumors.

The standards you walk past are the standards you accept, and MR must accept that stalking is cool.

It's all from people not understanding the very trivial technology that's is the hardware of an AirTag. Most tech is magic to most people. To be fair, fact that we use electric fields to bend a literal crystal, to make sound, is pretty damn magic. :)

Anyone that knows how a speaker works also knows how to silence an AirTag, without instructions required. Anyone that wants to silence an AirTag can just find one of the hundreds of videos on youtube [1], and spend some minutes carrying out the act.

The removal of this product will stop exactly zero people from silencing an AirTag, besides those that are probably doing it for legitimate purposes. For example, I silenced the one in my car, because I was tired of it constantly beeping anytime someone with a iPhone drove with me (including my family).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+to++silence...

What software? It's a pin you strike with a hammer to pierce the piezo speaker within.

tile tracker, it's airtag, but doesn't do the stalking warnings if you sign an agreement

paint them so they look undesireable

It's likely a Wordpress page with a "read more" plugin/functionality that is as unworking as it has always been.

Yes. Magnets and duct tape are particularly dangerous combination, too, and even cheaper.

You'd probably get the notification pretty quickly though, assuming the installer didn't use whatever "silencing" tech this post is apologizing for. My wife usually leaves her purse in the car, and I get the "[Person's] AirTag is moving with you!" notification whenever I leave the house without her. I keep forgetting to trust it or whatever.

Yes, within about 30 minutes. They are basically useless for theft prevention as a result. Apple nerfed the functionality after someone used it for stalking. You'll notice there is no mention of theft prevention in the marketing materials anymore.

Apple even provide a handy Android app for locating them.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.trac...

You get a notification when an AirTag is following you for some time, but the AirTags owner is not near it. It's meant to detect someone slipping an AirTag on you without the false alarms from, say, taking a walk with a friend who has one in their backpack.

Yeah, I forget the wording but there’s a notification like “so-and-so’s AirTag is near you and they can see where you are.” My spouse put AirTags in our baby stuff and I get them whenever I’m using it.

We have AirTags registered to my wife's account because I use Android. I have one in my work backpack, and every morning I get a notification that an unknown tracker is following me. I wish there was a way to silence the warning for that specific tag.

If an unrecognized AirTag is following you, you'll get a notice.

I'm not constantly notified that my keys are with me. But if you stuck an AirTag in my backpack, my phone would tell me.

No, only if an airtag that's not theirs follows them for an amount of time

Not sure about on iPhone but Android definitely alerts you if an unknown airtag follows you while moving.

This would work great if law enforcement was interested in recovering stolen goods.

Based on how many issues we have with police using Flock for their own personal issues, I think this may not be a great solution either.

I don’t know, the expensive bikes explained the need for the tool.

How is mentioning their valuable bikes a flex?

The average person doesn't think about bikes of the ring ring variety costing 15k dollars.

> Apple PR must be on yellow alert right now feeling glad they’ve dodged a bullet

iPhones notify you when someone else's AirTag is following you.

> The outrage feels misplaced.

Agreed.

> The way to stop evil people abusing your global track-anything network is to not have a global track-anything network.

Or, to have a global track-anything network, and recognize this is the wrong level to try and solve the abuse problem.

> Apple PR must be on yellow alert right now feeling glad they’ve dodged a bullet.

Nah, they knew about this from the start - that's why they nerfed the whole design to the point it barely has any use case; otherwise they'd be buried with complaints and horror stories and media criticism, and the device would've never reached the market.

> leverage their ubiquity

We live in different worlds

You're gonna vibe code a clone of hardware?

Also, even if it were software, what is virtue signaling about this? If they offer some software at any point, they should continue to offer that software to new users in perpetuity?

> these clowns

Can you please edit out swipes from your HN comments and stick to posting thoughtfully? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I think the idea was to intentionally disable the speaker in an AirTag you own. The use-case that I think they were describing would be to make it more difficult for a thief to find the AirTag and remove it. Thus, you'd be able to track your stolen bike for longer (and have a better change of finding it).

Of course, this would also make it easier for someone to disable a speaker and track a person without their knowledge, making it more difficult for that person to find a stealthy AirTag.

I'm not surprised that someone didn't think this through. I am surprised at how many people this must have gotten by to make it into production. You'd think that with any AirTag related product, privacy would be more central to the planning.

It says right there in the blog post - bike theft prevention.

AirTags are less useful for that use-case right now since the bike thief will get notified of the existence of the tracker on the bike once they transport it, and are hence prompted to find and remove the tag.

Theft?

> pierces the AirTag’s speaker

> also disables an anti-stalking feature that audibly alerts people

It sounds like piercing the speaker is the thing that disables the audible alert and the intent was not to help stalkers.

What would be dumb is to not discontinue an unsafe product because there are more dangerous products out there.

Doesn't your phone still tell you that the AirTag has been following you?

You vastly overestimate the intelligence of most stalkers.

1. There are a million ways to die. But that's no execute for companies to make products that could potentially kill people - in dumb ways. 2. "Easy" is subjective - something easy for one may not be so easy for others. 3. This guy blocked their site in a custom ublock filter... Why? Who cares? That's not relevant to anything!? Why did this guy put that in there? Was this written by a 4th grader? 4. Yea, go read more AI slop, good idea.