I get that this lawsuit is about discerning whether Apple built enough safeguards into the AirTag system…
But taking a step back and acknowledging the amount of heat Apple has gotten for releasing a legitimately useful product while we drown in an ocean of guns always makes me chuckle uncomfortably.
The American gun industry has explicit immunities from lawsuits if people use their products for bad things, Apple does not. So the lawyers are going to spend their time going after the company that they can win a huge payout from, not the company that is simply immune to legal action.
Agreed. the world doesn't agree. Cars provide a meaningful utility which is deemed important. Interestingly, more and more on the way out inside major cities in Europe, btw. But the utility of guns in Europe doesn't outweigh ownership; this is regulated (!= illegal).
There are plenty of non-AirTag trackers, and they by and large have no anti-stalking measures. In fact there is an entire market of explicitly non-traceable stalker ware, and that market existed long before AirTags.
Meanwhile there are explicit legal protections for gun manufacturers despite the vast majority of murders in the US being with guns that people have no real reason to have (see: the rest of the civilized world, and its lack of active shooter drills and training)
My electric scooter was taken from the house of a friend of mine one night. We eventually got it back, because we posted notes around town with a picture of the electric scooter urging anyone who’d seen it to contact us by phone.
Anyways, as a result of that I went on AliExpress and bought a small device which is supposed to be able to be mounted on things and track their location. You put a SIM card and an SD-card in it and it will report its location.
I didn’t get around to mounting it on the electric scooter yet. But something that stood out to me when it came in the mail is that it was declared as being something else and I was like, is this because people buy this thing and they don’t want their spouse to know what they bought or something. That’s a bit creepy, considering it’s a GPS tracking device.
Been a while since I actually looked at one of my aliexpress customs labels, but they tend to arrive as “electronic gadget - $5” or something very generic and undervalued like that.
Definitely a “they can’t inspect them all” aspect to it.
The thing that was weird and creepy in this case was that the label was very specific. But claimed that the contents of the package was another kind of product entirely. Seemed suspiciously like they want to make people able to order it without others in their family knowing what had been bought.
It's not FCC licensed so illegal to sell. Not carrier approved either so they'll get pissy if they figure that out. And likely the hardware design itself is stolen.
I think the charge of 'whataboutism' is often a bit of a strawman.
The argument is rarely, 'ignore Y because of X' or similar. Rather its 'if were were to apply this standard correctly, we would have other priorities'.
So here that if we were to apply the 'regulate/remove objects which change the social environment to make it less safe' standard to prioritise our concern, I'd imagine find-my-device systems wouldnt rank highly: indeed, we might find these systems make it more safe.
So, in a complex series of tradeoffs where all actions have a cost (time, effort, etc.) the claim is about where one ought pay that cost.
I think its fine to show that the standards people have lead to contradictions.
I think this happens all the time as a form of societal procrastination.
Like in a city where homelessness is rampant, and the city government meets up and the first thing they talk about is littering ordinances or if there's enough sun/shade in the park, and then oops, all out of time to talk about homelessness - let's just put that on the agenda for next time right after we talk about changing trash pickup day.
That's true -- but sometimes people are being accused of that when they arent doing it.
To say, eg., "my country did X too!" when "Country B did X" could be whataboutism, or it could be pointing to an international game with its own rules that all players are complicit in -- such an observation is a kind of rebuke to moralism.
Here we can read this sort of reply to those who worry about airtags in a similar sort of way: what, exactly does the principle, "limit objects which make a social environment less safe" do if applied mechanically -- rather than as a sort of circumstantial moralism about some recent headline.
Perhaps often, then, whataboutism is really a kind of distaste for hastey moralism about circumstantial matters
How would regulating guns make tracking less problematic?
It's still a problem in societies which have gun regulations. You can murder someone without a gun, too. Stalking is there without guns too.
Let's just face the obvious: bringing up a huge and dramatic topic like gun regulation makes the issue which is the topic here look less dramatic. This is it. There isn't more to it. The argument makes no other senese here.
Alice has lost her pen that may have no ink in it. Alice has also lost her bank card. Alice has just spend hours searching for her pen. What does this say about Alice?
It says alice gets swept up in solving "problems" that arent even clearly problems (does she need a pen without ink?) all the while not even basically engaged in real problems.
Here: do airtags make society less safe, or more safe? Does it, eg., supress theft? Does it enable more criminals who would go on to other commit crimes to be caught early? (And so on..)
In other words what does our being hastily swept up in one downside of one piece of technology tell us?
Now, if you think airtags are serious threats to social saftey, the above doenst apply. But I dont read the guns point as procrasting whataboutism -- rather I read it as a claim that airtags are pens-without-ink and this is obvious when contrasted with a more actually pressing matter.
I read it as a claim that we're being sweptup in moralising about a non-moral problem
This is not true at all. Maybe for AirTags themselves, but EarPods are the same trackers and they do no such thing. My partner has been getting plagued with notifications that an EarPod is tracking her location, but she cannot find where it is. This has been happening for nearly a month. An option is given on the iPhone to disable the tracking, but you need physical access to the device for it. Also a suggestion is given to notify the police, but you need to have the serial number for that. Which again requires physical access to the device.
All this while she’s been actively involved in a court case for establishing a restraining order against a domestic abuser of hers.
If Apple actually cared they’d allow you to disable from the app. As is they’re just paying lip service to the abused while actively aiding the abusers.
> If Apple actually cared they’d allow you to disable from the app. As is they’re just paying lip service to the abused while actively aiding the abusers.
Then the value of the product would be zero, because thieves would disable it remotely.
The stupid beeping is already annoying if I happen to have BT off and jiggle my own keys.
But: how is that AirPod not running out of battery?
> No. Not if only. If they have been away from their paired phone for more than a few hours, they beep whenever they are moved.
Far more than a few — I am away from mine all day and they don't beep when moved. Apple apparently says it's somewhere between 8 and 24 hours. Also, they don't have to be right up against the paired phone — if someone is stalking a neighbor in apartment building, they probably come close enough to fool the system.
It is of course much more useful to sue the well-known billion dollar company than some fly by night endeavor where your contact information is ‘China’.
While that's true, the AirTag network is much more valuable for stalking.
Most people don't have a specific competitors tracking app on their phone, so the network is much smaller and location updates much rarer.
On the other hand. Every iPhone is by default an airtag location reporter, not only making the network much larger, but also, importantly, making it very likely that the targets phone, if it's an iPhone, will actively be reporting on itself, bring effectively as good as a gps tracker.
While this doesn't rule out the possibility of another tracker being used for stalking, it does make it dramatically more important for Apple to solve this.
This is a terribly bad faith argument. Apart from anything else, comparing AirTags to guns is absurd.
However, as I said in another comment, if they have been away from their paired phone for more than a few hours, they beep whenever they are moved. Even if you have no phone at all.
So you're saying that the SAFEST of all tracking devices should be the one used as a test-case to set a legal precedent against the harm that tracking devices could cause?
This reminds of the legal urban-myth(?) where if you grievously injure someone but had the intent to kill them, you get less time than if you didn't intend to hurt them at all.
Then Apple would be the only company making a gun that warned anyone, and you're saying that would make them worse than all the companies making intentionally concealable guns.
Which is what happens with the other tracker devices: there is no notification for anyone with any device. Even on android where apple presumably doesn't have the ability to do whatever low power level stuff that's apparently required they have an app.
Other trackers don't have anything that warns people. Tile does do something at least: there's an anti-theft mode that requires a government id to use. Except that's still 100% dependent on the victim knowing that they're being stalked.
In my opinion, the issue is not so much that Apple built a tracking device (of which there are plenty of competitors) but rather that Apple built the first tracking device that worked at scale.
Some years ago a friend of mine bought a set of Tile trackers without knowing what they were. He then found out they were useless as anti-theft devices because no one in his area had the app. If his Tile was gone (along with whatever they're attached to), the chances of his tile being near a second Tile user were negligible. But Apple had the market power to overcome that issue.
I don't know how good other trackers are but I imagine a GPS tracker needs a battery and a SIM card, which would make them more expensive and with a limited battery life. If Apple truly managed to build a tracking device that's forever on and whose alarm can be easily disabled, I don't think it's a bad idea to wonder whether they've jumped too far into "bad for society" territory. Usually we would discuss these issues in the open, but nowadays lawsuits seem to be the only way to do it.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, because this is the truth. AirTags are cheap, always-on tracking tags with no GPS receiver of their own. The only way they can report their location is via the goodwill of the other devices in their monolithic ecosystem, something that can only be built via large-scale cross-manufacturer cooperation, or by unilaterally doing it as a dominant manufacturer with enough beachhead devices around the world to make the system worthwhile.
> One plaintiff from Indiana, LaPrecia Sanders, lost her son after his girlfriend allegedly used an AirTag to track his movements and then "followed him to a bar and ran him over with her car, killing him at the scene."
This was one of the few explicitly mentioned cases. And something tells me AirTags were not the problem here.
There's sorta a meta question here. If a product gets released, and some use it for nefairous uses, how much is the company at fault?
Even though airtags are tracking devices, they are legitimately useful.
Kinda reminds me of the NSO situation, where they supposedly only gave access for a specific set of legal reasons. Then the client decided to use it in a nefarious manner anyway.
What if a manufacturer produces a tool, like a screwdriver that is shaped exactly like brass knuckles? Or some sort of similar extremely obvious dual use widget where the illegal use is readily apparent? I'm arguing that it's not some sort of self-evident truth that manufacturers can't be held responsible, IF the illegal usage is well understood.
As always, Apple wasn't first but sure made it more easy. Any dumbass with bad intent can now buy airtags instead of getting a sim card and a gps device.
But taking a step back and acknowledging the amount of heat Apple has gotten for releasing a legitimately useful product while we drown in an ocean of guns always makes me chuckle uncomfortably.