Yes, I think the PR backlash for such features is too great that it spoils them for the rest of us.
When people "misuse" any technology, it seems the consensus nowadays is that the responsibility is shared between the technology creator/owner and law enforcement. Personally, I'm not fully sold as this is mainly a sociopolitical question.
It would 100% be used for stalking & be directly contributing to easier violence against victims. Not sure I buy the argument it's purely because of image PR reasons vs there being a genuine well-founded harm-minimization strategy for why it's designed this way.
You can call anything you do as a "genuine well-founded harm-minimization strategy", but nobody is out there banning knives and gardening shears and shovels and baseball bats and other tools that can contribute towards "easier violence" because of the cost to society. You either have an absolutist/ideological view on this, or you're willing to compromise. Ultimately its a matter of perception, and then too, some people are easier to convince than others.
I really don't understand your argument here. No one is banning you from building stalking devices. Apple and Google have chosen by themselves not to do that & are working to standardize their particular implementation (which you can also see in this thread there's a lot of support for). That's very different from banning knives and gardening shears.
And I think you are taking a very US-centric view. For example, switchblades & similar quick-open knives aren't legal in many jurisdictions. So yes, many countries recognize that tools have a trade-off and are willing to legislate their usage depending on problems being observed.
It's very rare to find a true absolutist on any idealogy unless they're completely blinded - it's just that they draw the line further away than someone else / need a stronger argument to convince them. For example, I'm going to guess that you're not in favor of laissez faire with respect to nuclear weapons & tech - cause that shit is actually really easy and cheap to build these days & the sole difficulty is the regulations that surround it.
>I really don't understand your argument here. No one is banning you from building stalking devices
I use airtags to not just locate lost stuff, but also as a potential means to find stuff when stolen. Its not about me wanting a way to stalk someone, what a bizarre thing to say!
>It's very rare to find a true absolutist on any idealogy unless they're completely blinded - it's just that they draw the line further away than someone else / need a stronger argument to convince them.
Oh, I'm not a libertarian, I'm firmly pro-government. I'm just not pro-nanny state. I'm willing to compromise if the other side is too. However am I not allowed to complain, even a little?
> Its not about me wanting a way to stalk someone, what a bizarre thing to say!
Please describe how what you’re asking for is different than stalking the people who stole your stuff? More importantly, how would Apple/Google know how to differentiate between the two use-cases?
> However am I not allowed to complain, even a little?
You can always complain but your complaint is pretty non-sensical because this is private corporations making a decision and government isn’t involved, so it’s unclear how this is a nanny state. Go build your own tracker that meets your specifications?
And yet tiles have been out for something like a decade and I've never seen a news story about them being used for stalking.
100% indeed...
Stop your screeching that is feeding the asinine moral panic that has resulted in these things becoming worthless for tracking packages and stolen items.
1. You need to go compare the reach of how good Tile’s tracking is vs literally nearly every smartphone being opted-in transparently into tracking these tags. This is drastically different.
2. Tile is a smaller target, so “I’ve never seen a news story” just means the reach of any such story is smaller.
3. Maybe Tile already has similar protections? It’s against their TOS [1]
4. Tile has been sued for stalking [2]
5. Tile is offering an anti-theft feature provided you have to use biometrics & give them a government ID and you have to agree that they’ll sue you if you use it for stalking [3]. So Tile too is clearly concerned about the stalking problem, they’re already being sued around it, & they’re a drastically smaller target than Apple and Google (no one is going to craft legislation around what Tile is doing). Apple is 3x the size of Tile by itself.
You can disregard it as moral panic but how would you distinguish that from a genuine concern of the potential for an abuse for a technology? Strict liability isn’t popular these days but it has ebbed and flowed as a doctrine. Failure to try to try to do a good faith attempt to prevent this problem would certainly land Apple and Google into hot water when a case of stalking inevitably happens using these devices.
3. Tile doesn't (or at least didn't as of when I replaced my last one with an AirTag). I don't put much weight in the TOS bit; I'm sure it's against Apple's, too.
5. If Apple launched an AirTag Pro at twice the price with these controls but otherwise identical hardware, I'd be all over it. They're leaving money on the table.
So which is it? Is it unjustified moral panic with 0 evidence of harm & Tile isn't doing anything or are you just upset that these big companies aren't building the product you want to buy?
With 5 you're now shifting goal posts by introducing a non-sequiter to my point 5. I've clearly highlighted that Apple always balances money-making opportunities against their values around privacy & public safety. No one is forcing you to buy this product. You should also fully expect to see Tile utilize this standard so that they can leverage the reach of having every smartphone in the world scanning for these instead of just other Tile customers.
I think you're right. I get the push toward that consensus. There are plenty of makers (cough cough Purdue Pharmaceuticals) who make awful, abusable things and then say, hey, it's not our fault people are misusing them! It still sucks getting caught in the middle.
Thinking system-wide changes through is what public policy is all about, and the same should probably be true of shipping devices in the tens of millions.
(That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Doing pilot studies is a good idea.)
When people "misuse" any technology, it seems the consensus nowadays is that the responsibility is shared between the technology creator/owner and law enforcement. Personally, I'm not fully sold as this is mainly a sociopolitical question.