An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking
&gt; <i>...and we condemn in the strongest possible terms any malicious use of our products.</i><p>Then subject them to malicious users <i>before</i> releasing them to see what sort of ideas they can come up with in a few days, and mitigate those before general release.<p>Go schedule a room at Defcon, give people AirTags, and see what they do.  If they neutralized your mitigations in an hour, well... other people can figure that out too.  That the speakers are so easy to disable... well, yeah, you should have figured that out <i>before</i> release.<p>I&#x27;m a bit concerned about Apple&#x27;s internal ability to reason about malicious actors.  This is the second time in recent history they&#x27;ve released a shiny something, only to discover it torn to shreds in very short order by people.  The whole CSAM hashing algorithm being as weak as it was to manipulation <i>should not have been a surprise to them</i> - but it sure seems like the system was designed without considering that the first hashing algorithm was trivial to intentionally collide.<p>&quot;Buy an iPhone to prevent people from tracking you, and if you want to see where the tracker is, buy a really new one!&quot; is some sort of sales pitch, certainly, though this new set of things sounds so prone to false positives and annoyance that I&#x27;m not sure how long it will be until people just turn the whole thing off (if that&#x27;s an option).<p>It&#x27;s a neat concept, but doesn&#x27;t seem to have survived contact with reality and humans very well.