I get that this lawsuit is about discerning whether Apple built enough safeguards into the AirTag system…<p>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.
AirTags are the only tracking device that have <i>any</i> kind of anti-stalking protection. Literally the only one that does anything at all.<p>And yet it gets all the flak.<p>People are stupid.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
> 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."<p>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?<p>Even though airtags are tracking devices, they are legitimately useful.<p>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.
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.