Part of me says "kitchen knife manufacturer sued over stabbing" and the other part of me says the fact that these tags can be rigged to avoid sweeps is screwy. The linked story says the tags just have a hole drilled into the tiny speaker so it doesn't beep. Just making it ping and not showing it on the phone itself seems like a dumb way to make "sweeps" work with these tags.
The iPhone app does have a pretty accurate Tag-finding feature. So disabling the speaker doesn't preclude a victim being notified of tracking and finding the device.
But, that's on Apple. There's only a very limited [official Apple] app available on Android - it lacks automatic notification of being tracked - victim has to manually scan for Tags. I don't know how well it can precisely locate the Tags.
No they don't. Besides the obvious flaw of having to download and open an app to check if you're being tracked, they just don't work. They all have sub 2.5 ratings on the app store.
The only ones on that list that don't have terrible ratings are general bluetooth scanners and they don't tell you that you're being tracked, just that there's one nearby. Compare that to iPhones where you'll get a notification if one is following your movement, they're functionally useless if you don't think you're being tracked.
It seems like this use case would be pretty easy to detect and disable.
There should be a way to give a fuzzy location to give you a general idea of which geo-fence you left something. Only authorized via warrant LE should be always able see exact location. You should only be able to get exact location for 20ft geofences that you have ever been in.The point of these is to find stuff you lost, not confront thieves (leave that to LE). Then you can still find tags you misplaced at your school or house or work or.... but you can't find it at a place you have never been. If your kid went somewhere new, you just have to go there and then you'd be able to see the location too.
As someone who loses his keys a lot, air tags are a lifesaver.
Also they're actually designed to last a long time being simple devices, with water proofing and battery replacability. I foresee using them until they break at this rate, which will probably be many, many years.
Knifes break, rust, dent and lose their sharpness. Many are about the equivalent of ewaste, much like furniture itself.
