Were the Stalkers haunting Apple??
The Apple AirTags were reportedly delayed several times, and this might just be the reason..
Apple finally launched the much-awaited AirTags this April. Some prominent leakers have tipped Apple launching something like these since the early phases of 2019–2020. But to our utter disappointment AirTags were nowhere to be found. Every time we expected Apple to launch them they weren’t there. I think now they are out there in public, I can guess the exact reason why there were so many delays.
Since its launch, Apple has sent out the review units and as of now, writing this post even the common public has got their hands on these tracking devices.
Now the issue that I strongly suspect, might be the reason Apple was pushing back the launch of the AirTags would have been brought to light.
These trackers are mainly meant to be helping their owners find the commodities they are attached to, like the keys, your small backpacks, or some other random stuff that you keep on losing and waste loads of time getting back.
Also one of the prominent features that come to play is if your commodity is stolen, or misplaced, and they somehow end up with someone else. The intended use of the tracker would be to help the owner find out their stolen/lost item wherever possible.
For iPhone users, the AirTags are registered onto the FindMy network. And it works Amazingly accurately. Those who own the AirTags would be able to access the amazing FindMy network and get all the information required pretty easily.
On the other hand for android users who find a lost item, Apple has built-in NFC into the AirTags which would help the Android users to scan the AirTag and get the required info of the owner, which can be used to probably return the AirTag and the commodity back to the original owner.
But on the other hand, there is a huge downside to this, brought to light by some early adopters of the technology, later also confirmed by the Washington Post.
The potential for the stalkers and domestic abusers. The Airtags provide a huge platform for these kinds of people to stalk on someone without them knowing at all, especially if they are Android users.
Whereas Apple has already thought about the problem and baked a potential solution into the network and AirTags which works for iPhones 6s and newer.
This is the anti-stalker feature(not officially but works as said), where if a person owning an iPhone has been compromised with an unknown AirTag, then their iPhone would inform the owner that they are being followed by an unknown AirTag when they are at a safe location, and if they do not recognize that particular AirTag, the iPhone will display ways you can disable the unknown AirTag. But there is no way of knowing who was the one trying to compromise the location of the person being stalked or the whereabouts of the stalker that might make it easy for the complainant to file a complaint and help the authorities to get to the stalker with ease. Whereas Apple would be able to release some information about the original owner of the Tag if requested by the authorities, but that could potentially delay the whole process and is only viable if the unknown AirTag can be found.
According to the reports, and personal tests, the AirTag seems to generate some kind of alerting sound anywhere around 72 hours/three days from the moment it has been separated from its registered iPhone. And even after three days, the unknown tag just provides a feeble beep for almost 15 seconds and goes into silence for the next few hours. This alarm feature is potentially useless for the Android users, as they would not know that they are being tracked and also when the feeble beep comes on, they would probably miss the beep too.
Also if the stalker is someone that is at work, or comes in contact with the person being stalked, it would reset the internal clock for the AirTag whenever they are around, and they still keep on track.
On the other hand, three days is probably a huge time duration for anyone to successfully know some things, they should never be knowing. And this is true for most of the stalking activities being reported. Even a day of tracing activity is more than enough for most case scenarios, as the prime location of your house can be compromised within a day.
Surely the delays to the launch can be explained with the ambiguities along the lines for the engineers and analysts at Apple to decide on what should be the best duration that would not annoy the heck out of their users, and also provide alerts whenever found being used mischievously.
PS:- Some might think, that the Tile trackers have been there for a long and would also serve the same purpose. Please understand that Apple is a huge corporation and probably the one that starts a chain of innovation leading to the whole market following them. So they need to take the most care and think twice before taking every step.
Also, the packaging information from the early review units conforming that the AirTags were indeed ready long ago.
