> There's no reason to believe these are a bad idea beyond lowering entry cost to GPS trackers.
That's not something to be glossed over. Lowering the price of abusable technology makes that abuse a lot more prevalent. Take for instance guns, there is a strong inverse relationship between the price of a gun and the likelihood that it will be used for murder. The guns most often used for crimes are the cheapest handguns that you could get for a hundred dollars or so. More expensive guns, like rifles or higher quality handguns, still get used in crimes but a lot less often. And the most expensive guns, machine guns with collector value, are virtually never used for crime.
In making GPS trackers extremely cheap, it will be abused far more often. It's no longer esoteric technology that most people except cops or PIs wouldn't even think to use; it's dirt cheap and prevalent. Prevalence is a big part of it; it used to be that most people were unfamiliar with the specifics of GPS tracking. Maybe they heard about it in the news or in movies, but they wouldn't know where to start looking to buy one for themselves and certainly didn't have one laying around in their home already. But now that every other person seems to have a dozen of them laying around their home, the risk of impulsive use has become very real. Planting GPS trackers on people has become something the general population can do on a whim. It wasn't like this before.
I think if you include the cost of an iphone then it's probably more expensive then the alternatives (unless you connect it to your own iphone/account in which case Apple will happily give your details to the police if the Airtag is found). I think the bigger problem is that if you're being tracked and you don't have some iDevice plus someone has tampered with the airtag speaker you're not going to be notified of its presence unless you install and use the airtag scanner app, which is a poor solution in my opinion. I'd like to see them open up the mesh protocol at least enough so that Android or other devices could see tags near them/be notified if they're being followed without having to opt-in
That's not something to be glossed over. Lowering the price of abusable technology makes that abuse a lot more prevalent. Take for instance guns, there is a strong inverse relationship between the price of a gun and the likelihood that it will be used for murder. The guns most often used for crimes are the cheapest handguns that you could get for a hundred dollars or so. More expensive guns, like rifles or higher quality handguns, still get used in crimes but a lot less often. And the most expensive guns, machine guns with collector value, are virtually never used for crime.
In making GPS trackers extremely cheap, it will be abused far more often. It's no longer esoteric technology that most people except cops or PIs wouldn't even think to use; it's dirt cheap and prevalent. Prevalence is a big part of it; it used to be that most people were unfamiliar with the specifics of GPS tracking. Maybe they heard about it in the news or in movies, but they wouldn't know where to start looking to buy one for themselves and certainly didn't have one laying around in their home already. But now that every other person seems to have a dozen of them laying around their home, the risk of impulsive use has become very real. Planting GPS trackers on people has become something the general population can do on a whim. It wasn't like this before.