I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move

> Checking in constantly. Wondering and/or quizzing their child, partner or friend about what they were doing at location X.

Fwiw, I’m a pretty big fan of FindMy and share my location with friends and family, I haven’t experienced this at all. My experience is that its convenient and cuts down on the number of “whats up” type messages I get when busy.

All of these people are fairly well-adjusted adults though. I don’t care if people I trust track me, or even ask about someplace they saw me — why would I? There’s a pretty bright line between controlling/judgmental/suspicious behavior related to tracking, and just curiosity. If your grandpa tracks your cousin because he’s old and bored and wants to live vicariously, to me thats fine, if he grills your cousin about where he saw him thats wrong.

I think a lot of this has to do with how open/accepting the group is. I can say confidently that all the people in my findMy group share the attitude of live and let live, and would tell me what they were up to, honestly, when asked “whats up?”. Its the anti-social network, lol.

Indeed https://memeslayerx.github.io/nonfree-pizza/

> Instead of making anti-theft devices semi permanent I think it makes much more sense to just discourage using them for stalking in the first place at the time of purchase. If you make a device that is semi permanent people will just find a way to hack it and repackage it into something else. And realistically people may want smaller anti theft devices for small but very valuable items.

My thought process was discouraging some kind of "sure, we'll sell you a piece of paper with a tracker stapled to it. Don't take out the staples, wink wink nudge nudge". It's a tradeoff between making sure that people can swap them out if their provider goes out of business, but also deterring people from casually trying to repurpose them. I was thinking something like rivets. They're totally removable, but not something you'd do without motivation.

> Instead of manually having to do that though it would probably be easier if at the time of sale you had to sign a terms of service and the vendor automatically registered the serial number to your name in some kind of semi-public registry that law enforcement and others have access to. Even if would be thieves find ways around this it is going to discourage a ton of stalking in the first place.

Yeah, this is exactly what I was thinking! It should absolutely be point of sale based. Both to prevent casual stalking, but also to protect normal people that just forget to register them. I'm a scatterbrain; I could totally see myself forgetting that I need to register it if they leave that up to me.

> In addition I think a setting on your phone that you could manually activate that told any airtags within a close vicinity to NOT track you could also be interesting - there may be many false positives but someone explicitly worried about someone stalking them could activate this feature for at least some piece of mind.

Currently, I believe you can tell your phone to not report the AirTag (or similar for the other similar devices). That works well, but it doesn't stop other people's devices from reporting your location. So your phone would have to be able to broadcast a message that stops everyone else's phones from reporting the location of the tracker. Even if only 10% of the population enables it, I spend a lot of time in Bluetooth range of at least 10 other people. It seems like a platform killer to allow that.

I want such a thing to exist, but I can't find a technical way for people to stop a random tracker in their vicinity without just killing trackers as a whole. I'm not an expert on the topic, and I'm a little buzzed as it is, so there might be a solution I'm not seeing here.

All your proposals ignore the fact that someone with electronic design skills can whip up a GPS tracker that is outside of this system.

You would have to regulate this at the integrated circuit supplier level.

Oops, China; good luck.

Note that a tracking device does not have to transmit any information in real time. Suppose someone wants to find out where you live. If they know that they will run into you again somewhere they could stick a device onto you that just records your movements into flash storage. Then next time they run into you, they retrieve it somehow over some close range wireless or maybe physically. Such a device won't be detected by the presence of signals: it doesn't connect to any mobile network or Wi-Fi or anything.

Or, such a device could just sporadically connect to a network to send a small packet of information, e.g. once every few days.