Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple is convinced my dog is stalking me

engadget.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 138 posts

Re: Apple is convinced my dog is stalking me

#91

Post by smiley1437 »

fingerlocks wrote: post #83
dougmwne wrote: post #81

Airtags are such a mess. My partner has one on his keys. First it would just notify me when he left his phone in the car. No way to permanently dismiss that notification. Hmm. Then it started notifying me all the time whether he has his phone or not. I have a near constant notification that I can only "ignore" for 24 hours. Then it started beeping at random times like in a theatre. I would gladly agree to a waver so…

That’s odd. My partner and I have two each and never have that experience. Like not at all. I wonder if the batteries are dying or the product is defective?

Another anecdote, my partner and I also have 2 each and we've never, not once, had that experience either in the nearly two years we've had them.

Which seems weird because you'd think it would definitely trigger the stalker warning.

Re: Apple is convinced my dog is stalking me

#92

Post by rtkwe »

croutonwagon wrote: post #77
el_benhameen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is surprisingly powerful anti-marketing from Apple. I got some AirTags to keep track of our keys without realizing that AirTags can’t be shared within a family. I hoped they’d be useful to my wife, who sometimes forgets her purse, but she absolutely hates them as they’re always giving her warnings. I loaned my car to my sister and now she and her husband are off the list of potential customers, too. I get the st…

Interesting point you make. My wife and I have shared an icloud account since before family sharing was an option but i was way too cheap to by multiple copies of a weather app etc. It works fine short of having to make some new tweaks each time i update/restore/add a device (mostly around setting options in iMessage and Facetime to uncheck my numbers on her device and vice versa on mine.). I have been increasingly m…

AFAIK if you setup a family the notifications go away. What would solve this for couples that aren't quite that committed would be a way to share the location info on an AirTag or at least be able to mark a particular tag as 'known' or 'safe'. I think with either of those but particularly the former all of the stalking concerns kind of go away. If you can also access and see the location for an AirTag in particular if you do need to get away for some reason you can find and dump the offending tag(s) or potentially disable them.

I don't really get why Apple doesn't have an option to do that already. It seems much better for shared objects and people like the Author and it doesn't seem like there are any technical hurdles to providing that.

Re: Apple is convinced my dog is stalking me

#93

Post by 93po »

dougmwne wrote: post #81

Airtags are such a mess. My partner has one on his keys. First it would just notify me when he left his phone in the car. No way to permanently dismiss that notification. Hmm. Then it started notifying me all the time whether he has his phone or not. I have a near constant notification that I can only "ignore" for 24 hours. Then it started beeping at random times like in a theatre. I would gladly agree to a waver so…

To clarify, your phone tells you he left his phone behind? Or the airtag on the keys tells you that the phone was left behind? Cus the latter sounds awesome for my use case.

Re: Apple is convinced my dog is stalking me

#94

Post by 93po »

I tried to use an Airtag to keep track of a the second group of people I was with at Disney World and it was beyond useless. For some reason they work well for my day to day life, and maybe it's because I'm checking for the location of something usually after it's been sitting still for hours. But at Disney it completely failed to find the Airtag unless I was standing literally next to it.

Re: Apple is convinced my dog is stalking me

#95

Post by _yb2s »

bcherny wrote: post #6

I recently bought a bunch of AirTags for my family: for our keys, our bike, our luggage. Annoyingly, every AirTag needs to be linked to a single iPhone. Even when everyone belongs to the same Family. AirTags also make annoying sounds every time I grab my keys to go out. They’re still the best UX on the market, but I wish Apple would improve the UX just a bit more. Maybe their policy folks are worried about news stori…

I was too cheap to buy airtags so I bought a cheap knockoff, the Nutale Findthing. The family sharing actually works very well. They were crazy cheap and have replaceable batteries even. Crazy that a cheap amazon knockoff would have a better experience than Apple.

Re: Apple is convinced my dog is stalking me

#96

Post by bende511 »

nerdjon wrote: post #85

Is it just me or does the author not really understand what a family iCloud is? It's not merging accounts as they seem to think it is. I don't gain access to my partners data just because we are on a family plan. Really the only "issue" we have is the credit card has to be the same but that's such a small issue to resolve since we have a shared credit card for shared expenses. I don't really see the issue with going…

But what if you have roommates? Like, what if I live in a 3 bedroom apt. I don't want to have a family plan with my roommates just so I don't get a stalking notification about my friends backpack being left in his bedroom. There are lot's of situations where non-traditional household arrangements make the 24 hour notice will be a real pain. You should be able to add other iCloud accounts to ignore specific tags, or something like that.

Re: Apple is convinced my dog is stalking me

#97

Post by 93po »

lsaferite wrote: post #23
fwlr wrote: post #10

A “Trust this AirTag” option, perhaps requiring the AirTag’s owner’s device to be involved as well, could solve this issue.

Why would the AirTag owner need to be involved? If I say that I trust a specific AirTag then it shouldn't matter what the owner thinks.

I wouldn't be surprised if half of all cases of an known Airtag following you resulting in an annoying notification whose options were "Trust Airtag" and "Close", people would choose to trust to make the notification go away. Thus enabling stalking.

edit: apparently Apple just disables the airtag in these situations so even the owner can't find it

Re: Apple is convinced my dog is stalking me

#98

Post by 404mm »

jrmg wrote: post #86
nerdjon wrote: post #85

Is it just me or does the author not really understand what a family iCloud is? It's not merging accounts as they seem to think it is. I don't gain access to my partners data just because we are on a family plan. Really the only "issue" we have is the credit card has to be the same but that's such a small issue to resolve since we have a shared credit card for shared expenses. I don't really see the issue with going…

There are loads of comments here from people that don’t realize that you actually can turn off notifications for AirTags that belong to family members you’ve linked your iCloud account to. It’s mentioned in one sentence at the end of the article.

How can you do that?! I need this! I have AirTags, family setup and plague of notifications :(

Re: Apple is convinced my dog is stalking me

#99

Post by nerdjon »

bende511 wrote: post #96
nerdjon wrote: post #85

Is it just me or does the author not really understand what a family iCloud is? It's not merging accounts as they seem to think it is. I don't gain access to my partners data just because we are on a family plan. Really the only "issue" we have is the credit card has to be the same but that's such a small issue to resolve since we have a shared credit card for shared expenses. I don't really see the issue with going…

But what if you have roommates? Like, what if I live in a 3 bedroom apt. I don't want to have a family plan with my roommates just so I don't get a stalking notification about my friends backpack being left in his bedroom. There are lot's of situations where non-traditional household arrangements make the 24 hour notice will be a real pain. You should be able to add other iCloud accounts to ignore specific tags, or s…

ok I will admit I did not think of roommates... that is my bad.

that is a valid use case that you would not setup a family account.

Re: Apple is convinced my dog is stalking me

#100

Post by ultra_nick »

kentonv wrote: post #82

Reminds me of how Google keeps giving me security alerts saying that an unverified developer has access to my account. It highlights a particular Google Apps Script which I've granted access, and strongly encourages me to revoke it, because Google just doesn't know who this person is. The person is me. I wrote the script. I granted my own account access to my own account. The account owning the script, and the accoun…

Hopefully their AI doesn't permanently ban the wrong account.
Post reply on HN