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Lufthansa abandons AirTag ban

arstechnica.com

51–60 of 115 posts

Re: Lufthansa abandons AirTag ban

#51

Classic. Someone gets a lower-level customer service rep on twitter to make a statement based on incorrect and incomplete information about Airtags in compliance with regulation. Media blows it up into this insane thing, that Lufthansa is evil, and doesn't want you to track your bags, so they can lose it with no repercussions. Lufthansa clarifies things (once again, in line with law) - and then the media uses works l…

Yeah, Ars Technica has really gotten irritating over the past few years. I read the Rocket Report and that's about it these days.

Re: Lufthansa abandons AirTag ban

#52
post #14

Classic. Someone gets a lower-level customer service rep on twitter to make a statement based on incorrect and incomplete information about Airtags in compliance with regulation. Media blows it up into this insane thing, that Lufthansa is evil, and doesn't want you to track your bags, so they can lose it with no repercussions. Lufthansa clarifies things (once again, in line with law) - and then the media uses works l…

Lufthansa deserves it. Worst airline I've ever flown (and that's saying something being from Canada).

Is AirCanada bad? I have a big flight on there in a few months (honeymoon) and it's gotten rescheduled numerous times but otherwise service has seemed fine.

Re: Lufthansa abandons AirTag ban

#53

Classic. Someone gets a lower-level customer service rep on twitter to make a statement based on incorrect and incomplete information about Airtags in compliance with regulation. Media blows it up into this insane thing, that Lufthansa is evil, and doesn't want you to track your bags, so they can lose it with no repercussions. Lufthansa clarifies things (once again, in line with law) - and then the media uses works l…

Ars has definitely gone downhill, both in-house stuff like this and in the spamming of other Cande Nast junk. What is today's Ars-of-10-years-ago?

Ars in 2008 was the place where people found out you could run arbitrary floating point computations on a GPU. I've never heard anyone talking about it but without those forums deep learning would still be this thing that looks interesting but is really hard to train at scale and no one bothers with.

Re: Lufthansa abandons AirTag ban

#54
post #28

I won't be flying Lufthansa anytime soon. I don't want to entrust my life and my baggage to a company so incompetent.

Yeah, you're right - managing PR and a social media presence is a direct correlation to operating airplanes with a relatively stellar safety record: > (Lufthansa has)"one fatal air crash, one non-fatal crash, and two hull losses noted since 1989" (1) (1) JACDEC, https://www.jacdec.de/Order/2021_JACDEC_AIRLINE_RISK_RANKING...

How is Germanwings Flight 9525 (Lufthansa Group) counted under this system?

Re: Lufthansa abandons AirTag ban

#55
post #29

From what I've read Lufthansa never banned AirTags, regardless of what a misinformed customer service person on Twitter may have thought. They clarified their guidelines to say that active transmitters were not allowed in the hold because they couldn't be put on to flight mode (pretty much correct according to ICAO guidelines), and then after all this blew up later clarified their position by confirming that AirTags…

>From what I've read Lufthansa never banned AirTags "Hi David, Lufthansa is banning activated AirTags from luggage as they are classified as dangerous and need to be turned off./Mony" https://twitter.com/lufthansa/status/1578879849577385984 I think that's pretty explicit. Official policy somewhere else in the company might be different but it's hard to imagine how folks are supposed to know what is up when they say i…

> regardless of what a misinformed customer service person on Twitter may have thought

I'd suggest that their published guidelines are probably more reliable than the interpretation of those being communicated for convenience by customer service reps. That's not to say this didn't have an impact, it clearly did, and customers should be able to trust this, but most of the reporting on this has treated it like an active decision to ban a particular device by a large company, rather than a misinterpretation by one individual in response to a question about a specific device.

Re: Lufthansa abandons AirTag ban

#56

Is it even possible to ban AirTags? How exactly would that work? Even if you made the cargo hold a literal faraday cage, presumably as soon as you move the luggage the mesh network will be active again and immediately reconcile the location, which is what the user would want anyway.

It's absolutely possible to ban AirTags, it may or may not be possible to perfectly enforce that ban.

Re: Lufthansa abandons AirTag ban

#57
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lufthansa deserves it. Worst airline I've ever flown (and that's saying something being from Canada).

It is my preferred Airline, but I'm usually flying business so maybe that's the difference

No post body was provided.

Re: Lufthansa abandons AirTag ban

#58
post #14

Classic. Someone gets a lower-level customer service rep on twitter to make a statement based on incorrect and incomplete information about Airtags in compliance with regulation. Media blows it up into this insane thing, that Lufthansa is evil, and doesn't want you to track your bags, so they can lose it with no repercussions. Lufthansa clarifies things (once again, in line with law) - and then the media uses works l…

Lufthansa deserves it. Worst airline I've ever flown (and that's saying something being from Canada).

When it comes to airlines, you can pick any brand, and if you mention them, there will be at least one person who will chime in with a horror story and claim they're the worst airline.

And it's usually based on a single one-off bad experience.

Re: Lufthansa abandons AirTag ban

#59

Classic. Someone gets a lower-level customer service rep on twitter to make a statement based on incorrect and incomplete information about Airtags in compliance with regulation. Media blows it up into this insane thing, that Lufthansa is evil, and doesn't want you to track your bags, so they can lose it with no repercussions. Lufthansa clarifies things (once again, in line with law) - and then the media uses works l…

[deleted]

Re: Lufthansa abandons AirTag ban

#60

I'd rather the opposite: when luggage is checked in, a smart tag is attached. Then, it's retrieved right before leaving the luggage area, such that you know that the person who got the luggage is the right person. That said, that brings a lot of logistical complication and cost, and won't happen anytime soon.

Yeah, I work in security, and it's always been horrifying to me how easy it is for people to steal luggage.
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