AirTags are not better in one very important way: they don't prevent theft. They will notify thieves that they are hidden in a valuable item that they are stealing if the thief carries an iPhone.
Tile has a feature where you can submit your info and sign some sort of extra contract stating that you won't use your Tile for stalking/illegal activity, and you can actually hide a Tile in your bike frame and it can be used to find your bike if it goes missing. AirTags are useless for this because Apple doesn't want them used for stalking.
How do hidden trackers "prevent" theft? If a thief steals your bike and is notified that it's being tracked, they're probably much more likely to abandon it somewhere, at which point you can recover it. This seems like a safer bet than trying to hunt them down yourself. (It should go without saying the police are not going to go get your bicycle back for you even if you do hand them the GPS coordinates.)
It’s a massive deterrence. LoJack has been in business since 1986 for a reason.
Also, the attitude of “don’t go and get your stuff back yourself, it’s not safe” is just castrated cowardice and only emboldens thieves. Thieves should be afraid of both law enforcement and vigilante response. Better society when both are on the table.
A hidden device can't prevent theft. It takes visibility to be a deterrent.
For instance: One or more well-hidden surveillance cameras cannot ever deter anyone from doing anything. However: One or more cameras placed out in the open can do so. (They don't even have to be functional cameras to be a deterrence.)
LoJack isn't a deterrence. It is instead a way to react after a theft has already occured.
The AirTag, meanwhile: It also can't prevent or deter the theft -- if a thief is going to steal a thing, they're going to steal it whether it has an AirTag hidden somewhere or not.
And when an iPhone-using thief is alerted to the presence of that AirTag tracker, they have options beyond just ditching the bike: They can make the AirTag make noise, and also use Precision Finding to draw an arrow on the screen of their phone that helps them to locate the AirTag so it can be destroyed.
(This is a deliberate anti-stalking feature on the part of Apple.
Tracking stolen goods is fundamentally incompatible with anti-stalking measures: There cannot be both things in the same ecosystem, since if a person can silently track their [stolen?] bicycle, then they can also silently track a living human being.)
Thieves will begin to expect it to be there some of the time, after sufficient police/vigilante response. And perhaps it will be hard to find. Hence, deterrence.
Cars are stolen far less often than they would be otherwise partially due to technology like LoJack. Did you grow up in the US? Steering wheel locks used to be on every other parked car. Immobilizers and LoJack made them a thing you buy for your weekend classic car only.
Immobilizers had an order-of-magnitude larger impact on car theft than LoJack. It used to be relatively trivial to start a car without the keys once inside. Now (disregarding certain Hyundai/Kia models) it’s essentially impossible to start without the key.
You lose credibility right there. No need for such bullshit it you actually have a point. Performative machismo is completely useless.
> Thieves should be afraid of both law enforcement and vigilante response. Better society when both are on the table.
lol no. Actually, what the hell are you thinking? Mob justice is not justice at all. What happens when someone decides you are a thief (or rapist, or murderer) just because they don’t like the look of you or would like to have your car very much?
This does not frighten thieves; this frightens people other people don’t like. I mean, we’ve had plenty of examples in recent history. I would take the risk of losing my bike every now and then instead of the risk of being lynched any day.
If you hide the tag in a way that it can’t be removed (locked to the bike etc) then what option does the thief have? They might actually decide not to steal the item!
Tile has a feature where you can submit your info and sign some sort of extra contract stating that you won't use your Tile for stalking/illegal activity, and you can actually hide a Tile in your bike frame and it can be used to find your bike if it goes missing. AirTags are useless for this because Apple doesn't want them used for stalking.