AirTag makes techno-surveillance more accessible

One of Apple's latest products, the AirTag tracker, prides itself on solving one of the most frustrating everyday annoyances: the misplacing of objects. However, in addition to its heap of environmental pollution, this innovation can easily be used for criminal purposes.

AirTags, “practical innovation”

Do you know AirTag ? It is one of the latest discoveries from the well-known American brand Apple. They are small pellets, just over three centimeters in diameter, which each weigh eleven grams and perform the function of Trackers.

To put it simply, an AirTag makes it possible to locate certain objects (keys, bag, car...) in case of misplacement, loss or theft. The location is carried out by bluetooth, using others iPHonest as relays. You can then, with your own iPhone, locate the AirTag — and therefore the object. It is possible to locate it on a map or to be guided more precisely to find it in a small space.

Get rid of the search for keys, but at what cost?

Technology is thus continuing its apparently inexorable colonization of our daily lives. In conclusion of its high tech section, Le Parisien writes that “the AirTag corresponds to a need, to no longer lose your things, which is the role of a practical innovation^[1] ”. For tech enthusiasts, their iPhone must now take charge until they find their keys. And never mind if the fantasized deliverance of these “painful” tasks by digital proliferation requires an abundance of waste and pollution of all kinds, extractivism and modern slavery.^[2].

Why use your memory and/or actively search for lost objects when a technological innovation does the work for us? It is better to add AirTags to your personal technological arsenal (smartphone, tablet, smartwatch, wired or wireless headphones...)! It is better to fuel the technological advance and the destruction of our living conditions on Earth rather than continuing to search — occasionally — for its keys!

Technology is replacing our cognitive abilities and weakening us. The use of technology reduces personal abilities: by outsourcing the search for keys (among other things), we give up to the machine our memory capacity, which we know deteriorates when it is not stimulated regularly.

Techno-bullying accessible to the general public

Beyond these material considerations, which should be enough to push everyone to work for the dismantling of the technological system as a whole.^[3], we can point out the dangerous implications of marketing this gadget. Even the most fervent technology enthusiasts denounce the harmful potential of AirTags. In recent weeks, several articles and videos have been published to alert on the subject.^[4]. Surprise: the Trackers keys can be used as Trackers of humans, and in particular women.

Many people are testifying on social networks to their horror by discovering the snitch in their personal belongings. We can imagine not without shuddering the potential for control, tracking and violence that such a device offers to toxic loved ones, violent spouses, perverse strangers... In the United States, a man has already been killed by a jealous ex-girlfriend who was tracking him down using an AirTag.^[5].

Jacques Ellul had long warned of the ambivalence of technical progress: each innovation carries an inextricable set of effects, some of which “unforeseen” turn out to be extremely negative. The wonderful technological utopia offers us a new possibility: it democratizes techno-harassment and the hunt for men (or women) for 35 euros each. It also makes possible the diffuse and constant surveillance of loved ones and foreshadows future possibilities of horizontal techno-control.

“To sleep peacefully, buy an iPhone”

Apple did not fail to communicate about these frightening “drifts” of AirTag. The company assured that various mechanisms were planned to prevent criminal use, such as tracking people without their knowledge. A warning message is supposed to appear on iPhones near an unknown tracker. However, many users are still experiencing a significant delay and this feature is not available on all phones, but only on the latest Apple iPhones.

It is only very recently that Android smartphones (Samsung) have been able to detect unwanted AirTags^[6]. Also, it is striking that no answer mentions those who do not have a smartphone. The only option that the technological system gives us to protect ourselves (at least) from this techno-harassment is the use of the same digital technologies to counter them. Technology is becoming unavoidable; it is becoming impossible to live without it.

Refuse AirTags and dismantle the technological system

Thus, AirTags pose an additional technological threat to autonomy and freedom. In addition to the environmental and social damage inherent in their production, these trackers feed — through their necessary ambivalence — insecurity by increasing the nuisance power of toxic, ill-intentioned and dangerous people tenfold.

AirTags also draw an unenviable horizon: that of everyone being in control of everyone. This small object, apparently insignificant, illustrates well how the technological system works: to satisfy a fantasy of freeing up daily tasks^[7] or to satisfy an unhealthy desire to control others, tech-savvy humans are fueling a technological leap forward that is destroying their own living conditions and putting them themselves at risk.

The increase in technological power and its increasing accessibility in fact mean a multiplication of nuisance capacities. When techno tricks are more accessible and more efficient, the bastards are more numerous and more powerful. Also, when the multiplication of technocrap exceeds a certain threshold, when they start to be part of the landscape, dirty behavior normalizes. Humans are not the harmful ones, it is technical progress that makes them stupid and dehumanized.

The only solution to the problem: ban AirTags and dismantle the technological system that makes trackers useful and, probably in the medium term, inevitable.