VanMoof bikes connected to the Find My network if I remember correctly. I thought you can pay for access.
But to disincentivize theft, any device would have to be built in such a way that swapping the electronics or discarding that tracking module makes the device you were protecting worthless. Lots of secure handshakes between paired components, very secure software kept up to date, etc. which sounds unrealistic in most cases.
Together with that network access fee probably makes such solutions economically infeasible today.
> But to disincentivize theft, any device would have to be built in such a way that swapping the electronics or discarding that tracking module makes the device you were protecting worthless.
Not really. It just needs to be so difficult to remove without a key that thieves physically cannot remove / disable the tag without threatening the stability of the bike, car or whatever.
Doesn't need to be perfect, all it needs to do is provide sufficient survival time against your average crackhead.
An AirTag is a lost item tracker. What I was mentioning is a stolen item tracker. Very different propositions.
You’re proposing something that may be a paradox. The only way to make something physically hard to remove is to integrate it. Locks are proven to be ineffective for this purpose. When this ideal lock is invented you will simply lock your bike with it directly and achieve the goal of theft deterrence to begin with. No need for tracking if stealing the bike destroys it.
Getting an AirTag into a mechanically locked compartment of your bike is useless. You even mentioned LPL so you know any such lock will be bypassed in a matter of seconds, maybe even less time than it takes you to put the AirTag you just bought in there. So your theoretical protection model hinges on something that doesn’t exist yet: a lock that you can easily open to put an AirTag in and service it but that nobody else can unlock.
Car or e-bike manufacturers paying for access to any “find my” network means they can heavily integrate the expensive electronics in a way that makes removing the “tracker” part truly impossible (it’s on a main controller chip) or severely devalues the object if you do (the chip/board is prohibitively expensive and impossible to find on the open market). It’s more expensive and kills self repair but reliable anti theft might be worth it to you. Think of the iPhone model here.
At the end of the day the Find My network exists to be used by different manufacturers [0]. The unpickable lock doesn’t.
> An AirTag is a lost item tracker. What I was mentioning is a stolen item tracker. Very different propositions.
There's two different types of "stolen items"... you got organized theft, stuff like people stealing cars that are then parted out in Eastern Europe [1]. And then you got stuff like people going for joyrides - this is something that can be solved by even a decently hidden AirTag.
No I get that. For cars it’s actually a lot harder because they have a lot of valuable parts that can’t be meaningfully secured.
And joy rides are the worst of all because the perpetrators aren’t around by the time you locate your car of bike. Locating it is actually the least of the worries, it’s usually crashed somewhere or thrown in the river.
But a phone, e-bike, or expensive camera, etc. are better served by integrated “Find My”. If it gets to Shenzen it’s lost anyway but otherwise removing the activation locks or location mechanism in practice will destroy the core of the device.
Locking an AirTag behind a mechanical lock cannot achieve the same. It takes a minute to pick or drill the lock and ditch the AirTag in an envelope to Shenzen. Think of LPL and what lock can prevent that. The lock is still the weakest link and if it can’t protect the bike directly, adding layers of complication directly relying on the same weak link seems pointless.
But to disincentivize theft, any device would have to be built in such a way that swapping the electronics or discarding that tracking module makes the device you were protecting worthless. Lots of secure handshakes between paired components, very secure software kept up to date, etc. which sounds unrealistic in most cases.
Together with that network access fee probably makes such solutions economically infeasible today.