Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review!
I have taken the last few weeks to relax and make sure that my hot takes are as prescient as possible. We are talking about the AirTag this week, and I think it could be one of Apple's biggest scandals of the decade.
You can get this in your inbox every Saturday morning from the newsletter page.
James D. Morgan is the photographer.
The biggest thing.
AirTags are a very useful product from Apple.
That is the problem.
There has been a lot of controversy about how Apple has rolled out these and how they can be used to stalk someone. This isn't just a theoretical issue, it's already happening.
It is not a unique scenario where technology can be used for good and bad purposes, and I think it is going to be more embarrassing for Apple than any mistake.
Over the last few years, Apple has arranged a lot of their product marketing on how their devices function in edge use cases. Health tracking features on the Apple Watch can help identify rare conditions or save lives. The stories of users who found the Apple Watch to be a life-saving tool have been documented in TV commercials. There is potential for some of that same good, but there is also more downside. In the next year, we will see examples of AirTags being used in ways that are not in line with the Apple Watch commercials. It may end up being a product that is gross.
This is a screengrab of Built for Mars.
Apple has made its own efforts to make it harder to detect AirTags that don't belong to a certain user, but these notifications have proven buggy and have often waited too long to alert users. Adding in the fact that Apple seems to treat integration of the two operating systems as an unimportant part of the package, and Apple's incompetence looks a bit more severe.
I don't think Apple will be able to design a way out of this problem. Even though they ship on iOS to backtrack issues, safeguards won't reach a lot of people who could be targeted.
It is hard to see how Apple would justify continuing to sell AirTags. Apple made a unique mistake in that they delivered exactly what they promised but failed to consider the full scope of that initial promise.
The photo was taken by Justin Sullivan.
Other things.
I think you should take a closer look at these stories.
The woman was found guilty on 4 of 11 counts.
The trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is over. We are waiting for further guidance on whether or not the jury will be retried for several of the counts that they could not reach a verdict on. Holmes was found guilty of defrauding investors, including the DeVos family, hedge fund manager Brian Grossman, and former estate and trust attorney Dan Mosely. She was found not guilty of charges related to defrauding patients.
