Yeah I don't understand this. Surely airtags have to be registered, and when an iPhone sees tag 3957375967 Apple's servers look that up and say "oh it's registered to Billy Bob; I'll tell them".
But if your fake airtag rotates through 2000 IDs how do you register them all?
Apple apparently stores every reported location in a database and allows people to query whether a certain public key was received with or without the key being registered to a specific user since they change on a regular basis so one can’t track a specific device.
Seems like the end-game for this is to change things around like this:
1. you can't track items outside of some distance from you in real-time
2. items marked as lost would need to be sent to a review team inside apple (contractors I imagine) that would then log your information, require you to explain what the item is, and generally make it very cumbersome to get the actual location or history of the location
3. then very likely a neutral 3rd party would have to go to the location to determine if the claim seems to be legitimate, or this is a case of somebody stalking somebody else or something
4. likely would require police getting involved somehow
The idea that people can be vigilante's and track down their own stolen bike is a great idea, but it basically equates to "stalking somebody".. any work-arounds for android users and iphone users will either only work in certain circumstances (what if you only live 1 mile away from the bars downtown -- then now the stalker knows where you live and the device was with you a super short period of time -- maybe 2-5 mins depending upon method of travel)... the only way around this is to block people from being able to get the raw information -- sure the data might be collected, but giving it directly to the customer is both the best and worst thing about this.
But if your fake airtag rotates through 2000 IDs how do you register them all?