Lufthansa abandons AirTag ban

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/lufthansa-awkwardly-abandons-airtag-ban-after-baffling-face-plant/

by rbanffy • 4 years ago

134 111 4 years ago

arstechnica.com

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

I won't be flying Lufthansa anytime soon.

I don't want to entrust my life and my baggage to a company so incompetent.

lutoma• 4 years ago

… because they banned AirTags? That seems a bit of an overreaction.

poochy2• 4 years ago

Especially because it sounds like they didn't actually ban AirTags

Fendii2• 4 years ago

Your logic is flawed.

If they really did it like mentioned than they did everything right: banning it then analysing it and then greenlighting it

If the analysis would have shown an issue you would have been protected BY Lufthansa and standing up vs just not caring.

InTheArena2• 4 years ago

You swallowed the yellow irrational outrage pill. Lufthansa had a customer service rep who (correctly) stated that things with transmitters must have a airplane mode (also true) - without knowing enough about airtags.

Now you are assigning an emotional context ("entrust my life", "incompetent") to a simple question of if Airtags apply?

duxup11• 4 years ago

a customer service rep who (correctly) stated that things with transmitters must have a airplane mode

That doesn't appear to be what they said:

https://twitter.com/lufthansa/status/1578879849577385984

zucked2• 4 years ago

Yeah, you're right - managing PR and a social media presence is a direct correlation to operating airplanes with a relatively stellar safety record:

(Lufthansa has)"one fatal air crash, one non-fatal crash, and two hull losses noted since 1989" (1)

(1) JACDEC, https://www.jacdec.de/Order/2021_JACDEC_AIRLINE_RISK_RANKING...

ciabattabread• 4 years ago

How is Germanwings Flight 9525 (Lufthansa Group) counted under this system?

sigstoat• 4 years ago

I don't want to entrust my life and my baggage to a company so incompetent.

even supposing the stories were true and accurate, if this is enough to get you to never use an airline, which ones are left for you to use?

anaganisk3• 4 years ago

Lol imagine distrusting an airline, pilots, ICAO, ATC, ground crew, Airbus/Boeing because they placed a ban on airtags.

danpalmer6• 4 years ago

From what I've read Lufthansa never banned AirTags, regardless of what a misinformed customer service person on Twitter may have thought.

They clarified their guidelines to say that active transmitters were not allowed in the hold because they couldn't be put on to flight mode (pretty much correct according to ICAO guidelines), and then after all this blew up later clarified their position by confirming that AirTags do not count (also correct).

duxup11• 4 years ago

From what I've read Lufthansa never banned AirTags

"Hi David, Lufthansa is banning activated AirTags from luggage as they are classified as dangerous and need to be turned off./Mony"

https://twitter.com/lufthansa/status/1578879849577385984

I think that's pretty explicit. Official policy somewhere else in the company might be different but it's hard to imagine how folks are supposed to know what is up when they say it clearly like that.

danpalmer6• 4 years ago

regardless of what a misinformed customer service person on Twitter may have thought

I'd suggest that their published guidelines are probably more reliable than the interpretation of those being communicated for convenience by customer service reps. That's not to say this didn't have an impact, it clearly did, and customers should be able to trust this, but most of the reporting on this has treated it like an active decision to ban a particular device by a large company, rather than a misinterpretation by one individual in response to a question about a specific device.

tlogan3• 4 years ago

If they just replied back and said “oh no - mistake: AirTags are allowed” then there will be no story. But they did not. So I called them and their customer support was not able to tell me. So I started believing that they really will not allow AirTags

croes• 4 years ago

But why do AirTags not count?

danpalmer6• 4 years ago

The guidelines are targeted at phones and other long range transmission equipment. AirTags use Bluetooth and have a relatively limited range, a very low transmission power, and don't really do much at all until they get pinged by another device.

It's also been fairly well understood for a while now that Bluetooth is not a concern on flights, and it uses an ISM radio frequency which is specifically set aside so as to not interfere with things like planes and other critical communications infrastructure.

Move37• 4 years ago

They are just afraid of more hate online

Fendii2• 4 years ago

Yes the online hate. This crazy online hate.

Just that 99% of normal people were probably not even aware.of this topic but hey online hate

kbelder• 4 years ago

They're not afraid of normal people.

InTheArena2• 4 years ago

Classic. Someone gets a lower-level customer service rep on twitter to make a statement based on incorrect and incomplete information about Airtags in compliance with regulation.

Media blows it up into this insane thing, that Lufthansa is evil, and doesn't want you to track your bags, so they can lose it with no repercussions.

Lufthansa clarifies things (once again, in line with law) - and then the media uses works like "face plant", "baffling" and "awkward". Assigning emotional context that ridicules Lufthansa.

This plays out all the time with the media and is a huge part of the reason why confidence in the media is at a all time low.

Mikeb856• 4 years ago

Lufthansa deserves it. Worst airline I've ever flown (and that's saying something being from Canada).

nominusllc• 4 years ago

Yeah, not sure why this commenter is rushing to their defense. Out of all PR fumbles, this one is the fumblest.

raverbashing2• 4 years ago

Yes, I'm sure one anecdotal experience turns it into the absolutely worse airline of planet Earth. Worse than Air Koryo even.

Most customer rankings disagree with you. Which doesn't mean the airline should be free from criticism, of course.

h0h0h0h01112• 4 years ago

easyjet wants a word

s1artibartfast2• 4 years ago

It is my preferred Airline, but I'm usually flying business so maybe that's the difference

pc86• 4 years ago

Is AirCanada bad? I have a big flight on there in a few months (honeymoon) and it's gotten rescheduled numerous times but otherwise service has seemed fine.

Sohcahtoa823• 4 years ago

When it comes to airlines, you can pick any brand, and if you mention them, there will be at least one person who will chime in with a horror story and claim they're the worst airline.

And it's usually based on a single one-off bad experience.

TillE• 4 years ago

It's definitely scummy journalism, but there's also a little misunderstanding in how social media reps work in Germany vs elsewhere.

Basically in Germany, they tend to operate with considerably more autonomy. It is not uncommon to see official Twitter accounts arguing with customers, where in the US you'd probably just get a canned response or ignored if you're sufficiently rude. So I'm not surprised that someone like this decided to interpret policy by themselves, and failed.

monksy6• 4 years ago

, they tend to operate with considerably more autonomy.

That's one way to put it.

Another way to put it is:

They tend to operate without much oversight or ethical boundaries.

duxup11• 4 years ago

That's now how I read this playing out at all...

Someone gets a lower-level customer service rep on twitter

You mean the person who posts to the verified Lufthansa twitter account?

https://twitter.com/lufthansa/status/1578879849577385984

This doesn't seem like some low level rep that got called up to get manipulated.

I think the lesson here is that if your verified twitter account says something ... people take it seriously.

offsign_p• 4 years ago

Or the lesson is very little good can come for using Twitter as a medium for "news"

mobiledev2014• 4 years ago

Ars has definitely gone downhill, both in-house stuff like this and in the spamming of other Cande Nast junk. What is today's Ars-of-10-years-ago?

bleomycin• 4 years ago

Agreed. Unfortunately there don’t appear to be any viable replacements. Ultimately I just read less in general now which sucks. I hate what the internet has become.

coldpie• 4 years ago

I've been a paying subscriber since 2009 and I'm still happy with it. I agree this article is a dud and I could do without the Wired articles (thankfully they're easy to identify and skip even if you miss the by-line -- just look for the first paragraph that's all setup and zero content). But they still seem like a fine outlet for high-level science & tech news.

thrown_22• 4 years ago

Ars in 2008 was the place where people found out you could run arbitrary floating point computations on a GPU. I've never heard anyone talking about it but without those forums deep learning would still be this thing that looks interesting but is really hard to train at scale and no one bothers with.

nmilo• 4 years ago

Then maybe it's time that lower-level customer service reps stop running official company twitter accounts. Maybe you and I see it differently, but most of the world sees a company's twitter account as the official source of information and fast-paced updates. It has as much significance as a press release from the CEO or an announcement on the company website. So if the lower-level customer service rep fucks up, outrage is warranted because they should have gotten someone more competent to run the account in the first place.

mjhay• 4 years ago

Social media managers form an important work program for executive's fail-nephews, so I don't think what you are suggesting is realistic.

INTPenis• 4 years ago

You're going after the wrong people here. Journalists hungry for clickbait can't wait for incompetent customer reps to tweet some stupid shit. So the "journalist" can blow it out of proportion. It's literally their bread and butter.

ramblerman• 4 years ago

No, outrage is warranted when countries go to war.

This kind of nonsense activism hurts us all.

bonestamp2• 4 years ago

I think you're both right in different ways -- part of the problem is operations...

A friend of mine operates social media (at a tactical level) for a very large company and it sounds like they have a good set of operating guidelines in place to prevent problems like Lufthansa has here.

Now, most of his job is just replying to the same questions all day long (and he has a small team of people to handle the volume). All of the information they give out has been pre-approved, but once in awhile something new comes along and he runs it up the flag pole to marketing and/or legal before adding it to his list of approved replies.

Additionally, he works with the communications department, sales, and marketing to create planned communications. His expertise is in social media, and he guides the communications from the other departments on what will work well on social media. But he rarely comes up with the actual message.

tlogan3• 4 years ago

Mistake happens. if the lower-level customer service rep fucks up, you just tweet again saying that it is wrong.

But they said nothing. For about 6 days. And on their twitter accout I do not see: hi so sorry we made mistake. AirTags are allowed.

Karunamon• 4 years ago

I get what you are trying to say here and generally I agree with the context you are trying to add, but so long as corporate entities have personhood rights, I think we should treat the putative monoliths as what they claim to be for the purposes of assigning blame, otherwise we make it too easy to escape accountability.

In other words: this was not the actions of some random low level person at Lufthansa, this was the actions of Lufthansa because it was an authorized person speaking on authorized channels. If they spoke incorrectly, that is within their power to fix and prevent from happening again.

spfzero• 4 years ago

Yeah, Ars Technica has really gotten irritating over the past few years. I read the Rocket Report and that's about it these days.

ncr100• 4 years ago

You really BLASTED the media there, @InTheArena!

Yes - modern technology is making an objectively malformed economy and social signalling system.

Still crossing fingers that there is a viable solution to populism.

andrei_says_• 4 years ago

The normalization of clickbait everywhere is so disheartening. Including on HN. I have to click through to the comments and find the one correcting for the hyperbole and fake extreme emotions used in the title.

It is exhausting and I refuse to click through such titles - but nowadays that’s almost all of them.

monksy6• 4 years ago

Someone gets a lower-level customer service rep on twitter to make a statement based on incorrect and incomplete information about Airtags in compliance with regulation.

I can't believe that someone pressured a lower level customer service. From my experience, they (the employees) decided to make up a new rule that benefited them.

tlogan3• 4 years ago

I do not know… it seems like Lufthansa messed up here.

Lufthansa official twitter account clearly said: “Hi David, Lufthansa is banning activated AirTags from luggage as they are classified as dangerous and need to be turned off./Mony”

So are you saying that official Lufthansa twitter account is some low level employee? So I should not trust messages posted on their twitter account?

I fly Lufthansa a lot and I follow their twitter account thinking that is official account to update me rafting different rules (COVID, etc.)

If they made a mistake that is ok: they should imeditatelly tweet again and said that. There will be no “crazy media”. But nope - nobody even customer service (I call them) did not know.

relativ575• 4 years ago

You get me read the article. Here is the timeline according to the article:

1) Lufthansa said Airtag was banned:

"Hi David, Lufthansa is banning activated AirTags from luggage as they are classified as dangerous and need to be turned off./Mony"

2) Lufthansa clarified why it banned AirTag:

"According to ICAO guidelines, baggage trackers are subject to the dangerous goods regulations. Furthermore, due to their transmission function, the trackers must be deactivated during the flight if they are in checked baggage and cannot be used as a result. /Ana"

3) Lufthansa backtracked, implying that it was the government who was wrong and they only followed the rules:

"The German Aviation Authorities (Luftfahrtbundesamt) confirmed today, that they share our risk assessment, that tracking devices with very low battery and transmission power in checked luggage do not pose a safety risk. With that these devices are allowed on Lufthansa flights."

4) Lufthansa confirmed with NYT that AirTag was allowed after all.

All I can see is Lufthansa was wrong, double down, had to reverse the course with some vague excuses, and still haven't admitted they were wrong. What exactly is out of proportion? When they said they banned it without clear explanation, it inevitably opened the door to speculation, and lost luggage is an obvious explanation.

I have to question your bias against the media here. As for using "face plant", "awkwardly", don't you see the walking back earlier tweets, but not admitting error, as anything but awkward?

jbverschoor• 4 years ago

You really believe that it’s because of a single rep? Then you also might also believe that most management disasters are “programming errors” like that sometimes say?

arinlen2• 4 years ago

You really believe that it’s because of a single rep? Then you also might also believe that most management disasters are “programming errors” like that sometimes say?

It's uncanny how all of the world's problems are either caused by lower-end employees or acts of god.

The higher the position, the more infallible they are.

That must be why higher-uos are paid the most: they are physically unable to do no wrong.

endisneigh3• 4 years ago

Is it even possible to ban AirTags? How exactly would that work? Even if you made the cargo hold a literal faraday cage, presumably as soon as you move the luggage the mesh network will be active again and immediately reconcile the location, which is what the user would want anyway.

capableweb2• 4 years ago

Same way illegal drugs are banned, pass everything through a scanner that detects the illegal thing. In this case, it would a UWB (and/or BLE and/or NFC, AirTags seems to use all three technologies) detector that flags any bags for manual inspection.

Not saying banning it is right/wrong, just that there definitely is a way of detecting them if you really want to.

endisneigh3• 4 years ago

How would you distinguish devices that use the sake protocols from the AirTags with the current scanners? There would likely be thousands in an airport at a given time.

How would you stop someone from taking out the battery and replacing it after security, or cross airline luggage transfer of devices with AirTags?

Enforcement of a ban without customs level scrutiny seems impractical.

duxup11• 4 years ago

Possible to detect.

Question would be how much compliance they would get, or mass non compliance that it becomes a hassle to deal with.

delecti• 4 years ago

It's absolutely possible to ban AirTags, it may or may not be possible to perfectly enforce that ban.

junon2• 4 years ago

"awkwardly"? "baffling face plant"?

Come on Ars...

shapefrog• 4 years ago

You Won't Believe These 10 Tricks Headline Writers Use to Get Clicks.

junon2• 4 years ago

But this is Ars. Typically considered above these sorts of things.

ebiester• 4 years ago

I'd rather the opposite: when luggage is checked in, a smart tag is attached. Then, it's retrieved right before leaving the luggage area, such that you know that the person who got the luggage is the right person.

That said, that brings a lot of logistical complication and cost, and won't happen anytime soon.

nijave• 4 years ago

Sort of like the inverse of restaurant "waiting for a table" pagers

Sohcahtoa823• 4 years ago

Yeah, I work in security, and it's always been horrifying to me how easy it is for people to steal luggage.

lizardactivist• 4 years ago

Article and title well on form for a cesspool like Arstechnica.

ehPReth• 4 years ago

why is it a cesspool?

tannhaeuser• 4 years ago

Idk this doesn't bode well - for Ars Technica. Don't they have news to report that they pull these nothingburger stories out of thin air? What has become of the Ars of John Siracusa with his legendary Mac OS reviews?

duxup11• 4 years ago

What's the nothing burger?

The story was all over HN and other sites.

Following up on what the actual policy is and how wonky it is to announce on your official twitter "Hi David, Lufthansa is banning activated AirTags from luggage as they are classified as dangerous and need to be turned off./Mony" and later having to clarify that it wasn't accurate ...

All that seems like legitimate news.

dang• 4 years ago

Recent and related:

Lufthansa has not banned AirTags - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33134737 - Oct 2022 (247 comments)

Lufthansa bans AirTags in checked luggage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33127459 - Oct 2022 (599 comments)

kristianpaul• 4 years ago

Hate when “interpretation” of regulations are used to cover questionable service or opportunities to improve

kazinator• 4 years ago

This is like the French Canadian story of the Black Dog of Jean Labadie.

The character Jean Labadie is a good storyteller, who spins a vivid tale about a black dog, which doesn't actually exist. The people in his village believe it and start spreading rumors about it. People claim to have seen it, and even to have been bitten by it. Calls grow louder for something to be done about the ferocious animal as the false rumor spreads out of control. In the end, Jean has to shoot the nonexistent animal to calm the uproar.

Lufthansa abandons AirTag ban

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