Will this be an option? We don’t really know for sure yet. The privacy section on the website doesn’t mention it as far as I can recall (it talks about locating it but doesn’t mention disabling). Others seem to have found more info but I’ve heard so many different things that it really just isn’t clear at the moment.
The only reference to disabling is found in Apple's
lone AirTag support document right now, but after re-reading it more closely, I'm 99% convinced that this is simply referring to telling users how to remove the battery.
In fact, if you look very closely, you'll notice that the option Apple is referring to isn't "Disable AirTag" — it's "Instructions to Disable AirTag" (the capital "I" is easy to miss 😏).
To disable the AirTag and stop sharing your location, tap
Instructions to Disable AirTag and follow the onscreen steps. If you feel your safety is at risk, contact your local law enforcement who can
work with Apple. You might need to provide the AirTag or its serial number.
Similarly, in the fourth paragraph it says "If you detect an unknown AirTag, use the steps below to learn about the AirTag and
how to disable it." (emphasis mine).
Again, I think many of us jumped on the support article, saw "Disable AirTag" and assumed that there would be some cool digital feature to switch it off, but that really makes no sense for all of the reasons that have already been discussed in this very thread. If you're holding the AirTag, you can simply pop out the battery and you're done, and if you're not holding it, you can make it repeatedly emit a sound until you do find it. If you're not holding the AirTag, you really have no business trying to disable it.
It is interesting that Apple have been so vague about how long it will take before people get alerted. I’m hoping that this is because it depends on the circumstance. Maybe with a crowd of people (especially if you are on a train line, which are marked on the map) then it will take a long time, but one person by themselves will be alerted quickly? We just don’t know.
I think Apple is being vague because it probably is circumstantial, even at a basic level. The notification is based on an AirTag "travelling with you," which suggests that it needs to be continually near you over a greater distance.
Based on the intended purpose of the notifications, I would guess that they also require close proximity. Nobody is going to be stalking you with an AirTag that's more than a car length away. In fact, in most cases it would be somewhere directly on the person's clothing or belongings. So an AirTag on the other end of a train car may not be considered a "threat" in this case.
However, I also suspect Apple is being deliberately vague in order to discourage stalkers from trying to find ways to circumvent these safety measures. Apple's execs have already made it clear that they'd much rather consider these features a deterrent to stalkers using AirTags in the first place.
I'm in two minds as to whether to buy these at the moment. I mainly want them for tracking baggage and it is a little unclear how well they will work in that scenario.
Tracking baggage does seem like it may be a bit of a grey area, but I think the worst-case scenario is that others might get inadvertent "moving with you" notifications, which could spook some people. However, I have to assume Apple has thought of this, and I doubt that's going to be a problem in most cases.
The most problematic scenario I can think of (which I noted earlier in this thread), is train travel, where the baggage area is at one end of a long train car, or possibly even in a separate car. In this case, it's possible that there may be other people who are much closer to my bags than I am.
Based on the assumptions I already noted above about the reason for these notifications, however, I suspect the range at which an AirTag considers itself as being away from its owner is far greater than the range at which somebody else's iPhone should consider it a problem. It makes sense that it would try and stay latched onto its owners iPhone for as long as it possibly can, and on the other side it's not really being used to track somebody else until it's within a few feet of them.
These are all assumptions, of course, but again I'm pretty confident that Apple has considered these angles. They've certainly had long enough to think about all of this, since we know they've been working on these tags for at least two years — and probably been thinking about it for
way longer, considering that Find My iPhone has been around for over a decade now.
But like you said, the only way to know for sure is to try them for yourself. I've already pre-ordered a bunch, and I'm eager to see how they actually play out under real-world conditions.