13 AirTag Tracking Scenarios

Well thank you, @glennf. This is the first time I’ve heard about two separate settings. They’re a bit hidden on my iPhone, but indeed they appear to leave an option for Find My for your own personal devices (“traditional Find My”) while not having to participate in the global Find My network. I stand corrected. Different naming might have helped prevent confusion here.

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I’ve written so much about Find My and AirTags, I forget that people rarely look at nested settings! I agree on the naming. It should be Find My Device and Find My Network or something. Originally, Apple called the network “Offline finding,” and then rebranded it all somewhere since last fall to Find My network everywhere.

So…so Airtags support Family Sharing in iCloud or are they unique to an individual iCloud account. Seems to me that sharing them via Family Sharing so that my tags and her tags become our tags instead. Yes…it means one could stalk their wife but if users could opt out of family sharing on a per AirTag basis that would make them more useful to a family group…and it would also solve the posted scenario of one in her car and one in my car but since either of us drives both on occasion (well, not actually quite true for my wife and I…I we’re together I always drive and we take my car unless we take hers for the extra space but she pretty much only drives hers) then the tag could check in with either of our phones.

Glenn, thanks for the tip.

The ‘Find My Network’ switch is hidden in the ‘Find My’ sub-preference of the Apple ID preference on mobile devices. When you tap the Find My carat, the top option says ‘On’ if you have, in fact, enabled it. However, when you tap carat after tha , you discover that in addition to the Find My Phone switch, there are Find My Network and Send Last Location switches, whose states are not represented in the options shown earlier.

Furthermore, even if you know a ‘Find My Network’ options exists, it does not show up when you activate a Search at the Settings level.

The UI leaves something to be desired.

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For whatever, they are initially not part of Family Sharing. That is likely because there’s an end-to-end security protocol employed that’s not used for any other Family Sharing purposes.

If you use iCloud Keychain, the People album in Photos, and a few other features that rely on iCloud for syncing, Apple uses end-to-end encryption in which all of your devices use a secure method to hang out keys among themselves that leak zero knowledge to Apple of those keys. They do know which devices are logged into iCloud. The synced data is encrypted at each device using encryption information they all share. It’s not decrypted while in iCloud, and iCloud.com doesn’t provide access.

Find My relies on the same sort of thing for the networking feature. You can only use it from a Find My native app, and you cannot use it if you don’t have at least two devices or items: the lost item or device can only be located by having shared encryption information.

Thanks Glenn…makes them a lot less useful than they could be.

I think it’s a bit part of the tension between utility, abuse, and privacy. Kind of why we published this article, to tease those issues out a bit and figure out what the best uses are.

My wife has agreed to take an AirTag with her on an upcoming car trip partly out of curiosity for her and me about it tracking! I could also de-pair one and give it to her so she could more easily find her car in a strange city after parking it.

The de-pairing part might be underrated. It’s a little irritating to reset them (it requires a repetitive act), but because there’s no long-term data stored by them or your devices tracking them, you can think of them as utility objects, and distribute and re-distribute them among family.

Given Apple allows Find My to track people over the Internet who have opted in, it’s plausible that they might expand the security model and update how they handle encryption to provide an opt-in that’s very similar to that Internet-based tracking option.

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Oh no. I forgot to update the firmware on my golf ball. It’s now out of battery.

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Thanks. Nothing I’ve read until now mentioned this. But I see it right now on my iPod’s settings:

Apple Maps already has a Parked Car function that shows the location of the car when the iPhone Bluetooth disconnects from the car system. It will be interesting to hear how the Airtag improves accuracy/reliability for this feature.

AirtagAlex the same man that @ace tipped us about have shown on youtube how to remove the speaker coil from the Airtag. https://youtu.be/sgGNShP9H8A

I don’t have AirTags, but after reading your brilliant novel on their use maybe I will. Great writing. Thanks so much for publishing it.

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If you’re not using Apple Maps in that configuration, then you don’t get the feature. I use Google Maps, and if I’m navigating and then park, it does seem to drop a pin. And then sometimes, perhaps if the background location engine stops or other factors, it loses the pin.

Yeah, that is great for stalking. It also prevents someone from using the Bluetooth-based option that appears when an AirTag is detected moving with them where they can play a sound.

I am not impressed. He broke the retaining clips when opening it - something that iFixit warned aginst in their teardown. Which means he was forced to glue it shut, meaning you can’t get back in again, should need to, without creating even more damage.

BTW, iFixit’s video for how to drill a hole (to attach a key ring) pops out the speaker magnet much more easily:

I’m not sure that Vicente‘s situation is accurate. From what I’ve been able to gather (from https://www.reddit.com/r/AirTags/comments/n4022r/airtag_faq_updated_weekly/ among other sources) AirTags don’t alert the iPhone of a person they’re following until it reaches their home or other frequented location. So now you know where your car thief lives, which should be useful information for the police. At least, that’s what seems to be the case. Do you have official information to the contrary?

From the Reddit article:

Will trigger iPhone notification for borrower (or thief) only when they arrive to the address registered as their home → Will give you their home address and some time to locate the AirTag in case they stop on their way back home (since it can’t be located while it’s moving).

I haven’t seen anything indicating that’s the case and the FAQ doesn’t cite a source. Note later in the FAQ that this appears to be the result of a single bit of writing:

NEEDS MORE TESTING) When the person having your AirTag arrives to their registered home adress or frequent location: | ”Drove around with one paired to my GFs phone and it didn’t beep at all. Had it with me from 6am to 6pm and the only notification I got was when I arrived home.”

We do research what we write, and that FAQ isn’t authoritative, though it is a great compilation of information.

According to Apple’s official documentation, you might be aware of an AirTag only in two circumstances:

  • Your iPhone or iPad alerts you: With an iPhone or iPad running iOS/iPadOS 14.5 or later and with the Find My network setting enabled, if your device detects the same Bluetooth anonymized AirTag ID for “if an unknown AirTag is seen moving with you over time.” We don’t know all the parameters. Apple says the encrypted Bluetooth ID rotates frequently, but not how frequently. If it changes every hour, and you have an AirTag you don’t own with you, ostensibly if you’re moving than X distance (not disclosed by Apple), your iPhone or iPad displays an alert. In the Washington Post and other coverage, reporters saw alerts without reaching home. The limitation here is how frequently the ID rotates.
  • AirTag beeps after three days: An AirTag has an internal timer that starts counting down when it no longer sees the device with which it’s registered. When three days passes and the AirTag has moved, the device “plays a sound,” which people hearing it indicates doesn’t last that long and isn’t incredibly loud. It apparently makes another sound at intervals, but not constantly.

Note also that we don’t update older articles unless there’s something dangerous or misleading in it (Adam can tell you more about that), and Apple has already started tweaking AirTag features. So it may be that in the future, these scenarios will sound way off base.

As of yesterday, Apple added the last four digits of the registered phone number associated with an AirTag’s owner’s Apple ID account to the “found” page that is linked to via an NFC tap. That seems to provide more accountability, as someone using an AirTag to track anonymously now has the issue that someone can find it, tap it, open the URL, and see part of a phone number—which the stalked party might recognize, or the police might be far more happy to take seriously since it’s data they can act upon.

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Here’s the semi-official source I originally got this from: https://youtu.be/DEbm2iG1TNU (starting at about 6:00).

Wild. That is not documented anywhere, and the folks who have tested it don’t seem to find it only works at home or known locations. Arguably, it’s an extraordinary bad choice: you don’t want someone to track you home at which point you’re notified that you’re being tracked. It seems like you’d want to know that as soon as it’s moving with you for more than a moment or so or over some distance.

Interestingly, Apple has been putting this out in statements since AirTags were released, but has no updated any of its support documents or other information. Here’s a paraphrased (not directly quoted) comment of the same sort to Fast Company on April 29:

Apple has built some protections into this system. If you are an iPhone user, for instance, and someone has placed an AirTag on your person, your phone will eventually alert you that an AirTag that isn’t yours has been found “moving with you.” Apple didn’t clarify how quickly or often this alert will arrive, but it did share that it will occur when you arrive at your home (the address stored in your Apple “Me” card) or at certain other locations that your phone has learned you frequent over time. Apple declined to disclose further specifics, citing the interest of public safety.

What I’m wondering is whether part of them not disclosing specifics, is if there is a filter: as you approach home or other frequently visited locations, does your iPhone or iPad stop relaying information from a specific Bluetooth ID until you’re alerted? Because an iPhone or iPad that’s not associated with an AirTag can only send a Play Sound message via Bluetooth, there doesn’t appear to be a way to suppress the AirTag broadcasting (so other people with iPhones and iPads around you keep transmitting the item’s location).

This seems even worse than what the documentation states.

However, I can see the philosophy there: it reduces false matches in public places—like public transportation. Otherwise, someone carrying a bag with an AirTag in it that doesn’t belong to them would trigger “an AirTag is moving with you” alert for 100 people…

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It also means that there’s at least some degree of theft protection. If it doesn’t alert until it reaches a frequented location, you can at least know roughly where the thief lives or works—presuming that information is transmitted back to the owner of the AirTag…or at least available to the police with a warrant.

On the other hand, that may be exactly the information a stalker is interested in, as you describe in Betsy’s scenario. It’s a difficult balance.