One of my many careers is as a type historian, and I have a $1,350 item I sell called the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule. I started shipping them in September 2020. Had AirTags been available, I would have put one in every package and a SASE for the recipient to send it back to me on arrival. Amazingly, not a single one of the 96 shipped to date have been lost. One meandered around for a few days. But it would have been nice to know where it was during its journeys.
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Iāve considered getting one for one of my bikes.
Diane
TBH, if there were a thinner AirTag Iād get one for my wallet. Iāve never lost my wallet before, but I donāt want to learn what that feels like. Iāve seen 3rd-party competitors that come in a credit card like form factor for exactly this purpose.
Not for everyone, I get that.
The army moving story quoted by @ddmiller reads cool, it really does, as do some other examples.
However, AirTags start to beep after being separated from their owner for a certain period (the exact time varies, doesnāt it?)
How is that going to work in a parcel you ship? Will there be alerts with their related delays if somebody in a sorting centre hears this?
Whats does a bike thief do once they hear and locate the AirTag? Even before the 8 hrs are up, said thief might get an alert on his iPhone that there IS an Air Tag.
What happens at an airport in the bag handling centres once the AirTag starts to beep? A bomb alert? Not every journey is shorter than 8 hrs.
Leave a laptop bag/camera bag/gear bag intentionally over night in the office/workplace/at a friendās house/even at home. After a while the thing gets on everybodyās nerves. Do you want to constantly have to manage your AirTags to avoid this kind of nuisance?
On balance, we read so many stories about stalking, theft prevention, getting items back after theft. I donāt think they work well for these scenarios and Apple apparently says they are not for theft cases.
Grandmas who loose their keys at the supermarket, ok, a good one. But seriously, such a giant technological effort for these use cases?
I think that some developers thought this up without thinking it through. Was the world really waiting for this or is this solution desperately searching for a problem to solve?
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Yes. Why not? To give an anecdote, my sonās girlfriend misplaced her car keys when they were visiting during the summer of 2019. They were never found, which was discovered when she needed to leave to meet friends for a lunch appointment. It ended up costing her a lot more than an AirTag to have a locksmith come and replace they key, plus she missed out on her lunch appointment (we were not there and would have loaned her one of our cars for the day.) We all got a good laugh the next Christmas when we have her a gift of a couple of Tiles.
So much of the technology we use today fills what to others are trivial use cases. As always, if you donāt need it, if it provides you no value, then donāt buy it.
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Right, there are definitely things Iād need to look up (beeping etc).
Is there an AirTag app that you need to see them? Iāve never gotten a notification that I was near one.
Diane
Others have made the point about the fact that itās not for you doesnāt mean itās not for everyone, but Iām wondering how big the effort really was? They had to add code to iOS to handle the network and design and build the AirTag, but the iDevice network already existed ā they just leveraged it. In fact, it strikes me as something that didnāt take a lot of effort.
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I agree with that. Seeing as to just how many iDevices are around and with Find My already existing, this seems to me almost like ālow hanging fruitā. Donāt get me wrong, there was developmental effort for sure, but it also screamed waiting to happen just to leverage Appleās broad reach. I think this also a key advantage over competitors like Tile (assuming they donāt just tie into Find My). Who else has such a huge number of devices distributed around the globe capable of āphoning homeā at any time?
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I would say, not precisely? There are really three Find My circles: People, Devices, and Network (Devices and Items):
- Find My People relies on your primary device, typically and iPhone or Watch.
- Find My Device requires an Internet connection two-way interactions, and is supported by iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS. (Several audio devices show up in Find My Device via Bluetooth or using the Find My network, but arenāt āitemsā as Apple terms them.)
- Find My network is Appleās term for the crowdsourced network. This predates AirTags and since it already existed, AirTags leverage this extended system.
Iām still not sure why anything thinks its strange to want to track stuff in case you lose it or leave it behind. Apple added a very nice little Find My feature a release ago that lets you get notified if you leave something behindāitās a switch under Notifications for devices. Perfect to help avoid losing an iPad in a coffeeshop.
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Yep, thatās pretty much what I thought. AirTags by themselves arenāt a particularly big added effort to what already existed.
From a privacy point of view, it also leveraged the design of COVID-19 contact tracing APIs designed with Google, right?
As of course previously noted:
I, too, was puzzled by the news stating that some women were being stalked because of AirTags. As usual the news reports left out details like the ones being stated here.
The question - how can anyone DROP an AirTag on a person and be able to follow a person???
Other way around: the Find My network was introduced a few years ago for devices only. The idea of āitemsā (Bluetooth, no Internet connectivity) came with the AirTags and then the licensing program. Some more licensed items were announced at CES this year two weeks ago.
Apple collaborated with Google to create a modified Find My network, more or less!
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The model who said she was AirTag-stalked said her coat was on the back of her chair and she wasnāt always in the chair. I can see someone trying to slip a small item into someoneās possessions, but the odds of being caught seem really high?
There are also simple ways to disable the speaker so the AirTag doesnāt beep: Howto remove the speaker coil from the Airtag (make your Airtag very silent!) - YouTube
My wife and I spent decades working with victims of domestic violence and people being stalked. If there is any chance these devices can be used for stalking purposes that would be of grave concern. Many of the people we worked with were at high risk if they were being stalked. So reports of such happening would need to be carefully checked out.
BTW when a victim of domestic/relationship violence leaves the abuser they are at the most vulnerable and high risk time for violence. I would be interested in any information regarding the possibility of any of the tag resources being used in that manner. From the discussion thus far Iāve not heard anything certain to indicate they are a real danger. Is it a menace or an urban myth? Seems to me law enforcement and shelter services might be the best answer to that question. Iām going to check with some professionals to get an opinion. Thanks for the thread.
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The main things I āloseā are my eyeglasses, the tube of superglue I was just using, etc. AirTags are too humongous to use for these; I need something I can tape to the inside of a bow on my glasses! 
Donāt glue your eyeglasses to your head, Dennis!
Iām very concerned about this and appreciate any insight you have.
My reasoning in this article is that if it were being used on a widespread basisāletās say, 1,000s of people, evenāyou would think that the odds of discovery are so high and the publicity around it so high that we should be seeing dozens of credible newspaper and local blog reports, in addition to people posting on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc. The number of reports is very small.
The other thing is that the easiest way I can imagine a domestic, acquaintance, or unknown stalker tracking someone is by tracking their iPhone or Android phone. If someone ever has access to the device, they can add them to Family Sharing or install spyware or malware on an Android device, and have unfettered Internet-based tracking thatās very accurate.
I sometimes forget that everybody in my household can see every single one of my devices at all times! We canāt track as āpeopleā unless we opt in (which we do with our kids), but we can track all of each othersā devices.
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Unfortunately there has been quite a bit of news coverage about AirTags being used for stalking, carjacking and theft:
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