Right, my article has a section about this—but many of the published reports and police warnings are either vague or cite the same source material, like the York Regional Police. The question I raise about an urban myth is not that it’s totally impossible or never happens, but how much is the repetition of stories (sometimes distorted)?
The New York Times article that mentions only well into that one unwanted tracker was placed by a 17-year-old’s mother? I mean, 17: you’re a minor. Your mother can do that. Is it good parenting? I would always use disclosure. But it’s not per se abusive and the interview doesn’t make it sound problematic.
I didn’t see a direct answer to this, so yes, there is an app that you already have on your iDevice named “Find My”. Select “Items” from the bottom of the box that lists People, Devices, Items or Me.
Nor have I and I suspect most people won’t since as explained earlier it has to be there for an extended period, you have to be in a familiar spot and the mystery AirTag must no longer be with it’s owner.
I don’t often lose things either, but there are family members who do, and what I’ve discovered over the years is that things are rarely actually lost, simply misplaced. Like many, we have two sets of keys for our cars. One set was AWOL for almost 2 years. Because of COVID, we’re not out as much, but I lived in fear of being on a family trip without a second key. I also bristled at the idea of paying hundreds of $$$ to have a new key programmed.
Sure enough, the key was recently located in the pocket of a rarely-worn winter coat in our basement closet. I immediately ordered an AirTag to attach to the keys. For me, this kind of scenario is the best use case (for us) for a tracker. Had we used a tracker when the coat was stored, we would’ve found the keys long ago.
We actually did have a Tile tracker on those keys, but it was an earlier model with a non-replaceable battery. For me there were a couple of key reasons why Tile didn’t work for us: the battery issue, and the fact that it relied on other people using the Tile app to be able to locate the tracker. Find Me is much more ubiquitous.
I will be glad to pass on what I learn. One of the problems right now is that the agencies are absolutely hammered - COVID has greatly increased the need of services (people trapped in homes increases isolation and maximizes abusive behaviors) along with funding cutbacks because not-for-profits are struggling for grant and funding support. So it may be a bit before I hear back from some of our contacts. Really appreciate that you have raised the issue. I will get back to you what I find out!
There are a couple of options (none of which I’ve tried yet). There’s Nomad’s holder, which works in most wallets: Card for AirTag | NOMAD®, and Chipolo has an Find My-compatible wallet tracker: Chipolo CARD Spot - Chipolo.
The world has really been waiting for this. My ex would regularly lose her keys. I once lost my wallet for months. I finally got fed up and bought several Trackrs (which never worked too well) when I couldn’t find my wallet for days, and finally found it behind my bed.
This is just the first step. I’m waiting for when they are flat stickers that cost a couple of bucks a piece, and then I will stick them on my books, remotes, and anything else I might misplace (or loan out).
I just did this on my trip home on Monday. When we landed at home, as we taxied to the gate, I checked Find My and it said that my bag was with me in Boston. So, it was able to connect to at least somebody’s phone on the plane, if not mine, into the cargo hold from the passenger cabin.
I also used it when we landed in Charlotte at baggage claim (this was an international flight) and I could see the bag circling the carousel getting closer and closer to me as we approached it. Pretty slick really.
Cool. I’ve used airline apps to track my bags for many years, but they only have city-level granularity - they tell you which plane or airport has your bag (basically, wherever the airline last scanned its tag), but they stop there.
The ability to locate the bag on arrival is a really nice bonus.
Hi Glenn. I’ve not given up on checking with Dom Vio sources with which I am familiar. It is just many of them are really being pushed to the max right now and I don’t want to interrupt the execs in a time when they are dealing with staffing shortages, $$$ shortages and highly increased client needs. Their work right now deserves respect and I would urge people to donate to their local sexual abuse/domestic violence agency as they would most certainly welcome it.
Apple has just released a statement on AirTag tracking that talks more about the problem, what Apple is doing about it as a company, and how it will be tweaking the technology and user experience in the future.
That is a huge number of changes. “Tuning sounds” is interesting—when you compare the Chipolo ONE Spot alert sound to an AirTag, the former feels far louder, though when I used a decibel meter, the peak sounds weren’t that different. It seems like Chipolo uses more noticeable frequencies and a higher amplitude for longer than the AirTag.
Will the anti-stalking measures to make Airtags more noticeable to others when away from their owners cause problems when the owner is using the Airtag to trace luggage or packages shipped.
Luggage is often outside Bluetooth range of the owner and, for most of the trip would not be in an often visited location. Similarly, packages shipped would spend most of their journey away from the sender or recipient or any place they normally visit,
So, the Airtag would frequently beep in these situations. Because of the great nervousness about beeping objects, wouldn’t that cause security protocols to be raised?
Kashmir is an extraordinary writer on privacy and this is a fabulous article that I think uses a little bit of heightened anxiety (though realistic) to sell a very solid, nuanced story. I keep coming back to a question I asked in the article: how many of these has Apple sold? What percentage are being used nefariously? Did Apple sell a million and 500 are being used poorly? Or 100,000 and 50,000? We don’t know!
I also keep coming back to Bitcoin, if you can believe that. One of the worst things to steal is Bitcoin, because it’s so trackable and illiquid. The alleged launderers of the Bitfinex theft from 2016 had apparently been unable to or were too worried to use much of the Bitcoin? And the feds tracked them meticulously through the web of transactions. Because Bitcoin has to be cashed out through an exchange to get fiat currency, there are these enormous choke points.
So with an AirTag, I keep thinking about it this: a stalker buys a serialized piece of equipment, they put their hands on it, they pair it with hardware they own, a sequence of data is stored in Apple’s servers, their iPhone or iPad has an IMEI or other traceable connections via IP address, etc. It’s probably the most trackable way to try to stalk someone. So the people who use it that way are the people most likely to get caught using it that way.
I concur. Despite the click-bait headline and a very strange fear-porn paragraph:
Ummm… It’s not a surveillance state if you’re tracking your own stuff. That phrase should be reserved for cases where the state is tracking you, which is (at least for the moment) not the case for the three products discussed.
That having been said, I thought it was a well-written article and it comes to the same conclusion I came to on my own. AirTags are doing the same thing that others have done in the past. There is increased risk due to the fact that they are more popular than the others, but this is greatly offset by the safeguards Apple is building in to their ecosystem, which other products are not (yet?) doing.
Of course, this is all only relevant for individual people tracking each other.
Once we start discussing government surveillance, there’s no need for such devices. If you have subpoena power, you can contact mobile network operators and track any mobile device as it pings off of towers, and possibly even get them to broadcast their GPS coordinates. Only a person who is trying to hide would keep his phone powered off all the time, since most of us want to be able to receive calls when we’re on the go.
BTW, do you know if Apple makes available to law enforcement (when properly subpoenaed) data from the Find My network? I would assume that they will, if it is technically feasible to do so, but I haven’t heard any discussion about it so far.