That sounds correct. Disabling “Find My” on your phone will prevent Apple from tracking the location of your phone, but it won’t stop the device from relaying information about other devices that broadcast data to the Find My network.
If you disable location services, then it won’t be able to broadcast your location. And yes, location services uses many things in addition to GPS (including nearby Wi-Fi hotspots).
I looked for an option that might stop your phone from relaying the location of other objects, but I didn’t see anything relevant. So you may have to disable Bluetooth altogether if this really bothers you.
I believe that’s in settings / privacy & security / location services / share my location / find my iPhone - you can turn off “Find My Network” there. (Also in settings / Apple account / find my / find my iPhone).
Maybe, but it’s unclear. The text below that box says:
Participating in the Find My network lets you locate this iPhone even when it’s offline, in power reserve mode, and after power off.
It doesn’t say anything about relaying information from other devices.
The option may be something else entirely - like using Bluetooth to advertise itself (the way an Air Tag might) when the normal methods of location reporting are unavailable.
Sorry, I should have added that I checked for that, and found this article by Glenn Fleishman on MacWorld a few years ago:
When your device has Find My network enabled, it relays any signals it picks up from other devices if it has an active Internet connection. But it also broadcasts that anonymized Bluetooth message whenever it’s not connected to the Internet. When you disable Find My network, both tracking and relaying is turned off.
I put Air Tags in all my items when traveling. I never know when I’ll forget to carry on my carry on items. Also very reassuring to know my checked bag has arrived at the destination airport, especially when it is one of the last ones to come out. Or when it doesn’t come out at all.
I flew home to San Francisco airport directly from France. My bag showed as being in the terminal. Eventually bags stop. Carrousel stops. No bag. Find a helpful agent. After literally a couple of hours (she was quite busy), she says that the bag was caught in the machinery and retrieval has to wait until shutdown at 3am. Go home, she says, and we’ll deliver it in the morning. Which they did. Good thing I wasn’t going on a connecting flight, as was a couple who had the same problem.
Adam asked, “Have AirTags made a difference in your life?”
Absolutely! I have a dozen of them, shared with my wife, and they are incredibly helpful. My wife constantly misplaces her keys – no problem. Her purse? Sometimes. We’ve located luggage – and have gotten positive confirmation that our bags made a flight. When my wife was on standby for a flight, and didn’t get a seat, her bag made the earlier flight, and I easily I located her waiting bag among the dozens in the “unclaimed” area. We’ve got one concealed in each of our bikes, which gives us some piece of mind when we have to lock them up when we go inside an establishment. We’ve got one in the car (we live in a city) in case it goes missing.
Adam, if you have it inside a bell, and the bell is metallic, you are limiting its ability to operate (radio signals do not traverse conductors). I recommend the Pelican Protector 4-Pack AirTag Holder, available at Amazon, which you can stick to the back side of a kickstand pivot point, or under a seat, and it does a good job of protecting the AirTag from the elements.
To the question, “Do you plan to replace existing ones with these new models?“ I won’t replace the ones I have now – they get the job done.
@glennf has written an article about AirTag 2 compatibility at Six Colors. It basically comes down to needing iOS 26.2.1, which many previously AirTag-compatible devices can’t run.
One thing I don’t quite understand, Glenn, is whether this impacts findability by devices running older versions of OS or Android.
Tahoe requires that a Mac has an M-series chip or is one of a handful of late Intel models from 2019 and 2020.
I haven’t investigated Android, and now I am curious about the cross-compatibility issue. I have got to assume that anti-tracking features work with Android and older Apple OS versions because that’s part of the spec: a device doesn’t have to support tracking natively to recognize it is traveling with them or, when jostled, has been away from their paired device for 8 to 24 hours.
Right, it’s the visibility of newer AirTags to other devices that I was curious about, though anti-tracking falls into a similar bucket. When you lose your luggage, you want as many devices as possible to be able to detect and report the position of the associated AirTag.
I see my confusion over your use of findability and visibility. There’s “being able to recognize a tracker is near you” and there’s “be part of the Find My network crowdsourced location relay.”
This is another good question. Android devices can’t relay Find My locations. The two networks are incompatible in terms of offering crowdsourcing. Google, in fact, has much better restrictions and requirements on theirs, I think, for reducing the potential of unwanted tracking.
All Apple devices will be able to continue relaying new AirTags, because that is based on Bluetooth broadcasts, and doesn’t require chip compatibility for location tracking.
The thing I don’t exactly get on Apple’s part is that crowdsourced locations should still be available with an AirTag “2,” even if Bluetooth and UWB were incompatible for nearby finding? I don’t understand why they’re incompatible, but even so, it seems like Apple didn’t want to have AirTag 2 support before 26.2.1 on devices that don’t also have BT/UWB support for local finding!
@glennf: I see my confusion over your use of findability and visibility. There’s “being able to recognize a tracker is near you” and there’s “be part of the Find My network crowdsourced location relay.”
I’m still not sure I understand the compataiblity issue. … If I buy an AirTag 2 and add pair it with my iPhone running 26.2.1, can older Apple devices running older versions of iOS/iPadOS still report the Air Tag 2’s location to the Find My Network?
If I lose my keys attached to an AirTag 2, I want as many Apple devices as possible to be able to see it and report its location to the Find My Network so that I can find my lost keys. In most situations, more devices finding and reporting my AirTag’s location is more important than improved precision finding range. (But I do value the increased range of precision finding for situations where I’m out hiking and the only iPhone in the area is my iPhone.)
Yes. I understand the concern, but it would be absurd for Apple to break that part of the compatibility, as it would make the new AirTags dramatically less useful for some time than the old ones.
AirTags and other Find My items of every sort broadcast a Bluetooth signal that all Apple devices recognize. It is only if you want to pair or track an AirTag you own or that is shared with you that you hit the compatibility snag.