Yes, this started with the MagSafe wallet introduced with the iPhones 13 last year. Jason Snell wrote about this new feature (and its lack of live trackability, like an AirTag) last year. As Jason says, for some reason the original magsafe wallets didn’t have this feature.
I have this wallet as well. I don’t always use it, and I find its notifications mostly not very useful - but if I do, in fact, lose it someday, it may still come in handy to know where it last detached from my phone.
I finally got around to trying to exclude a location. I typed my address, confirmed that it was my address, and told the iPhone to exclude all items and devices at this address (and again confirmed that it was the correct address). After I clicked Done, the iPhone showed my neighbor’s address as the exclusion address. I deleted my neighbor’s address, repeated the whole procedure, and the iPhone continued the repetition by again showing my neighbor’s address. What’s going on?
The iPhone reports that the AirTag is at my address, but the exclusion address is my neighbor’s. That seems good enough for avoiding the Left Behind notification, but why, after I type my address and the phone shows the address I typed, does the phone change the address?
A separate issue is that my Mac did not have the Notify When Left Behind option. Is that because it’s running Big Sur rather than Monterey?
IIRC, Apple does some kind of double approximation thing: it takes your input, then sticks a dot on the map, then uses that dot to determine the address. I had this happen in many cases. Close, but not precise.
This is for a laptop? That might be it.
Thanks, @glennf.
Yes, I saw that dot, and moved it to my house. That worked to set my address on an iPhone SE 2020 but an iPhone SE original stubbornly uses the neighbor’s house.
It seems odd that Apple thinks it knows my address better than I do. On the other hand, it knows better than I do how its software works with addresses, and maybe things work better if it assumes I live at my neighbor’s address. (But then why would the two iPhones show different addresses?)
Yes, MBA M1 2020.
Right, when I did this for my summer house, Apple used my next-door neighbors’ house address. But you can see from the circle when you add the address that my house is included within the circle, and it does truly stop the “you have left your iPad behind” when I go for a workout.
I wonder if this is some sort of weird privacy feature where the locations are mapped to some sort of generic grid to avoid identifying specific addresses.
Knog has just made available in the US their Scout. It connects to the Find My network all by itself, no AirTag necessary, and it has an alarm set off by movement. Has a USB-C port for charging the battery, which is supposed to last a year. I bought one which arrived this week and have mounted it on my gravel bike. It’s intended to mount under the bottle cage, but I tried and failed with my road bike, since I have a pump holder under the bottle cage and the supplied bolts weren’t long enough for that. It’s fairly inconspicuous, but it’s still visible to a potential thief who knows about them. It comes with “security” bolts and a tool for them, so you can’t take it off that easily. I haven’t tried the alarm yet; it’s supposed to be pretty loud. More expensive than a single AirTag. I’m not sure what I think about it yet.
It’s an interesting hybrid. It’s a licensed Find My item, but it has the extra feature of using Bluetooth to alert you if moved. It cannot alert you over the Find My network still, as that’s not within Apple’s rules/approach. It’s a smart idea.
Recharging is an interesting idea, too. Pebblebee’s tag is basically a somewhat better designed AirTag: some visible indicators plus a 1-year rechargeable.
BTW, I just got back from a trip (first since Covid) and I put an AirTag in my checked bag. It was a great experience. I could see the bag made it the airport where I stopped to change plans, and at one of them it even showed the bag as being “with me” meaning it was on the same plane as me!
Both legs when I got to baggage claim the AirTag reported it was nearby, which was reassuring, and once the conveyor belts started moving I soon saw that the bag was 50ft away and getting closer. Made it so much easier to find my bag and there was so much less stress. Highly recommended!
OK, so I bought a set of these to track my car and an ebike.
TLDR: Net result, they are utterly unsuitable for the cars, but probably vaguely ok for the ebike
For the cars, they proved to be completely useless - we (my wife and I) don’t have “his and hers cars”, we just have a big car and a small car and we take whichever is appropriate. The AirTags can’t share locations, so we can’t both see where the car is, and the AirTags can only belong to one of us, so the other will get an alert every time they drive the car unless they turn off all AirTag security alerts.
That is madness - why can’t we share locations and why can’t we disable alerts for a specific item? This renders them useless, I’m going to have to remove them just to stop the alerts (or disable all AirTag security alerts which is probably safe enough for me but entirely unsatisfactory).
For the ebike, with only one rider, it’s kind of ok as only one of us rides it - but it means even though we share our locations we can’t both see where the bike is, which is still ridiculous.
Clearly I should have done more research before buying them - I expected them to work like devices, but they don’t they work in an entirely different way.
So net result - you cannot reasonably use the AirTags in any situation in which you have two users of the device you want to track, even if those users mutually share locations via other devices.
Too far into the risk profile for stalking is the short answer. You might say, as many people have!, that Apple could provide additional mandatory disclosures and opt-in parameters. But there a lot of ways in which a known unwanted tracker (domestic partner, for instance) could use a shared AirTag in a way that is much harder with a shared iPhone, say. So I expect Apple will ultimately provide a way to share access—but not yet!
My wife has one in the car she mostly drives and Find My should allow me and my older (driving age) child to disable alerts from other people in Family Sharing, but we don’t get that documented option. So we do drive the car and get the alert and can’t track the car…however, the primary driver gets the utility of not having to remember where she parked!
Apparently you don’t have Family Sharing set up? I don’t get any annoying Safety Alerts when I’m riding in my wife’s tagged automobile, nor does she get a notice when I borrow her car and drive away without her.
You should receive these notifications once per device with an option to mute them forever. However, my wife and two kids and I are all in the Family Sharing group and we don’t get the Family Sharing mute option. Only an “ignore for rest of day” or whatever that message is.
What is most ridiculous is that Apple knows that I am sharing my location with my wife, and yet tells me that her AirTag can track me. It actually only knows that her AirTrag is tracking me because I have my phone with me, said phone which sharing its location with her! So on top of not being able to permanently disable the warning on that particular AirTag, I should never receive it in the first place, not while I am sharing my location anyway.
I thought that Apple wasn’t able to determine who owns a particular AirTag when it recognizes that’s it’s connected to your phone but doesn’t belong to you? It uses end to end encryption so Apple doesn’t know it’s your iPhone that has found that AirTag, nor does it know that it’s your wife’s AirTag
until she connects to the Find My network.
It knows it is her AirTag since it displays her name - when you set up an AirTag you give that permission.
Whether it knows more I guess is uncertain.
Regardless the whole use of AirTags within a family seems really crippled for reasons that I guess make sense to someone at Apple.
Same here. My wife and I both have AirTags on stuff the other uses (like cars). We are on Family Sharing. We both got an option the first time it alarmed to mute forever. That has just worked for us. In fact, I’ve never seen any other such message since.
I just received mine for review, and it looks pretty slick. The fact that you can enable it for Find My and have a separate motion alarm that you can arm and then disable within Bluetooth range feels like a smart combination.