Apple's new AirTag item trackers have been making their way into the hands of customers since Friday, and while the company has tried to describe the ways that they can be used to find lost items, many users are still surprised and disappointed to learn that the location of an AirTag can't be shared with other family members.
On the face of it, sharing the location of an AirTag via Apple's Family Sharing feature should be a no-brainer, since individual members in a Family Sharing group can use the Find My app to see the location of other family members' Apple devices, including iPhones, iPads, Macs, AirPods, and Apple Watches.
Given those Family Sharing privileges, many users have understandably assumed that an AirTag attached to an item that's regularly used by more than one person in the household (a set of keys, for example) could be tracked by multiple family members within Find My.
Unfortunately, however, AirTags don't work like other Apple devices in Find My, and several users have taken to the MacRumors forums,
Reddit, and Apple's community support site to share their displeasure after learning about the Family Sharing limitation:
As Apple has
explained, the only AirTag privilege afforded to people in an iCloud Family Sharing group is that they can silence the "AirTag Detected" safety alert that appears when an AirTag is traveling with them that is registered to someone else. (Likewise, the owner of the AirTag can disable the safety alerts to prevent someone else's iPhone from detecting it as unwanted tracking.)
But that's as far as the Family Sharing functionality goes. AirTags are only meant to be owned by one person, and it's not currently possible to share an AirTag's location with another family member using another Apple ID. It's likely that Apple has omitted this feature due to privacy concerns, so whether or not it intends to introduce it in the future via some other form of implementation remains to be seen.
Article Link:
AirTag Owners Bemoan Inability to Let Others Track Their Items Via Family Sharing