His friend did not receive notifications by design, as the Airtag was not moving with him, but sitting on a table.
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AirTag Used to Successfully Track a Mailed Package Across the UK
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Come on you can do this since forever with a GSM dog tracker or a 1972 “No Country for Old Men”-style analog tracker…
Yes, or you could see it get taken away by the bin lorry after they've left it in the bin on collection day.
Seems like a viable attack. It would be pretty easy to hide the tag inside something.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this 
Yes you can track your lost keys … and it seems that everyone can track anyone ?!
Yes you can track your lost keys … and it seems that everyone can track anyone ?!
Stratford-upon-Avon … that's a Shakespearian story
Correct. They state that it notifies you that an unknown tag is traveling with you.
If we are to believe movies, private detectives (let alone governments) have been able to do this for decades already. What differentiates Airtags from existing trackers that they combine good coverage with very long battery life. Tiles had long battery life since the beginning but pretty limited coverage (my main expectation for Tiles was that they could tell me where and when my phone last saw the Tile). Cellular phone network based trackers had good coverage but limited battery life.
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How? The guy doesn't know any of the postal worker's name or information. He is just tracking his package!
You can only track AirTags linked to your AppleID.I’ve got a bad feeling about this
Yes you can track your lost keys … and it seems that everyone can track anyone ?!
All the mobile platforms are using crowdsourcing - that's how stuff like the traffic congestion view works in both Google Maps and Apple Maps. I think I saw something about one or the other putting an atmospheric pressure sensor in phones and using that to increase the resolution for weather sensing. Yes, I guess you could say that this is "using the users", but it's really using a network effect to provide a service that everyone can benefit from.
Using all the iPhones in the world as a mesh network to track AirTags is a brilliant concept, and this field experiment demonstrates how effective it is. As I understand it, considerable effor has been put in to the design to make sure that the overhead imposed on others is insignificant and privacy is maintained.
If you don't want to participate, turn "Find My" off in your phone settings, or (even better for privacy) turn off Wifi and Bluetooth. Turning off Wifi and Bluetooth will also prevent stores and advertising boards from tracking you - which *is* intrusive and creepy, but doesn't seem to get *any* criticism.
Am I missing something here? The person wrote “my friend left the envelope on a table in his house” and the concern is the friend has not received a notification that an Airtag is moving along with him? Well it isn’t, is it? It is sitting on a table. So unless he is carrying that table around with him why would he receive a notification? Think about it for a second. There are soon to be thousands, if not tens of thousands of these devices out there. Your coworker has one in their bag in the cubicle next to you, should you get a notification? You have guests come to visit (when that can happen again) should you be getting notifications they have Airtags in their bags? No. So why would you get a notification that an Airtag is in an envelope sitting on a table?
I do not know how the “moving along with you” notification is set up but I would imagine that if you were to move out of some predefined range of the Airtag the tracking clock would reset as, well, if you can move out of range then it is not moving with you.
Is there potential for any tracking device to be used for nefarious reasons? Yes. Is Apple at least attempting to mitigate some of those possible exploitations? Yes. Could they do more? Quite possibly and they likely will. Meanwhile, hopefully ridiculous stories like this will go away as people start to grasp the concept, though my hopes are not high.
I do not know how the “moving along with you” notification is set up but I would imagine that if you were to move out of some predefined range of the Airtag the tracking clock would reset as, well, if you can move out of range then it is not moving with you.
Is there potential for any tracking device to be used for nefarious reasons? Yes. Is Apple at least attempting to mitigate some of those possible exploitations? Yes. Could they do more? Quite possibly and they likely will. Meanwhile, hopefully ridiculous stories like this will go away as people start to grasp the concept, though my hopes are not high.
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In Apple’s eyes we are not ”products”. We are a “network”. That’s even worse.
Sure but for that you only need a few days of battery life. Dog trackers using a cellular modem could have been used for that for a couple of years already. Yes they are larger and more expensive, but for the purpose you have just outlined that is not a big hurdle.
Though the density of Apple devices is likely low in most parts of Africa.
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So you’re saying that the delivery driver starts opening up all the packages to look for an AirTag? Erm no. You do realise to disable it, you have to remove the battery right.
Well, he'd have to open all of the packages containing AirTags in order to do that. Contrary to a popular myth that made the rounds right after the AirTag was announced, there's no "remote disable" feature. What Apple does is provide instructions on how to manually disable the AirTag.
In other words, it just tells you to remove the battery, and shows you how to do it.
Not three days if they were carrying an iPhone. We don't know how quickly a notification shows up, but it's clearly based more on location and distance than time, so a delivery driver might see one in only a couple of hours as they were driving around. Maybe even sooner if they went near one of their frequent locations.
Being a delivery driver, however, with a truck full of unknown parcels, they hopefully wouldn't be too alarmed. They're all being tracked by their companies anyway.
That's actually normal behaviour. AirTags don't notify anybody if they're simply lost. The original owner can track them down or make them play a sound, but they otherwise remain passive.
I suspect this was a deliberate decision on Apple's part, rather than an omission. Although Tile does this, they have a much smaller network, and people who are running the Tile app — and therefore capable of finding Tile tags — know what they're dealing with. Having dozens of iPhones report randomly lost AirTags could get chaotic. Plus, there's always the risk of alerting a would-be thief to the presence of a lost item.
I know that if I lost something, I'd rather my AirTag didn't advertise its existence to everybody nearby, since unless I left it behind in another city, it makes much more sense to have it remain exactly where it is so that I can go back and retrieve it myself.
The only active alerts and notifications are designed for anti-stalking purposes, not for helping to locate legitimately lost AirTags. An unknown AirTag that's travelling with you to multiple locations could have been planted on you. One that's simply laying around nearby is considered harmless to the finder.
1. If someone uses a PO Box for their business, people can now work out where they live.
2. Stick a bomb in the parcel too and use your remote tracking to time perfectly when to set it off.
This. People who are going to conduct these kinds of tests should at least educate themselves on how AirTags work 😏
So you think AirTag is the first remote tracking device that could be used in this manner?
I think he's saying that if the postal delivery person has an iPhone, the feature which notifies him that an Airtag is traveling with him will be activated, and he will be given the option on his phone to disable them.
Except in this case, an iPhone user would likely be alerted to the presence of the AirTag, because they would be moving with it from the PO Box back to their home.
Now, whether they would get the alert in time to avoid divulging their home address is another matter entirely, but it's almost guaranteed that they would get one.
Further, if the package takes more than three days to arrive, the AirTag should start beeping as soon as it's picked up. The catch, however, is that if it's buried inside a package the person may not hear it, and it doesn't seem to keep beeping.
If the person receiving the AirTag is not an iPhone user, they wouldn't get any alerts, but they also might be harder to track. If they live in a detached home without any Apple devices, you might get their neighbourhood from other nearby iPhones, but you wouldn't get their exact home address.
I thought the alert was for if the AirTag is MOVING WITH YOU. This AirTag was just lying on the table. So congrats, you've successfully stalked him to his own house, which you already knew was his house, LOL!