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I wonder if you put an AirTag in a package and got Hermes to deliver it, would you be able to track it accurately as it sailed over your fence and landed in your neighbour's back garden? 🤔
Yes, or you could see it get taken away by the bin lorry after they've left it in the bin on collection day.

I could imagine a circumstance where a youtuber (or other semi-private person) let's fans send letters and packages to a PO Box (not their home address, to keep it secret) and unknowingly gets sent an AirTag.

Rather easy to do and hide, and suddenly that person has a stalker who knows where they live.
Seems like a viable attack. It would be pretty easy to hide the tag inside something.
 
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Seems like if the AirTag was left on the table for 3 days, it's not actually tracking anyone. The anti-tracking may take into account that the package receiver's iPhone has moved out of range from the AirTag in question several times, is therefore not on that person's person, and did not warn them.
Correct. They state that it notifies you that an unknown tag is traveling with you.
 
Mmmm. So my Android using brother wouldn’t know if I stuck an AirTag in his car to track his movements…
Just kidding of course, but this could be really creepy. Imagine a criminal who spots a nice car in a car park for example…slips an airtag underneath it and finds out where it’s kept overnight.
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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So apple is "using" users, imo that is worse than being a "product" for sale.
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.
 
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I could imagine a circumstance where a youtuber (or other semi-private person) let's fans send letters and packages to a PO Box (not their home address, to keep it secret) and unknowingly gets sent an AirTag.

Rather easy to do and hide, and suddenly that person has a stalker who knows where they live.
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.
 
A few months ago I sold my old car with a diesel engine to a guy for €1000. When the money was handed over, he told me that the car would be shipped to Africa and driven on there.
If there had been Airtags at that time, I would have liked to follow the way to Africa and beyond.
Though the density of Apple devices is likely low in most parts of Africa.
 
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A few months ago I sold my old car with a diesel engine to a guy for €1000. When the money was handed over, he told me that the car would be shipped to Africa and driven on there.
If there had been Airtags at that time, I would have liked to follow the way to Africa and beyond.
Can you legally track something that no longer belongs to you?
 
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The real issue would be the iphone carrying delivery driver getting a notification that air tags are following him and he disables them!
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.

I thought of that too, but it would require a single iPhone-carrying delivery driver to maintain contact with the AirTag for three days straight. I don't think that's a likely scenario.
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.

I’ve seen other people report their AirTag doesn’t alert a nearby iPhone if it’s lost. I don’t know if these are isolated issues, defective AirTags, a known issue or a common problem that needs fixing by Apple.
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.
 
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What potential harm is there? If you have someone’s HOME ADDRESS there is not a lot of harm in sending a tracker to the house in the mail. It will simply show the airtag being at the address you gave.

You don’t get a letter or package and keep it your car. 🤦🏼‍♂️🤦🏼‍♂️ Once the package is opened, the gig is up.
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.
 
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.
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.
 
1. If someone uses a PO Box for their business, people can now work out where they live.
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.
 
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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!
 
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