For everyone who has privacy and battery usage concerns about AirTags, this video does a really good job explaining how the FindMy network actually works:
Note that it was published Feb. 5, so he doesn't talk about the unwanted tracking prevention and all of that, but I think it's still very relevant to some of the questions people have raised in various AirTags threads. One point that's especially important for those stomping around upset that they don't want to "waste" their battery power tracking other people's AirTags think about these two points:
Note that it was published Feb. 5, so he doesn't talk about the unwanted tracking prevention and all of that, but I think it's still very relevant to some of the questions people have raised in various AirTags threads. One point that's especially important for those stomping around upset that they don't want to "waste" their battery power tracking other people's AirTags think about these two points:
- The Bluetooth LE portion of the equation uses so little power that the AirTag can last at least a year on a tiny button battery. So imagine what percentage of your phone's battery that is. It's miniscule.
- Your phone will wait to send the data about AirTags that it has seen back to Apple until a time that it needs to contact Apple's servers for some other reason. The data it's sending related to an AirTag is literally just a few bytes. Not megabytes. Not kilobytes. Bytes. Again, a miniscule amount of power is needed for this considering all the overhead of contacting Apple's servers and whatnot was going to happen regardless.
