I suppose it depends on what the stalker wants. If someone wants to "follow" me home without following me home, then 48 hours is more than enough time.
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Apple Enhancing AirTags Anti-Stalking Measures With Android App and Shorter Sound Intervals
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I suppose it depends on what the stalker wants. If someone wants to "follow" me home without following me home, then 48 hours is more than enough time.
Plus it’s a much better defence to claim your watch accidentally dropped into someone else’s bag at a gym or something than you were carrying around a spare AirTag.
But in this case it is Apple suffering themselves directly if the AirTags turn out to only be useful for a small narrow set of use cases and only few people will buy them. When they restrict functionality of their phones in some way, almost all people will suck it up and still buy iPhones. So if you think they are holier than thou here, they are directly harming themselves.
And the battery life of all GPS trackers prior to AirTags was also more than enough.
I would think it would only alarm if it were in motion, not stationary.
And that is what you do when you detect that somebody has been tracking you with an Apple Watch, you buy a charger so that they can keep tracking you?
What you should do first is read the post to which I was responding. It was “It knows your home address.”
The AirTag doesn’t know where home is. It doesn’t know your home address. I can be told where home is. It won‘t be told that with no devices around, which was the premise of the original concern about making noise.
I know everybody says it's not an anti-theft device. But that's precisely what I need. The only time I "lose" stuff is if somebody decides they need it more than I do.
If that is what you currently need, you can save money by not getting AirTags.
The AW would be planted with the charger attached.
The point is that would be stalkers have no shortage of options when it comes to stalking their victims.
To think that firearms can be procured so easily in the US but Apple has to take measures to ensure the AirTags have more safety features is baffling to me.
Bad people are able to subvert the intended use of any piece of technology to commit crimes. If we hold companies to standard that the products they release can never be utilized by criminals, no company could release anything.
I believe the complaint against Apple is that AirTags allow for a criminal unintended use too easily. My counterpoint is that any person that would do what they are suggesting - use AirTags to track someone - are only a 30 second google search away from learning how to track/stalk someone in a very comparable manner to AirTags. Most will cost more than AirTags but have much more precise tracking. And frankly I don’t buy the idea that someone *would* cross the moral boundary of tracking someone at $30 but *definitely wouldn’t* for $50-$200 range.
I hate to bring up firearms again as I fear the lightning rod nature of the topic will cause the rest of my argument be ignored but I can’t help myself: the US allows the sale of handguns, a piece of technology who’s sole purpose is to murder other humans, to civilians. I’m not saying it’s impossible to be against both, but perhaps the collective hysteria should be directed towards technology that has extremely small amounts of productive use for society outside of crimes, rather than those that provide many benefits and have small amount of criminal applications that don’t already exist.
The way I understand it AirTags never know where they are period. They have no way to, they just sit there sending out a radio signal saying "Here I am". It is the iPhone and other devices that hear the AirTag saying "Here I am" and then report that back to the Find My network. The iPhone tells the Find My network, that it was around GPS location xx.xxx, yy.yyy and it heard AirTag SN 1234567890 saying "Here I am" in that area.
Your iPhone then connects to the Find My network and asks where your AirTag 1234567890 was last seen, and the network lets you know where the last iPhone was located when it heard from your AirTag. You then travel to that location and use the Precision Finding tool to hopefully locate your lost item.
What I am not sure of is if other people can use Precision Finding to locate lost AirTags near them? Or can only the owner of an AirTag use precision finding? Do others just have to rely on the noise if they get a notification that a lost AirTag is nearby, or they are being followed by and AirTag?
I bought my wife an AirTag for her work keys but I haven't really played around with it much to find out.
Apple knows where your home is. Why would that information not be transferred to an AirTag when you link that AirTag to your AppleID?
Maybe it is because firearms can be procured so easily in the US that Apple has to be so careful to protect people against stalking?
If you’re able to plug your tracker into a power source, any old smartphone can serve as a tracker.
Apple has to be careful not because of any meaningful enabling of stalking but because the media will create a PR nightmare (resulting in reduced profit) employing appeals to emotion/fear rather than based in fact. Again, any new technology can be used to carry out crimes but all throughout history, once the hysteria dies down society realizes the benefits are worth it.
Apple attempted to be a step-ahead and have anti-stalking measures in place at launch. They underestimated the power of fear mongering and now are on the back-foot. I wouldn’t be shocked if they dramatically reduce the marketing of AirTags and abandon the product altogether sooner than anyone would have thought. One highly publicized case of these being used for stalking causing even just a 1% dip in a single quarter of iPhone sales is probably more profit than these will generate in several years.
And yes, any old smartphone can serve as a tracker. Those too can be planted with a battery pack attached to extend the life, just as I referenced for the AW.
It’s for lost or misplaced items, not stolen items. They have been very clear and consistent about that.
8hr is dumb though if I leave one somewhere and am away for 12 hrs.
This is completely false any device that can scan for nearby Bluetooth devices can detect if a Samsung Smart Tag is nearby no separate app or download needed to detect a BLE device
I am more concerned why with Apple you need an app to detect an Airtag
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Wondering how well Tile Tracker has got this sorted out as everything is quiet about them? Reducing the alert time is going to mean a very small window to try track down a stolen item before the thief knows exactly where to locate the AirTag.
I perfectly understand that Apple dont want to be in the business of tracking people and they shouldn't advertise the Airtag as tracking device for people. That does not mean that Apple should intentionally limit the usability of a product just because "what if someone do something wrong with it?". The Airtag is the perfect anti-theft device and yet, Apple is doing everything to prevent this use case, because they see too much risk for their public image if someone commits a dirty crime. As for your examples, lost puts usually return to urban areas to look for food, so the Airtag may be detected eventually by someone. Current pet trackers are far less convenient and more expensive. Same applies to anti car theft device. You cant compare 29$ Airtag that is set up in 5 seconds, with traditional GPS/cellular tracker for 5x the cost of the Airtag which must be set up, recharged far more often, etc. As for tracking luggage and parcels, with the current and new anti-stalking features, the Airtag would start beeping after spending some time with anyone other that its owner. Just imagine listening this beeping sound from an aircraft luggage compartment, it definitely could sound as a bomb and create tons of issues.
Some people think Apple is way too paranoid about stalking issues. I'd say those worrying about beeping luggage or packages are at least equally paranoid. Nobody handling luggage or packages will really care about that. Or do you have any reports about packages or luggage being considered bombs just because they were beeping?
And your phrase: "That does not mean that Apple should intentionally limit the usability of a product just because, what if someone do something wrong with it?" reads as if Apple should not roll out any anti-stalking measures at all.
You need an app to notify you that an AirTag has been 'following' you. There is a difference between you having to manually scan your surroundings every 15 minutes for 'unknown' Bluetooth devices and you being automatically notified if one following you. If I remember it correctly, AirTags change their Bluetooth ID frequently, thus the only way to figure out that one is following you, is to count how many Bluetooth devices are near you that are not your own (or those of other people travelling with you). And if you are close enough to other people, there will almost always be a number of Bluetooth devices around you that are not your own.
The Tile tracking network is so sparse that it is just not very useful in tracking things. If there is a 19 out of 20 chance that you won't be able to track a given Tile, almost nobody will bother to use it for stalking. Tiles largely only work in two situations: 1) it tells where and when a given Tile last connected to your smartphone (ie, it tells you were and when you lost it) and 2) it tells you when you are getting close while searching for it.
I once lost a Bluetooth device in the snow. I could see when it was last connected to my phone and I knew that I had to backtrack my steps for about half an hour. Once I got somewhat close to where I must have been when I lost it based on the time that had elapsed, I kept checking my phone for a Bluetooth signal from the device every couple of steps and noticed the signal getting stronger and then weaker again as I passed the device. I had to go back and forth a couple of times to narrow down the area with the strongest signal (thanks to the deep snow with my tracks that was a one-dimensional search) and then scour the ground to find the device which wasn't trivial in one foot of snow.
That is exactly how useful I would expect a Tile to be (basically adding a Bluetooth signal to things that don't have one). Hardly something useful for tracking somebody.
There probably have about 20 posts in this thread alone that point out that leaving your AirTag alone for 8 hours won't trigger any sound. It also has to be moved after those 8 hours. So, unless you 'leave' it in a moving vehicle or in an object somebody else is carrying, there is no worry.
The point is the location and owner ID are encrypted with an encryption key stored on the AirTag. So what is the difference whether that encryption key is sent to the third-party iPhone and then used there to encrypt the location and send it to Apple's servers (for the owner to download from in encrypted form when opening the FindMy app) or if the location is send to the AirTag, encrypted there and then sent to Apple's servers?
If I had to implement this, I'd rather have the encryption key not leave the AirTag. Not least because otherwise that third-party iPhone could track your AirTag via this encryption key instead of only seeing a rotating Bluetooth identifier (ok, on top of the Bluetooth ID changing frequently, an AirTag could also cycle through a set of encryption keys, but I like the former solution better).
Note, the point is that nobody but you know where any of your AirTags is. Apple does not know where your AirTag is. Only when a third-party iPhone 'identifies' an AirTag (eg, by connecting via NFC to one or if the anti-stalking measures alert the iPhone to an AirTag) is its serial number sent to the phone and the phone can then communicate that serial number to Apple which knows with whom that serial number is associated with and thus Apple will know where that AirTag of yours is located. This is somewhat unavoidable in that if a phone is able to connect via NFC to an AirTag, the owner of that phone likely has found the AirTag and thus the serial number printed on it.
At least that is my understanding, correct me if I am wrong about that serial number aspect.
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The point is, an AirTag has no way of knowing where it is. A separate device can tell you where it is, but the AirTag doesn’t know.