I think it has been a little over a year since he left iMore.
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Apple Executive Says AirTags Designed to Track Items, Not Children or Pets
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This thread is mental. It’s supposed to help you find things you’ve misplaced around your home or maybe a friends and this thread has gone to “can I put it on my bike? can I put it on my cat? can I put it on my kids? Can it stop my luggage being stolen? Will it be useful in a kidnap situation”
I’m waiting for someone to ask if they can slap it to a rocket and track that next.
I’m waiting for someone to ask if they can slap it to a rocket and track that next.
This is a common myth, but it's not correct.
It's true that spare batteries (separate from a device) are generally not allowed in checked luggage. However, portable electronic devices (laptops, cameras, phones, etc) with batteries installed are permitted, provided the battery capacity does not exceed 100 Wh.
House keys when you lost them between the car and the door in snow, and you really have to take a dump?
Car keys when you're late for an important meeting?
I was really hoping these would be useful in the construction industry, where things get stolen often. Like once we had an entire trailer stolen. If a tag would have been in say a nook or somewhere hidden near/in a wall, we could have tracked it.
Also the you have a tag following you warning... What if the stalker's target is using an android device? Stalk away?
Also the you have a tag following you warning... What if the stalker's target is using an android device? Stalk away?
It's brilliant marketing, really. If you don't want to risk being tracked/stalked, you'll need to buy an Apple device to counter the malicious use of Airtags.
It’s not suitable for accurately and reliably tracking ‘critical’ things like children or pets. While a crowdsourced network of iOS devices is huge, it’ll still have holes in it so no guarantees. For an object that stays where you dropped it, you may be more likely to have people pass it, or time allows more chance for the location to be logged. You ok waiting a day or two for your child to be located? Probably not. Pet maybe?
sure- but apple won’t tell you that’s a key supported use for it. If it works for you (nad I’m sure many people) then great
There are only three things I could conceivably need to track, a very sneaky beagle, my laptop, and my Yeti (mountain bike, not beer cooler). If this tracker was only designed to help me track those things in the event that I’ve misplaced them and cant remember where I left them, then I’m probably unfit to have those things in the first place and shouldn’t be out walking around without a helmet on.
I thought about building a system like this years ago, and came to the realization that the tracker would need to function like an intermittent beacon, so that on the hour the first few days, it’d send out a strong ping, but between each quickly go back into energy saving mode to be able to continue pinging as long as possible on its batt. After a few days, if not retrieved, it’d ping every 6 hours for a week or so, then once per day, prob at noon, until it runs out of juice. Each ping would prob send its location, with a window of a few minutes to respond to it and tell it to stay active (or reactivate in a half hour or whatever time interval you want) to buy you time to approach it without having to wait another 6 hours for the next ping. Since you’d know when to expect its incoming pings, you can make the most of the beacons battery charge and have it become more active and guide you toward it the closer you get.
I assumed Apple had the same idea when they created this, but now i’m not so sure.
No. Read more of the posts about them, because this (and honestly a lot of the questions in this thread) has already been answered. If they’re away from their owner for three days, they start making a sound every time they’re moved, so the stalkee can hear it regardless of what kind of phone they have.
Only readable if someone brings your pet to a vet, and he holds a scanner to the neck of your pet, where the microchip usually is. And then he enters a code and where he is into a database and you can look it up. Only happens when someone takes the pet to the vet, and tells them to scan the code.
This here will help while your pet is still wandering around, getting hungrier and more and more tired, as long as it is near people with iPhones.
Personally I prefer the solution that anti-vaxxers are imagining: Give your dog a Covid vaccine, head to Bill Gates' website, and you can track exactly where your dog is, with a camera on a satellite showing you every move in realtime.
Didn't you get the message that Cellebrite has been hacked himself? Someone picked up one of their devices that by coincidence fell off a lorry while he was having a walk, he examined it, found the code on it was full of security holes, and you can reasonably easily develop a set of files that you put on your iPhone, that the Cellebrite device will try to read, and get infected while trying to read these files.
Oh yeah, my bad, you're right. There should be zero protections against people being stalked using Apple tech.
Yeah, stalking and abuse only happen in the movies. Sure, guy.
Listen, if you wanna play cowboy with some kind of tracker, I’m sure there’s a whole universe of shady devices out there for you to use. They aren’t made by Apple though.
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Thinking about this problem for ten seconds... I'd design it so that it only stays turned off as long as that phone is nearby. So your phone turns it off, it stays off for 20 seconds. And the phone tells it to turn off every 15 seconds. So you can turn my AirTag off, but only as long as you are near the AirTag plus 20 seconds.