iOS 14.5 Beta 3 Includes 'Item Safety Feature' for AirTags and Other Tracked Items to Help Prevent Stalking

[mw360]

I had hoped to use AirTags for the following scenario:

My female best friend is a runner. If she has one in her shorts, gets kidnapped by someone with an iPhone, would I be able to follow her location (which she has permanently shared with me), due to the location reporting similar to phones/laptops?

Would this feature kill that use case, because it would basically be tracking that person?

Yes. These things aren’t going to turn you into the FBI. The kidnapper’s iPhone will alert him to the presence of a tracker nearby and he’ll be able to find it and dispose of it. If your friend had a rival tracker which doesn’t support that feature, the kidnapper would still be able to disable the tracker easily. It only takes a moment’s thought to figure out how, and I think the kidnapping victim would much prefer Apple’s way. We aren’t going to catch many hardened criminals with these things - they’ll know they exist just as much as we do.

 

[gnasher729]

"Find My" only works when you tag something as being lost. From that point on it's being tracked. So there's no reason for you to get notifications, just because there's an AirTag somewhere near you.

The idea is that some spy manages to plant a tracker into the soles of my shoes for example, then marks the tracker as "lost", and gets permanent updates about the location of my shoes which is often the same as my location. So the idea is that my iPhone would detect the tracker and tell me that there's a tracker following me. If it was an Airtag that I put myself on my backpack then I would disable that notification. If there was a tracker that I don't know about I'd try to find it.

And if I'm on a six hour train journey with a person with an airtag on them sitting next to me, as long as they don't change the tracker to "lost" apparently I wouldn't get a false warning.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

This is pretty important. I remember reading stories of people being tracked with their Nike shoe pods. A friend of a fried found a GPS tracker on her car and assumed, correctly, that it was her about to be ex-husband that was stalking her after they separated. Tracking/stalking and lurking has gotten easier and the legal system still have to catch up.

 

[MacD]

Thief who has an iPhone steals something with a tracker, Car, Bag, etc... gets notified it has a tracker. Finds the tracker and ditches it. Tracker is rendered pointless.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

Here’s my assumption on how it’s going to work...
I have an airtag on something, lets say, my backpack.
Someone steals it.
I go into the find my app, see where it’s at, and mark it as lost so I can constantly track it.
Eventually I get it back.
Now the way that I’m assuming this anti-stalking thing is going to work is this...
Stalker puts airtag in someone’s car without them looking.
Victim’s phone notices that an airtag that isn’t connected to another phone is constantly in their presence.
Victim shuts down air tag
not a 100% fool proof solution, but it’s something.

 

[MacD]

Lets just hope the person you want to track is not using an iPhone.

 

[mw360]

Lets just hope the person you want to track is not using an iPhone.

What a weird coincidence that you could say the exact same sentence about cookies, apps, location services, payment processing and encryption.