The alternative is being constantly bombarded with alerts because other residents of an apartment building also own AirTags, which is not going to be useful to anyone.
They took her to the dog park on 5/9, and got the notification that an AirTag was following them. So I was gone for a little over 24 hours, but they only got the notification after they took the leash with them for a couple hours and then went home.
I believe the 3 days is for the audible beeping when it's moved, but they haven't seen that yet and they marked it as "pause safety alerts" so I'm not sure if it'll still beep.
Edit: Also, I have a bag at home with an AirTag and it's constantly updating location, so presumably one of my neighbors has an iPhone that's nearby. Kind of cool that it updates so frequently, and I'd say it was worth replacing my Tiles because of it.
I used to have a Tile and the AirTag is so much better with updating location just because the sheer number of iPhones.
If I do you the favor of watching your dog, I'm going to be pissed if you're spying on me during the process.
I'm sure they knew about it, so I don't think it's unethical, just sort of ugly.
It's more useful to know when someone is X minutes away when you're being picked up or whatever, so it's certainly not "ugly" to anyone that watches my dog either.
At least here in Germany I would imagine that the only answer to a question like that would be "do you want to resurrect the stasi?".
> It's more useful to know when someone is X minutes away
Usually a quick message is enough for something like this.
This isn't to say I'd allow this with anyone, or that everyone should do this—far from it—but it's a convenient tradeoff in this case, at least, for my friends.
I would guess that my father would have also said "who cares" if his best friend knew where he was at all times. Until he found out that his "best friend" did detailed reports on him to the stasi for Years. You never know with these kind of things.
Giving up your privacy for the tiny convenience of not needing to spend 5 seconds to write a message after you arrived home sounds insane to me.
> If I didn't want them to, I'd just disable the location.
Why is that the logic you apply here? It could easily be applied the other way around: If I want them to know, then I can enable it temporarily.
Doesn't that make much more sense than the opposite?
What would be the point of that?
Speaking as a fellow German, I would never share that info with friends, but using that feature with my SO or future kids, sure. Not to spy on them, but e.g. to know they're safe when I expected them to be home already.
There are much more dangers than just the government even if I chose to use the stasi as an example. I just thought that it makes for a good example where you can know a person for years and still get betrayed by them.
To your edit: Especially using this with kids (probably pressured to do so) is icky. You can claim that you are not spying on them, but you are. Maybe for their safety, but safety is often used to remove rights like this. You still spy on them.
I remember my cousin and I got lost in Disneyland once, because we both somehow forgot where the meeting spot was. We didn’t have phones, and we were, of course, fine—truth be told, Disneyland is probably among the safest places to get lost. But it would have been nice if we’d had a tracker that could just tell Dad where we were.
The negative I see here is that it teaches your child that giving up rights for the promise of more safety (or more likely just because an authority figure says so) is something good and normal.
Also teaching that the concept of constant surveillance is good and normal.
I don't understand why you would like to do this just in case or because "it would have been nice".
- Going on a date
- While out running
- Going to a bar
Plenty of other things too but those come to mind first
It also comes in handy if, for example, she goes to the store and I realized I forgot something and want to see if she's still there so she can pick it up. Or when she wants to know how soon I'll be home so she knows when to start dinner (my bike ride from work is around an hour)
Why do it then? In another comment I shared that even people you consider best friends for years could betray your trust and even if we take that possibility away there is still the question of how secure that data is in their hands.
Are they going to leak it inadvertently? Can someone else gain access to their systems and spy on you through them?
> many younger people don't think it's too too odd
Don't you think that is bad? People are just getting used to loosing their rights for minor "convenience". Not to mention that getting used to constant surveillance isn't great either.
My dog has a "Whistle" GPS tracker on her collar. Friends have no problem with it when they watch her even though they know what it is and that it can track them every time they take the dog out. They even keep it charged.
That is a little bit of a different context to what the comment above claimed.
"Curious, do you find an Airtag on your dog's leash to be effective?"
"It's just to see what they're doing with her"
"If I do you the favor of watching your dog, I'm going to be pissed if you're spying on me during the process."
"but how do you ask a friend if you can track them 24/7 without sounding like a giant creep?"
So it's not clear how a GPS tracker on the dog's collar is different than an air-tag on the leash?
> We're all on each others' Find My Friends, and have no problem knowing who is where. I even have non-blood-related friends on there, as do some of my other family members.
Along with a lot of replies that try to explain how constant surveillance of their friends is fine.
You tracking your dog and incidentally tracking a friend while they are walking said dog is completely different then tracking your friends 24/7 via their iPhone.
It does not make a difference if you track your dog with a GPS tracker or AirTag, but it is fundamentally different than what the comment was about.
I'd find that more invasive if I was worried about tracking. At least with an app in my control, I can turn off tracking when I want to, but if I watch my friend's dog while he's out of town and he sees me walking the dog to his girlfriend's house every night, he's going to ask questions.
Would you really prefer to be tracked by your friend every hour of every day instead of only when you are walking their dog?
I do not believe that.
So I've also been looking for a way to use an airtag unobtrusively. My cat isn't outdoors, but I have a big house and she's very old and likes to hide. I'm afraid someday she'll be sick or worse and I won't be able to find her, so something like this would make me feel a lot better.
Worst case if it falls off the caller is you just go find it (and come up with a better system).
This is probably the one aspect where Tile has been superior (for my use case). I never noticed the bulk of the Tile tracker on my keyring.
I'm keeping an eye out for less bulky attachments online. Everything I've seen so far emulates Apple's bulky keyring design.
[1] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP840?viewlocale=en_US&locale=e...
But if you forget your bag on the train, it would start alerting people on the train after a while.
(Unrelated, but kind of sad that I got more information on how airtags actually work from a bike components review channel than dedicated tech reviewers)
Keep in mind the idea of "other iPhones will help you find your tags" was not even a thing you could test for when the first reviews came in, since iOS 14.5 was not out yet. Testing Airtags, therefore, was extremely complex for some edge cases and the experience was not as serendipitous as it would be now.
It didn't help that Apple was not very open on how the anti-stalking features work exactly, for obvious reasons (you don't want people to figure out how to bypass them).
This is not a very good reason at all. People have already worked out basically every detail a week later as well as how to remove the speaker.
All this did was spam the internet with billions of questions confused about these features and if they will be left with a bunch of ringing tags if they go on a holiday or take a bus.
My understanding is that this is not actually true. AirTags using the existing "Find My" network of devices and iOS 14.5 is not required for Airtags to be tracked in the wild. iOS 14.5 is required, however, to pair to an AirTag as the owner or get the "this AirTag is stalking you" notification.
If i have an Android i wouldn't even know that.
That's why the alert only pops up when you get to a known location (home/office).
As for Android, I wonder if an app could be made for phones equipped with UWB radios that alerts you if a tag is always in close proximity, just based on the tags radio activity.
The cat is well out of the bag now. I think Apple, Google and Samsung all need to get together and standardize safety alerts.
The Verge still has quality content as long as you keep in mind almost all of their reviewers live in the US, they are all in the Apple ecosystem, and they wouldn't be able to talk their family and friends if they switched to Android anyway.
They have no reason to be enthusiastic about anything that's not an iPhone or an iPhone accessory.
The industry has a very carrot-stick mentality. Gamers Nexus for example gets shit on by everyone especially when they call this shit out while the "real gaming" channels just go along with anything to get review copies.
Phrasing clumsy, but essentially: If your iPhone doesn’t have a Home icon in Maps for your home, you might not get AirTags tracking protection. Someone should test, or ask Apple to clarify.
So, if some guy hides it in your bag at the airport, with the intention of finding where you live, and you get to your home within the same day, you wont be notified about it for many days, or possibly months, if you leave your bag stationary at home.
Doesn't sound like a very good design.
>because other residents of an apartment building also own AirTags
How about just showing you a single alert (or stationary info page you could check optionally) "Airtag that's not yours travels with you, still here"?
You could then ignore it at public transport (where you expect others with airtags to be travelling along), but you could start getting suspicious if you still get that a "foreign airtag that travelled with you is still nearby" when you're at your home.
Isn't this iPhone only, too? So if you have an Android phone and live near people with iPhones, your location would be identified but you would never be notified.
because there has to be a trade-off between usability and privacy. Something following you for a few hours (max trip for airport to home) could be a stalker, or could just be an airtag on your uber driver. Excessive alerts is counterproductive because people eventually tune them out, which makes them useless.
>How about just showing you a single alert (or stationary info page you could check optionally) "Airtag that's not yours travels with you, still here"?
You'll get that every time you're on a subway/bus.
You don't need excessive alerts, you just a place in the UI that the user can check and see if there's an alert or not. To make it even fancier, add a red dot to the "Find My" icon.
I don't understand why "excessive alerts" and the image of a constantly ringing iPhone is presented as the only possible way to notify the user...
>You'll get that every time you're on a subway/bus.
Yeah, so? As stated above, it could just be an entry "foreign airtag travelling with you" in some UI screen that you open and broswe -- tagged with the date and duration it happened. You can then blisfully ignore it (especially since it can also show "it's not here with you anymore" when you go to your destination).
Isn't this just spamming but slightly more discreet? If there's a red dot next to the "find my" icon every day you go home you're going to tune that out as well.
The original concern was about "excessive alerts" annoying the user with new popups/sound etc. This is unobtrussive.
It's potentially useful information, that can just show the last 2-3 entries, and consumed at will. So not really like spam.
>If there's a red dot next to the "find my" icon every day you go home you're going to tune that out as well.
Most of the time, and it can auto-tone itself down, so it's only shown when you should actually pay attention.
I gave the example of when you're back home, and the same airtags that were potentially "following" you on the subway (e.g. some strangers' airtag) - no longer follow you, so it's ok for the red dot to go back to green.
But if a foreign airtag is close consistently (the same foreign one), it could show the red dot.
And in the next sentence I said the problem is that users eventually ignore them, not that they're annoyed by them (although annoyingness is also a problem).
>It's potentially useful information, that can just show the last 2-3 entries, and consumed at will. So not really like spam.
A red dot is distracting in and of itself. I myself went out of my way to hide app store notifications entirely because it had no way to hide update notifications.
>I gave the example of when you're back home, and the same airtags that were potentially "following" you on the subway (e.g. some strangers' airtag) - no longer follow you, so it's ok for the red dot to go back to green.
>But if a foreign airtag is close consistently (the same foreign one), it could show the red dot.
I feel like this is in the class of features that are theoretically useful, but nobody but the most paranoid actually use. You don't see google/android IMSI catcher or rogue hotspot detection for instance, even though it might theoretically be useful.
IMO, this is just proof that the impossible is being asked of Apple here.
Totally legitimate use case: you put an AirTag in your bag while at the airport. The bag is stolen and you use the tag to track the bag to the thief's home. You're able to recover your bag.
Illegitimate use case: you put an AirTag in someone else's bag while at the airport. That person takes it home and you use the tag to find out where they live.
In the first case, any form of notification to the thief would be non-ideal and go against the point of having an AirTag (tracking missing / stolen objects). In the second case, nothing but immediate notification would be sufficient. So unless tracking products are not to exist at all, there will have to be uses of them that are illegal but not technologically preventable.
Sounds like a lot of work. If I wanted to (which I don't!) probably easier to sneak a peek at the luggage tag. Which may be privacy shielded but probably not and would only take a few seconds in any case to lift a flap up.
So if you're a jealous husband who wants to track your wife's whereabouts as she goes through the day before returning to your home every night, well Apple has the product for you!
Or if you're stalking Cindy, just walk by her place every few days... until she spends the night at Peter's, but hey, your iPhone will tell you that, and where to find them.
So what methods are you talking about?
The Nordic Semiconductor NRF52832 used in the airtag, unlike NRF52840, does not support this.
https://colinoflynn.com/2021/05/apple-airtag-teardown-test-p...
https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Low-power-short-range-wi...
Apple seems to have removed support for long range coded PHY from iOS as well, so other vendors can't make use of coded PHY either. It was present in iOS 13, seems to be absent from iOS 14.