Yeah, the 'Settings > [Name] > Find My > Find My iPhone > Find My network' option will turn the collaborative tracking off. But yeah, it's buried, poorly explained, and an opt-out rather than an opt-in.
And it is opt-in... you need to enable Find My iPhone at setup time in order for that to be enabled.
"Find My Network: Participating in the Find My network lets you locate this iPhone even if its offline"
So in fact there is no option (there at least) to opt out of finding other people's AirTags unless you also want to opt out of finding your own iPhone, at least as stated.
Or is it the airtag functionality specifically that’s bothering you?
Yes. What does find my phone have to do with airtags?
Either you use the roads and pay for all the roads or you don't.
Everyone interested in finding their lost or stolen iPhone already turned it on. AirTags will bring up another small percentage of people. The sum of everything available to you, means you have this small price to pay to be part of it: contributing to finding stuff for others.
The specs are here: https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1902/en_US/app...
Page 139 onwards.
If you can find a security/privacy hole in the spec, I think Apple will compensate you pretty well.
Not something a regular dude off the street will be doing any time soon. =)
A phone is bigger, more visible, and expensive if someone would want to use it to track you. Not practical at all.
Maybe they should have 2 options: Phone and Tags (or All). Enabling find my phone would not necessarily allow tags.
Yes.
There’s nothing on any of the apple pages I could find about opting out.
If it took me that long to disable it, it won’t be obvious for most people.
I found it through Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services -> Share my Location -> Find my iPhone -> Find my Network.
They could have put it 2 steps above or found a better way.
They have a search bar at the top where you can type "Find my" and it jumps you straight to those sections.
The only jump that is not immediately obvious is that the Find My settings are under your Apple ID settings. Everything else is blindingly obvious and is not confusing at all. You being confused does not mean the average person will also be confused. You could just be a confused person.
From there though, it is a root level option when setting up your phone and enabling "Find My iPhone".
I'm actually disappointed that the disabling of the network is even an option.
Bit of a tragedy of the commons situation if we have too many selfish people like you who want the benefits of being able to find their own phone when it's lost but not participate in helping find other people's.
What if you only want to turn off airtags? This false choice is caused by apple.
Furthermore, when you disable the find my network it disables it for you as well. You can't just do it one way so it's not selfish.
> tragedy of the commons situation if we have too many selfish people
I can’t think of how helping the Find My network would compromise my privacy in any significant way. But I am still glad there’s an option to disable, there may be people for whom it is a concern.
Eh, I find it a stretch to consider things that need to be typed "discoverable" unless there's a user manual provided telling you everything that can be typed. This same reasoning is why many would consider GUIs (or text mode menu-driven interfaces) to be more user-friendly than CLIs.
Voice assistants have a very similar issue, but nobody likes IVR systems either, so who knows.
2) You can just disable this stuff when you first get your phone it walks you through these prompts there. If you don't enable it - it is not enabled.
3) Spam should be opt-in - most people don't want it. But a lot of Apple stuff should be opt-out, because people do want it. Ie, turn on GPS / location features - folks really want weather, maps with turn by turn etc. Apple already over prompts on setup for my tastes.