Maybe I missed it in the article but how does it work with Bluetooth exactly — how does that help my find my phone over a long distance? What’s the Bluetooth connecting to and how does the phone get the request?
The Find My Network is, basically, every Apple device out in the world. Using bluetooth in this fashion, all the other devices participating in the network and in the area of the phone (or AirTags, they work similarly) will receive the bluetooth broadcast. They'll then communicate that to Apple's system. So when you go to find your device, its most recent known location can be provided to you. They've got some cryptographic mechanisms in place (I haven't researched them) that ensure that the systems receiving the broadcast don't know anything other than that it is an "I'm an Apple Device and here's some cryptographic data" message.
Do you mean that every Apple device in the world acts as a proxy to forward Bluetooth requests from nearby (off) devices containing their location, automatically? E.g my laptop is pinging data to Apple about random nearby phones all the time that it sees with Bluetooth?
Unless they opt out of it, yes. Which is pretty easy to do, pretty sure it's an option during initial device configuration, but regardless it's in the system settings. Which is pretty easy to navigate. There's even a search option at the top to help you find it instead of navigating to the setting.
If you know about it.
you have to opt in when setting up a new device, and I think when updating to the OS version that enabled it
It jumps off of general Find My functionality, so pretty much anyone that has BT enabled, and doesn't want their phone to be sellable when stolen, will act as a proxy node.
Maybe I missed declining a prompt in setup, but this latest feature was opt-out, automatically enabled after a software update, and only notified me once, the first time I powered off the phone after updating. To disable the feature, I had to go four levels deep in Settings, with the last two levels having seemingly unrelated names, disable a toggle, and accept a misleading confirmation prompt.
Yes, essentially.
Not only a proxy. The other random devices use their known location to add to the data to show where the device was found. It’s all encrypted with the key of the lost device owner so apple can not read it.
And all of the data is encrypted so that no one other than the actual device owner can get any of the location information for their device. No one else, including apple can locate a device using the find my network.
Did not know that’s how Find My worked - very interesting
It is how the new feature works. The old feature did not work this way.
The comment is a bit incomplete in its description, but it looks like an accurate description of how Find My Phone has always worked. All that’s new is that a turned off device will be respond to queries.
There’s no actual Bluetooth connection that happens here. The AirTag or other FindMy-enabled device is purely transmitting. The packets being transmitted are Bluetooth Low Energy advertisements (sometimes referred to as “beacons”). Any Apple device can perform Bluetooth Low Energy scanning and can listen for these advertisements, and report what they’ve found to Apple’s servers.
The idea is that someone else's apple device finds it, then you can see where the last place someone was in bluetooth range of your device.