Apple Air Tag. The famous Apple tracker. He was even used to harass a Sports Illustrated model. By thieves to track cars to your home or a place where they can be easily stolen. Could one of us also be followed?
If you’re like me, you’ve probably worried about the headlines in the first paragraph. But since many titles can be overdone, I decided to experiment with an AirTag myself. Would it be easy for me to track my wife and kids with an Apple AirTag? I set out to check it out so I could tell you.
Just to be clear: I’m an Android user and have been using Tile devices for a while.
I ruled out the possibility of Tile being a big threat, as my experience with Tile was more “not working” than “working”. How can a technology that can’t find my lost portable SSD inside my house be used to track someone 20 miles away?
Still, I decided to include a Tile Pro (a 2020 model with a new battery) and a shiny new AirTag in my testing. I did this with family acquaintances and also tracked them through a phone based GPS tracking app to compare with what I was seeing on the Tile app and Apple Find My.
Before we go too far, let’s understand how the AirTag and the Tile Pro work, two very simple devices that emit a Bluetooth beacon every few minutes via radio frequencies. This beacon reports the last location of the phone, tablet or IoT device it visited ping.
In the case of Tile, any other phone running the Tile app or any Amazon Sidewalk device (Echo, etc.) will report if it has received the beacon and transmit the information.
The AirTag does the same thing, but with the main difference that there are a billion iOS devices it can be done on. ping. The trackers do NOT contain GPS locators, but are instead based on the location of the phone or Amazon Sidewalk device.
There is also a high precision short range location feature on the newer trackers, but only when very close to the beacon. Most coarse location information is done via Bluetooth.
With all that out of the way, I reunited with my family with my AirTag and Tile Pro in a variety of scenarios.
Tracking device: almost useless
For my tests, I ran them with the trackers inside the car in a cup holder. And also stuck to the bumper to simulate my lifelong fantasy of being PI Jim Rockford following someone.
In fact, I tried to follow someone the old-fashioned way as a journalist and lost it within minutes. If he had put an AirTag or a Tile Pro in his car, it wouldn’t have helped me.
The AirTag and Tile Pro simply don’t update information often enough or contact other devices at the right time to be helpful.
When the location is updated, it is often so out of date that the actual person may be a mile or more away. Also, at highway speeds most of the time you won’t get any updates.
Follow you home: Scary, effective
Actively tracking you at high speeds doesn’t make sense, but if everyone wants to know where you live, Apple’s AirTag is deadly effective.
But of course, the same goes for the Tile Pro. Again, my experience with my Tile Pros has been more or less flawless when it comes to finding lost items around my house. So I was quite surprised to see that the Tile Pro works reasonably well as a tracking device.
I expected Tile’s porous network to be so inefficient that Tile Pro wouldn’t provide any useful information. For example, within a 20 mile radius of my metropolitan home, the app reports about 5,000 Tile users. That’s 5,000 people using the app who can spot a lost Tile in a city of 400,000 people.
It’s not much, but its partnership with Amazon seems to have made the difference. Any Echo or Amazon doorbell, security camera, or other Bluetooth-enabled device can also detect the Tile and report its last location.
It works well enough that it looks like a Tile Pro planted in your car can at least locate someone within a few blocks of you. During my tests, the Tile Pro was located at a neighbor’s house 150 meters away.
I’m sure Apple’s AirTag could follow you around a house or two wherever you are thanks to the vast network of iPhones. Find My, for example, reported that my AirTag was inside the house next door, where I know the occupants are using iPhones.
As a means of stalking someone passing by: Terrifyingly effective
The Sports Illustrated model who was found said the culprit attached an AirTag to his jacket to track his house. To simulate this experience, I placed the Tile Pro and AirTag in my daughter’s backpack and observed her movements.
The Tile Pro, again, did much better than I expected in a dense metropolitan area with lots of Amazon Sidewalk devices and Tile-enabled phones. But that still pales in comparison to the AirTag, which gave me updates on my daughter’s location, which allowed me to pinpoint her location within 25-50 feet and apparently updated every time I checked.
The reason? My daughter has a Tile, but the app is no longer active because she was frustrated that it didn’t work. If the Tile app was running, location updates might have been better. But she uses an iPhone which the AirTag would use to update her location.
Again: an AirTag has no GPS. It relies on your phone to inform you of your location. In a dense area, you’re unlikely to be out of radio range of an iPhone reporting the AirTag’s last location.
It’s scary, Apple (and Tile) have to do something.
After seeing how frighteningly effective AirTag (and, to some extent, Tile) is, you might think I’m in favor of Apple weakening its use further. In fact, some would probably call for the technology to be banned.
It’s an understandable knee-jerk reaction many people would have after seeing the latest 60-second newscast or article in the newspaper about an AirTag “used to track someone home!” These occurrences should not be taken lightly and are a legitimate problem.
But these are also legitimately criminal activities. Many states have laws that prevent someone from being electronically tracked without their knowledge. I recommend reading igamesnews’s excellent guide on how to find and neutralize unwanted AirTags that may be following you.
However, after a few days of consideration, I realized that the AirTag is much more useful as a tool that works in your favor in the event of a crime, rather than being used against you.
The latest FBI crime statistics report that 721,885 cars were stolen in 2019. The National Insurance Crime Bureau shows that 53,111 motorcycles were stolen in 2020.
Your chances of recovering a stolen car seem to range from 50-80%, depending on the state and the reporting organization. Recovering a stolen motorcycle is also quite rare. Stolen bike or mower? Forget that.
What I know from living in a high crime metropolitan city is that stolen cars end up being scrapped for parts, lodged against a running board, or left in an area where someone else decides to dump them scrap for parts or use as a bathroom. .
If you’re lucky, he stays on the street until he racks up enough tickets and a towing agency wins him over, leaving you to pay several thousand dollars in impound fees.
You may get your Creedence Clearwater Revival tape back, but ultimately the odds of getting your car back – especially in time – are dire. You could pay a few hundred dollars for a great system like a LoJack, but are you really going to make the LoJack a clunker?
But for the low price of $29, you can essentially tag your car, bike, motorcycle, outdoor grill, or generator and locate it in case it gets “lost.”
In fact, it’s already common to tag pets with AirTags to locate them if they escape. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind if someone found a way to get an AirTag to withstand the heat of a catalytic converter so I could tell the police about thieves and the location of stores buying those stolen catalytic converters.
Apple and Tile are probably uncomfortable with the use of trackers in this way, as they are always thinking about the liability that could be placed on them.
Apple has already made a few changes to begin addressing the AirTag harassment issues, and those improvements may end very soon in iOS 15.4. Good. I don’t care what Apple or Tile thinks though, because despite months of scary headlines – this one included – I’ve come to realize that AirTag and Tile are very powerful tools that can also be used for good, and not only for evil
Original article published in English on our sister site PCWorld USA.
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