After more than a year of rumors related to Apple’s location beacons, the Cupertino-based company officially introduced AirTags, the location beacons that hit the market as an alternative to TILE, which has previously expressed its discomfort at this subject.
After the launch, Kaiann Drance, vice president of global iPhone marketing and Ron Huang, senior manager, spoke with Fast Company employees about design, operational confidentiality… As for the design, they state that they wanted one that was unique that no one else had used before.
When it comes to privacy, they claim that one of the main virtues of AirTags is privacy. This device uses encrypted networks so that neither Apple nor anyone else can know the location. In addition, if a user loses sight of the device associated with the beacon, it cannot be reset for reuse.
This entire process is end-to-end encrypted, so that no one other than the owner of the AirTag – not the owners of the crowdsourced devices that collect the AirTag or Apple’s location – same – does not have access to the current or past location of the AirTag.
In addition, the Bluetooth identifiers emitted by the AirTags are not only random, but “rotated several times a day and are never reused, so that when traveling from one place to another with the AirTag, it cannot be re-identified. “
Drance and Huang also point out that so nearly a billion Apple devices act as a collectively provided tracking network that helps track AirTags, the owner of the AirTag. you can never see which devices your AirTag location is pinging nor who owns these devices.
Great for kids and pets?
Many people consider this device to be ideal not for tracking objects, but for follow children or animals. However, from Apple, they claim that it is not designed for this function because it is the Apple Watch family setup function in the case of children.
But of course, a tag is much cheaper than an Apple WatchAlso, if they are young children, the Apple smart watch is of little or no use to them. With AirTags, it is much easier and cheaper to follow a child when we go on an excursion, in an amusement park, in a shopping center …
Regarding the possibility of using an AirTag with a pet, Drance says if people do, they need to make sure that your pet is within range of a device on the Search network so you can track your location.
In both cases, Apple’s responses are very vague and they don’t make us wonder why we can’t use them on both small children and pets.