Woman describes experience of being tracked with an Apple AirTag

[Christobell]

@Answer

Adding: When AirTag came out, I did some checking about how to expose them. Because far too many people misunderstand them as anti-theft devices. They are actually rather easy to find if you know what you are doing, since they broadcast so often.

Next time you are in a public environment, fire up a BT scanner like Light Blue – there are literally dozens in all the stores. These days, where there are people, there are dozens of devices around you. all merrily broadcasting their thing. Finding out where they are by tracking signal thing is tedious, but actually easy. You want to steal a bike? Disable your smartphones’ reporting, put it in a van. Drive to public place., open the door. Then close the door and get the hell out of the city to an empty parking lot and simply scan at your leisure.

There’s definitely a need for security apps(if not core OS functionality) to log wireless device traffic around you and surface anything fishy. There are apps that can do this already, but the space is split between user-unfriendly technical tools and spytech “bug detector” woo apps, and it can be difficult to tell the two apart.

The first company to pin down a good user experience and brand this stuff as “antivirus for your personal space” is gonna make a bundle.