Woman describes experience of being tracked with an Apple AirTag

In an urban environment? You wish. I track our car (with my wive’s knowledge, of course) and our 9 year kid sometimes gets the house keys, also tagged. Also gets reminded that I can see their location. I also left an AirTag with my bicycle when they came out.

I live in Germany, where ¾ of all smartphone are Android. The number of “hits” I get are crazy. Even in our suburban boondocks I get multiple hits of passers-by in a few hours.

The range outside is impressive. My wife recently passed me in our car while I rode the bicycle and I was kinda confused why I got the “You left the item Car behind” – those few seconds had been enough for my iPhone to register the passing AirTag and to then think that I left it behind.

If said cosplayer parks outside, it’s almost guaranteed that her car’s position will get reported.

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Do you have any idea how many iPhones are in use in this country? There’s at least 130 million in active use every single day. The chance that you’re outside bluetooth range of an iPhone in urban areas are pretty slim.

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It would also help if police would take stalking seriously. Apple has a frigging website about this and how to contact them when AirTags are abused as stalking devices, but apparently many cops just brush people (well, women, lets be serious: Even though it’s women who joke on Twitter of tagging their spouses, it’s men who stalk and assault women) off when they make a report. Personally, a slipped tracking device should be worth a minimum of six months in prison.

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In general, they don’t take domestic crimes and stalking seriously enough.

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Oh, the really expensive stuff gets the Apple Watch treatment: https://www.gizmochina.com/2021/08/25/apple-watch-tracker-robbery/

And, after all, a GPS tracker with cellular connection can be had for less than 20 bucks. Get a burner SIM and yo get far better resolution than wit an AirTag, though for fewer days.

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Yes, as you say they are basically the same as their competitors, if AirTags are being abused for this purpose so is Tile and all the other devices in this space.

So I agree one of the reasons we see more “AirTags used to do bad thing” (high end car theft seems to be the other activity that gets a lot of press…but makes less sense to me, if you can get an AirTag inside a body panel, why didn’t you take the car at that point?) is Apple makes it easier to find out if an AirTag you don’t own is traveling with you.

Another reason is the press likes to write Apple stories, and doesn’t bother so much with “one trick start up’s one trick can be abused”.

I think AirTags are also less costly, so maybe more likely you will buy one for $19 to do something bad than $50 for a Tile?

Last reason could be the bad actors themselves are not great at picking tech stacks, and are buying Apple because it has a reputation or an ad budget and Tile & friends don’t, so even though they ought to use one of the less abuse resistant systems they don’t.

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You mean like Apple tells them to do?

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Great ‘encouragement’ there.

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AirTags and Tiles are in about the same price range. Actually, Tiles Mate (a dispoable tracker) costs under 20 USD. Samsung Smarttags are in the same price range. Apple generally beats them on the network. It’s opt out for the billion of Apple devices (it’s not just iPhones, but also iPads and I think even Macs), dozens of millions of Samsung Galaxy device – yet for Tiles it’s a few million who needed to opt-in.

Edit:

Good point. But this means that in this case WhatAboutTism is actually called for. It’s not a case of “What About Her E-Mails” or “Biden once wrote a college recommendation letter for a 2nd cousin, so that’s as bad as hiring your kids for your administration”, but here it’s literally the same danger: Stalkers using flock-based networks to attack their victims. (I’ve decided to stop calling it merely tagging or abusing trackers, those are attacks. We don’t call people stabbing other people “knife abusers”, do we?)

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Also of note. Apple did decrease the time before it alerts you quite soon after release. My wife took mine for a while to see how the alerts worked. It took several days to trigger. Then they updated and she got the alert the same day.

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By the way, the alert definitely has to be more assertive. There’s the quite believable story of a woman out there, who got stalked and had dismissed her iPhone’s warning because she had been busy and didn’t know what it was about.

A “Warning. You May Be Tracked” could help.

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Yes, this. I actually think this is a really good thing, even though Apple catches a lot of (often) undeserved flack for it. Years ago Greenpeace dragged them heavily for continuing to use mercury (fluorescent screen backlights) and non-recyclable materials in addition to not having a comprehensive recycling/buyback program. There were a flurry of articles afterward clarifying that, although Apple had a long way to go, most of their competitors were far worse. It made me realize that GP targeted them specifically because they knew that they would get better results by rubbing Apple’s nose in their own poo. Sure enough, a few months later Apple announced their free recycling program and began eliminating toxic metals from their hardware.

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If I can think of this, even though I have no interest in doing so, so can others.

Yes, it sucks. Hell, I taught my kid to set a passcode on their non-networked iPhone without me not knowing it, they just had to write it down. put it in an envelope and then sign the envelope it can’t be opened without them knowing it. ('cause if they forget the passcode, there’s no getting it back, as it should be.)

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Which is why I am generally okay with that practice. Apple can stand the heat and is one of the bigger player. What annoys me are the blogger and journalists who act as if their preferred brands are acting any better (when they often aren’t at all).

Boing Boing is a good example, with multiple articles peddling Tiles over the years, with no concerns about the privacy issues.

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An app that is a minimum viable product for CYA purposes and does not have a continuous scan feature. You have to manually activate it for each scan, making it far less likely that you’ll discover a tracker in a timely fashion.

Apple is the only company talking about this issue because they have to. The ubiquity of iPhones and forced integration of AirTag tracking into the iOS makes them the most effective low power tracker network in the world.

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Why bother sticking an air tag on somebody’s car when you could secretly develop tiny tracking microchips that could be surreptitiously injected as part of a phony vaccine developed to address a worldwide phony pandemic? Duh.

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I sincerely hope that is her actual name. I would love for that to be my actual name.

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So she had this user experience with a single stranger’s AirTag.

But if you’re on mass transit or an airplane, isnt your iPhone going to go crazy with everyone else’s AirTag triggering notifications? And won’t your AirTag(s) be triggering everyone else’s iPhones?

EDIT: Apparently the answer is that, you only get the annoying notification if the alien AirTag is travelling with you and someone else is actively tracking you via their own Find My application. So, this woman was quite right to be freaking out. She said she didnt see anyone. She said she was alone. She wasn’t alone.

-—
Per appleinsider.com/inside/airtags

Anti-Stalking Features

Apple has implemented a feature in iOS 14.5 to prevent bad actors from hiding trackers on a person. If the iPhone detects a device using the Find My network following the person around, perhaps in a backpack or vehicle, the iPhone will alert the user of the tracker.

This alert will only occur when the tracker has been separated from its owner’s device, so don’t worry about spurious notifications while riding a bus or walking in public. Apple cannot provide these notifications to Android users, but the company has another feature to help dissuade stalkers.

If an AirTag has been separated from its owner for three days, it will begin chirping regularly. Reports indicate the chirp is only about 60 decibels at its loudest and can be easily smothered if the AirTag isn’t in an open space. This chirp is the only protection against stalking Apple can provide to those who do not have an iPhone.

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The problem is that the barrier to entry is a completely different one with a consumer product. Your average Joe Stalker is going to be a lot more tempted if they can just buy their surveillance equipment in an apple store or even have it lying around at home anyway.

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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.

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