I give it 2 weeks before we start hearing news stories about people using as a stalking tool. A jealous partner could slip it into their partner's purse to track their movements for example.
Apple actually added a feature to prevent this. If you have an iPhone it is supposed to notice that you have an airtag traveling with you that isn't yours. It then alerts you and you can make it play a sound to help find it if needed.
I suppose you could use an AirTag to stalk someone who doesn't have an iPhone.
Picturing what will happen on a flight, with a bunch of these in the hold... I currently use tiles, and I have one that I stash in a pocket on my suitcase to a) let me know it's coming out on the baggage carousel and b) often it lets me know that my bag made the connection.
As it's bluetooth LE, it would be useless for this purpose. About all it could do is tell you when the tag was *not* somewhere, i.e. out of range as opposed to where it was. So I suppose you could use it to test your partners car was parked in the garage or not and make inferences but not much else.
Anyway if you wanted a GPS tracker then they sell them on Aliexpress for $5-10. As it happens they also sell Bluetooth LE proximity tags almost identical in purpose to these Airtags for a buck. So Apple saw the
It's more than that. It will report its position using any internet connected Apple Device, not just your own. The security around this is actually pretty clever, in so much that the relaying device has no way of knowing who owns a device it's reporting, but never the less, it's not just when it's within Bluetooth range of your own phone.
In other words, phone software is doing the heavy lifting (scrap some bluetooth devices, send data to Apple), not the hardware itself which is so cheap you can get similar tags for a dollar.
Or will that come later? The UWB version of Airtags is supposed to be able to pinpoint location to within an inch and give precise direction and distance measurements. That would certainly be different than Tile's use of older Bluetooth technology which is much less precise.
I give it 2 weeks... (Score:2)
What could possibly go wrong...
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Re:I give it 2 weeks... (Score:4, Interesting)
Picturing what will happen on a flight, with a bunch of these in the hold... I currently use tiles, and I have one that I stash in a pocket on my suitcase to a) let me know it's coming out on the baggage carousel and b) often it lets me know that my bag made the connection.
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Anyway if you wanted a GPS tracker then they sell them on Aliexpress for $5-10. As it happens they also sell Bluetooth LE proximity tags almost identical in purpose to these Airtags for a buck. So Apple saw the
Re:I give it 2 weeks... (Score:5, Informative)
It's more than that. It will report its position using any internet connected Apple Device, not just your own. The security around this is actually pretty clever, in so much that the relaying device has no way of knowing who owns a device it's reporting, but never the less, it's not just when it's within Bluetooth range of your own phone.
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Re:I give it 2 weeks... (Score:5, Informative)
New in the Bluetooth 5.1 standard, from wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Angle of Departure (AoD) which are used for locating and tracking of devices
So it is a little more then just signal strength.
Airtags use UWB for precision location? (Score:2)
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Surely all those shenanigans have been possible using Tiles (or other similar tracking devices, such as cell phones) for years?
I don't see how an Apple-provided solution makes the situation any more prone to abuse than it already was.