Comment by kalleboo
5 days ago
You get a notification when an AirTag is following you for some time, but the AirTags owner is not near it. It's meant to detect someone slipping an AirTag on you without the false alarms from, say, taking a walk with a friend who has one in their backpack.
Wait so a thieve an eye with an iPhone who steals my expensive bicycle that I have tagged with an airtag Is receiving a notification that there is an airtag "following" them nearby?
Yes, the moral of the story is - don't steal expensive bikes if you don't want to get spammed by notifications that the bike is following you.
With the side effect that the thief can easily find and remove the tag.
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They always talk about lost items in their marketing. They don’t talk about theft prevention or finding pets or anything. Gotta go for a mini GPS tracker or something for protecting $$$$(+) bikes (which should never leave one’s sight anyway).
> They don’t talk about theft prevention or finding pets or anything.
In particular I'm guessing you can't use it to track your kid's backpack either; for that, you should instead buy your 7yo their own iPhone.
> Gotta go for a mini GPS tracker or something for protecting $$$$(+) bikes
The same one actual stalkers would use?
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It's far from the only annoying false positive.
Here's a real world case I've run into a bunch of times. Parents send children to school with Airtags in their backpacks. (The children are young and don't themselves have phones.) Class goes on a field trip. Boom, tons of notifications.
Yes indeed. Not only that, Apple worked with Android to make it work there too. It makes it a lot easier on the thief so they don’t have buy/steal an iPhone, too.
Yes. The alternative is to have stalkers using hidden airtags
So what good is piercing the AirTag's speaker?
It stops the audible notifications for people who aren't looking at a phone screen.
They also ring when a non-associated iphone is moving with them for some time.
Android users
Supposedly Apple opened this up to Android already
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