AirTags Are Getting a Bad Rap | New Test Reveals More Dangerous Trackers

By Jesse Hollington
7 Min Read
Apple AirTag Credit: Nikita Ognev / Unsplash
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Although Apple’s AirTags have been getting a lot of negative attention lately for their potential to be misused for stalking, they’re far from the first tracking devices that can be abused in this way, and now a new report from The New York Times sheds some light on how big of a problem this can be.

Let’s face it, Apple is at the centre of this controversy largely because it’s Apple. When you’re a trillion-dollar company, you’re under a lot of scrutiny, and everyone from the public to advocacy organizations and the media have been following the story of AirTags much more than they ever did with Tile or a score of other much lower-profile tracking devices.

In our opinion, Apple should be lauded for at least trying to take steps to prevent its AirTags from being abused. While some have legitimately argued that Apple hasn’t gone far enough, Apple has still shown far more interest in addressing these important privacy and safety issues than any of its competitors, most of which didn’t even think of these things until after Apple announced the AirTag.

It’s also fair to say that Apple is paying attention to safety and privacy advocates and doing what it can to adjust course, gradually improving the AirTag’s safety features, and making sure people understand what the AirTag is designed for — and what it’s not.

For instance, many have lamented that an AirTag can’t be used for tracking stolen property, and some have even created “Silent AirTags” for this purpose — to avoid alerting a potential thief that they’re being tracked. The concern, of course, is that AirTags only know when they’re away from you and moving. They have no way of knowing whether they’re being carried by a thief or a victim.

Comparing Tracking Methods

While we’ve heard numerous stories of people discovering unwanted AirTags planted on their person or property, the very fact that folks have found these AirTags at all proves that Apple’s anti-stalking features are working reasonably well.

We’re not really qualified to judge whether Apple can do a better job of this — we’ll leave that up to the experts — but it’s fair to say that they’re doing more than everyone else is. Of course, that isn’t hard when you consider that everyone else is doing, well, nothing. It’s a pretty low bar for Apple to reach.

This was recently highlighted by tech reporter Kashmir Hill in an investigative comparison piece for The New York Times.

Hill decided to do a fairly simple experiment, planting several tracking devices in various places in her husband’s car and belongs to see how things worked out.

I put a quarter-sized Apple AirTag in a seat pocket; a flat, credit card-shaped Bluetooth tracker made by Tile in a dashboard pocket; and a hockey-puck-like GPS tracker from a company called LandAirSea in the glove compartment.Kashmir Hill

In total, Hill planted three AirTags, three Tile tags, and a GPS tracker on her husband. She also pointed out that she asked his permission first. While that could taint the results somewhat, it’s illegal to track someone without their knowledge, and Hill wanted to make sure she was up front with him.

“You can do it,” he said. “But it’ll be boring. We’re in a pandemic. I never go anywhere.”Kashmir Hill

While that may have tainted the results a bit, Hill didn’t provide him with any specifics as to how many devices she’d be using, or where she’d be planting them. He also agreed to not specifically look for trackers unless he was given to do so, such as an alert from his iPhone.

Perhaps the most insidious of the devices was the $30 LandAirSea tracker which Hill had planted in her husband’s car. While this requires a subscription plan, it provides near-real-time updates via a cellular connection. $20/month gets you updates every three minutes, while $50/month will provide updates on a three-second cycle.

Unlike AirTags and Tile’s tags, which are expressly intended to find items you’ve lost, the LandAirSea device is quite specifically a tracker, and it’s not all that more expensive or complicated to use than an AirTag. It also naturally provides no feedback that would let a person know that it’s nearby and tracking them. LandAirSea markets their devices for “asset protection,” which includes everything from vehicle fleet management to theft recovery of boats and vehicles.

In keeping with those aims, the LandAirSea tracker also offers an “InstaFence” feature that can alert the owner when it moves and a “Playback” option that shows exactly where it’s been every step of the way. The only positive aspect of the LandAirSea tracker is that it’s not exactly small. While it’s easily hidden in a vehicle, it’s not something you’re going to be able to plant on someone’s person.

Not surprisingly, the AirTags and Tile tags didn’t provide nearly the same level of tracking detail. For one thing, both trackers rely on other nearby smartphones to report their locations, and Hill notes that her family lives in a sparsely populated area.

However, Hill notes that the AirTag’s abilities “skyrocketed” when her husband arrived in New York City, since he was suddenly surrounded by people carrying iPhones — all of which happily reported in the location of the moving AirTag.

This was also where the AirTag leapt ahead of the LandAirSea GPS tracker. Hill notes that it became her “most powerful tracker” and allowed her to “tell a photographer exactly where he was at all times.”

The Tile tracker didn’t do nearly as well, which also shouldn’t come as a surprise. As Hill explains, Tile can only report its location to people who are running the Tile app, which is a much smaller group. Tile has sold only 40 million tags over the past several years, and with many customers buying more than one tag, it’s fair to say there are probably far fewer than 10 million people actively using the Tile app. By comparison, Apple has over a billion active iPhones roaming the world.

However, the AirTag may have done a better job of tracking Hill’s husband around New York City, but it was also the only one that alerted him to its existence.

Within two hours of my putting all the trackers in our car, my husband, who has an iPhone, got an alert about the AirTag, after running an errand.Kashmir Hill

Unfortunately, even though Hill’s husband’s iPhone informed him that an unknown AirTag was moving around with him, he wasn’t able to actually find it. He ran into technical problems making one AirTag emit a sound at all, and in the case of an AirTag in his car, the sound was so difficult to pinpoint that he gave up looking for it after five minutes.

The Verdict

As Hill’s husband said after the experiment was over, “It’s impossible to find a device that makes no noise and gives no warning.” That’s something that applies to just about every other tracker out there.

However, as Hill’s experience showed, even the AirTag’s warnings weren’t particularly helpful. While Hill’s husband received alerts about the existence of the AirTags in at least two cases (he found the third accidentally), neither of those notifications helped him actually put his hands on the tags. Further, the second AirTag only notified him of its presence after it had already been tracking him for 12 hours.

The critics were right: Apple’s safeguards against nefarious use weren’t foolproof.Kashmir Hill

This leaves a lot of room for potentially dangerous situations. While a person who is fearful of stalking and understands what the AirTag warning means might act on it either way, others who can’t actually find the tag may just shrug the whole thing off. After all, if you can’t find the AirTag — or can’t even connect to it to make it emit a sound — it’s easy to assume that maybe your iPhone is just being weird.

However, this is also something that Apple plans to address. This week, the company announced that it will soon enable its Precision Finding feature for locating unknown AirTags. This will help iPhone users who receive an unknown AirTag alert track it down without relying on an audible alert.

“For all the bad press the AirTags have gotten, and as flaky as the detection mechanisms were, at least I was consistently getting notifications they were following me,” he said. “The privacy dangers of the other trackers were way worse.”Kashmir Hill

While many experts still feel that Apple’s safety precautions are inadequate, others are praising the company for shedding light on the larger problem of how widespread this kind of tracking is. Most tracking devices won’t ever notify a person of their existence, so it’s fair to say many people had no idea this sort of things was going on at all before AirTags came along. Certainly, few people had any real understanding of how widespread it could be.

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