Can I Be Tracked Using My Own AirTag?
Nope. Apple has taken several precautions to make sure that your AirTags can’t be used against you.
Firstly, as noted above, even if somebody is using a specialized Bluetooth scanning app or hardware device, an AirTag doesn’t offer up any information that even tells somebody that it’s an AirTag. It will simply appear as an unknown device. While an advanced hacker might be able to identify it as an Apple device from the actual Bluetooth ID, since the Bluetooth spec uses a unique prefix for each hardware manufacturer. However, that “Apple device” could be anything — there’s no way to know it’s an AirTag specifically.
Further, Bluetooth LE doesn’t provide any useful proximity or range information. That’s why UWB is required to track the specific location of an AirTag, and this protocol is considerably more secure in that it doesn’t “broadcast” any information to nearby devices the way that Bluetooth LE does. So, even if a stalker could identify nearby AirTags, they’d have a hard time knowing which one is which in a crowd.
Lastly, however, even if you were alone in a room, such that somebody could peg your Bluetooth ID to you, they wouldn’t be able to use that for persistent tracking. Apple has designed AirTags to randomly switch Bluetooth IDs at regular intervals. This means that whatever number they’ve associated with you would vanish in a couple of hours or less when the AirTag switched to an entirely new ID.
This isn’t even a new problem, and Apple addressed this years ago with the iPhone and its other devices. They all switch Bluetooth IDs at random to avoid being used in this way.