Your iPhone May Soon Be Able to Alert You to Third-Party Tracking Tags

With the first iOS 17.5 developer beta making the rounds, clever code sleuths are starting to uncover some buried secrets about what we can expect in the next version. Yesterday, we saw evidence of a new “squeezable” Apple Pencil, and now it looks like Apple may be preparing to roll out safety alerts for third-party tracking tags.

When Apple released the AirTag three years ago, it opened a Pandora’s Box of safety concerns about how the inexpensive accessory could be used for stalking. The problem wasn’t unique to AirTags — more dangerous trackers had been around for years — but Apple’s popularity became a double-edged sword in highlighting the problem.

That’s not to say that Apple didn’t think to build in some safety protections from the start. In fact, it took the initiative to create ways for your iPhone to notify you if an unknown AirTag was found moving around with you. That’s something rival products like Tile didn’t offer. By and large, Apple’s protections often worked quite well, although they were far from foolproof and left too many ways for things to slip through the cracks.

One of the biggest limitations is that Apple’s AirTag notifications only worked on iPhones running iOS 14.5 or later. That should cover any iPhone sold in the last nine years, but it still left a conspicuous gap in the safety net: Android users.

This was one area that domestic safety advocates pointed out early on, and Apple worked to address many of these concerns. However, there was only so much it could do for Android devices without Google’s cooperation; it released a Tracker Detect app for Android in late 2021 that would help users actively scan for nearby AirTags as a stop-gap, but many safety experts recognized that the problem was much bigger than just having Android devices alert users to AirTags. Other trackers exist, and what was really needed was for the industry to come up with a universal standard for alerting all potential victims when unwanted tracking devices are following them around, whether those are AirTags, Tile trackers, or Samsung’s Galaxy Smart Tags.

As a result, Apple and Google announced a landmark partnership last spring that would create an industry specification for all personal item trackers. This would allow both iPhone and Android smartphones to detect when these trackers are nearby so appropriate action can be taken.

Google was remarkably quick to get on board, rolling out changes last summer that would allow smartphone users with Android 6.0 or later to receive alerts when unknown tracking tags were found moving around with them.

However, the new system can only track tags that are part of the specification, and since that only included AirTags and other Find My enabled devices at the time, that’s all Google’s new system could track. That’s still a huge win, but it also explains why Apple didn’t need to be in such a hurry to announce a similar feature for the iPhone. After all, an iPhone can already track AirTags, and there was nothing else to track back then, especially considering the draft specification wasn’t even published until December 20.

iOS 17.5 Could Alert You to Other Tags

While Tile, Samsung, Eufy, Chipolo, and Pebblebee all expressed support for the draft spec last year, it’s unclear if any of these companies have implemented it in their products. However, the fact that Apple is getting ready for it in iOS 17.5 suggests universal unwanted tracking tag alerts could soon be a reality for iPhone users as well.

Code found in the first iOS 17.5 developer beta by MacRumors contributor Steve Moser has found several references to alerts that would only apply to third-party item tracks.

For example, one such snippet reads: “You can disable this item and stop it from sharing its location with the owner. To do this, follow the instructions provided on a website by the manufacturer of this item.” It’s unclear if Apple will redirect the user to that website or expect the person receiving the alert to figure that out for itself, but this is also still a work in progress.

Along similar lines, the folks at 9to5Mac uncovered another snippet that adds, “This item isn’t certified on the Apple Find My network” before the instructions for disabling the tag.

There’s no indication that this feature has been enabled in the current iOS 17.5 beta. Still, it would be impossible to know for sure without testing it with a third-party tracking tag that was known to support the new feature, and those are a pretty big question mark right now. There also aren’t likely to be any specific user-facing settings for this outside of the existing Tracking Notifications used for controlling unknown AirTag alerts. Like most safety features on the iPhone, this should be the sort of thing that just works unless you take very specific and deliberate steps to turn it off.

[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]