Can Apple's AirTags Be Used to Track Another Person?

As Mother's Day approached, CNN Business Editor Samantha Murphy Kelly clipped a keychain with one of Apple's tiny new "AirTag" Bluetooth trackers onto her son's book bag, in an experiment that "highlighted how easily these trackers could be used to track another person."

Location trackers aren't new — there are similar products from Samsung, Sony and Tile — but AirTags' powerful Ultra Wideband technology chip allows it to more accurately determine the location and enables precise augmented reality directional arrows that populate on the iPhone or iPad's screen. While AirTags are explicitly intended for items only, Apple has added safeguards to cut down on unwanted tracking. For example, the company does not store location data, and it will send an alert to an iOS device user if an AirTag appears to be following them when its owner is not around. If the AirTag doesn't re-tether to the owner's iOS device after three days, the tracker will start to make a noise.

"We take customer safety very seriously and are committed to AirTag's privacy and security," the company said in a statement to CNN Business. "AirTag is designed with a set of proactive features to discourage unwanted tracking — a first in the industry — and the Find My network includes a smart, tunable system with deterrents...." The safeguards are a work in progress as the software rolls out and users begin interacting with the devices. When my babysitter recently took my son to an appointment, using my set of keys with an AirTag attached, she was not informed that she was carrying an AirTag — separated from my phone. (She hadn't yet updated her phone's software to iOS 14.5.) Non-iPhone users can hold their phones close to the AirTags and, via short-range wireless technology, information pops up on how to disable the tracker, but that's if the person knows they're being tracked and locates it. In addition, three days is a long time for an AirTag to keep quiet before making a noise....

Apple said one of the main reasons it spent so much time developing safeguards was the sheer size of its Find My app network. But it's the AirTags' reliance on that broader network that creates much of the need for the safeguards in the first place, said Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and a fellow at the NYU School of Law. "That's because Apple is turning more than a billion iOS devices into a network for tracking AirTags, while Tile will only operate when in range of the small number of people using the Tile app.... The benefits of finding our keys a bit quicker isn't worth the danger of creating a new global tracking network."

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