It is a weirdly framed feature request. Sounds like they want some way to signal that this third party AirTag is actually "co-owned" or at least the user knows about it and silence (maybe even track).
I think families _do_ have an option and it's listed in the article. The author just didn't want to take that route as it's more merging of accounts than they are comfortable with.
I'd frame it more like Apple doesn't support the idea of shared resources except in a family account setting. A good example could be roommates living in a house and sharing a dog. A family account makes no sense here and the systems in place don't support sharing an AirTag for them.
The last few months when I go out I get notifications that some airpods are following me. As if someone dropped one in my jacket pocket specifically to follow me around popular bars, as opposed to someone else just going to the same popular local bars.
The first time it was screenshot worthy at best. I'm not the demographic to have predatory tactics done towards me, the likelihood was too small.
The following times its just a nuisance, a conversation starter for a pickup improv skit.
I recently bought a bunch of AirTags for my family: for our keys, our bike, our luggage.
Annoyingly, every AirTag needs to be linked to a single iPhone. Even when everyone belongs to the same Family. AirTags also make annoying sounds every time I grab my keys to go out.
They’re still the best UX on the market, but I wish Apple would improve the UX just a bit more. Maybe their policy folks are worried about news stories about people using AirTags to stalk, which is unfortunately a reasonable fear.
My dog did a runner a week after we got her, only found her thanks to the AirTag. Despite all the AirTag annoyances, I'll definitely keep using one on the dog.
I believe in the next couple of years, they would have done their extensive research and have the feature like how we got with Photos after years of wait.
Fair, but I’ve found I basically never use other people’s devices, just the last seen location to see where I left something. The only cases where there something was tracking movement was in the case where my wallet was stolen and they were smart enough to remove the credit-card shaped tile in it and bin it immediately in a different place; I imagine my much more conspicuous airtag on my partner’s keys would share the same fate.
Interesting to hear this, not having tried Tile myself. It does seem like Apple’s big competitive advantage (along with access to low level device APIs they don’t offer to developers).
The last and only time I actually had to use my Tile, it didn’t even work in a frickin’ major international airport.
I think it’s funny how people gripe about AirTags and how they have stalking notifications. This was never an issue with Tile because you couldn’t stalk someone with it if you wanted to. It is only an “issue” with AirTags because they actually work.
I abandoned my tile and am considering getting an iPhone just for AirTags.
Tile is close to useless for tracking lost items [1] except when it's in you own home. Also, I am very annoyed they try to get you into a subscription model for sending you replacement batteries, but also for app features that have no business being locked behind a subscription. Juicero, anyone?
I have an AirTag in my bag and it beeps maybe twice a day for no apparent reason, It'll be in the same room as me, I have my phone with me, and I'm in this same room every day. It doesn't send me the notification the bag is "lost", it just starts beeping.
This is super annoying for me, as I bought a tag for our shared mailbox key thinking we both could find it when needed, but only my devices can. It seems crazy to me that this still hasn't been implemented in over a year now - iCloud family plans exist, CloudKit sharing zones exist since last year (In public API form, so likely they existed internally for even longer.)
Also the device ID's are already shared internally in some fashion across an iCloud family, as my key tracker doesn't make my wife's phone detect an unknown tag and vice versa.
Ideally you should be able to share beyond the family, IE I let my parents borrow the car, I should be able to "loan" the tag to their account (And I guess choose whether I can see tracking or not.) But if we don't have family plans we obviously won't get to this point any time soon.
Here's what likely happened -- they built the entire system from the ground-up based on a single-user because integrating with iCloud family wasn't part of the MVP.
By the time someone got around to asking about it, they realized that their data model was so thoroughly fucked it would take several weeks of risky migrations in order to add multi-user support.
So stakeholders are punting on it left and right. The things are selling, so is multi-user support really that important? It's an "edge case".
Alternate interpretation: Any multi-user support will be wielded by abusers, and no other use cases deserve precedence over inhibiting abuse, so all multi-user cases result in unpredictable sound and/or push notifications to inhibit abuse.
I expect Apple will eventually add “This AirTag has been traveling with you for a while, are you okay with that?” random pop-up notifications, the same way that it randomly confirms “Always Allow” location access and “Time-sensitive” notifications access.
I explain the little chirping sound the one in my glovebox sometimes makes when I start my car to anyone riding with me who doesn’t recognize it, so that they understand what that sound is and to pay attention and be conscious of what it means whenever they hear it.
If occasional chirps are the price I have to pay to inhibit abuse by a global tracking network, then that’s a small annoyance paid for a great good for others.
On the iCloud family settings page you can enable/disable sharing your location with the rest of your family. I imagine AirTags would be the same.
That being said, if you aren't comfortable with family members knowing your location, then why would you want to share AirTags or an iCloud with them in the first place?
This is surprisingly powerful anti-marketing from Apple. I got some AirTags to keep track of our keys without realizing that AirTags can’t be shared within a family. I hoped they’d be useful to my wife, who sometimes forgets her purse, but she absolutely hates them as they’re always giving her warnings. I loaned my car to my sister and now she and her husband are off the list of potential customers, too. I get the stalking concerns, but I’m surprised that the solution was to make the product completely unusable for anyone but single people.
My wife and I have shared an icloud account since before family sharing was an option but i was way too cheap to by multiple copies of a weather app etc.
It works fine short of having to make some new tweaks each time i update/restore/add a device (mostly around setting options in iMessage and Facetime to uncheck my numbers on her device and vice versa on mine.).
I have been increasingly mulling over setting up family sharing. But I am also planning a longer trip to another country and bought some airtags for luggage etc, but also to use for our keys/wallet etc.
These comments have me saying sticking with the current setup would be preferred. Specifically for the airtags.
AFAIK if you setup a family the notifications go away. What would solve this for couples that aren't quite that committed would be a way to share the location info on an AirTag or at least be able to mark a particular tag as 'known' or 'safe'. I think with either of those but particularly the former all of the stalking concerns kind of go away. If you can also access and see the location for an AirTag in particular if you do need to get away for some reason you can find and dump the offending tag(s) or potentially disable them.
I don't really get why Apple doesn't have an option to do that already. It seems much better for shared objects and people like the Author and it doesn't seem like there are any technical hurdles to providing that.
The notifications do not go away. My wife is on my iCloud family plan and she still gets them constantly. That’s what’s so bizarre about the whole setup.
I was too cheap to buy airtags so I bought a cheap knockoff, the Nutale Findthing. The family sharing actually works very well. They were crazy cheap and have replaceable batteries even. Crazy that a cheap amazon knockoff would have a better experience than Apple.
Given all the edge cases with AirTags (i.e., everything from "dog stalker" to actual stalkers), I get the sense Apple didn't bother to do much adversarial usability testing on these things. They made a thing because it's cool tech, damn everything else, if you don't like it then tough shit.
I get the complete opposite impression - they did more of that than others, compromising the product (in one sense) to accomodate for bad actors, resulting in 'bugs' like this.
I disagree in that I see bugs like this help bad actors. If users are conditioned to accept false alarms from rather common use cases, then that weakens true alarms about actual stalkers. It's an inherent contradiction in the AirTag's anti-stalking requirements: it needs to be a useful alarm and not go off under "normal" proximity relationships, but most stalkers are people close to the victim to begin with.
If I were building a system with such self-defeating requirements, I would take a step back and either roll it out very slowly, or conclude that this is a bad idea completely.
I can't imagine you've actually read into the anti-stalking measures they've implemented because it's pretty damn clear to me that they've thought about adversarial usage. You can absolutely disagree with where they drew the lines between safety and usability, but claiming they didn't think about it past "cool tech" is farcical.
Aside from my partners' AirPods which are bugged up (unique to them specifically, not sure...) I've ignored alerts on all her other tags.
When you receive the tracking alert, tap it and you will have a few options. One of those options is to ignore alerts. When you tap it, it will ask you whether you want to Pause Tracking Alerts for the day or indefinitely. If you tap indefinitely, you'll stop getting alerts for that item.
You can see this referenced on Apple Support [1], but I've done this personally with success. The only devices it doesn't work on are AirPods but it works on my Chipolo wallet card and all my/their AirTags.
Thank you, this is news to me, and apparently something is stubbornly not working properly in my setup. That "indefinite" option, which I've never seen before but you kindly highlight, should fix this case. Time to... debug a coin.
If you are seeing their name (ie "John's AirTag" or "John's iPhone") then it should work. On the AirPods I mentioned that don't work, no name appears which I suspect is why.
No particular reason it should be necessary, it’s just a step that is very easy to do for most of the legitimate use cases and maybe a little harder to do for some of the nefarious use cases. Having that step adds some differential friction, a little behavioral nudge in the direction of ethical AirTag use.
I wouldn't be surprised if half of all cases of an known Airtag following you resulting in an annoying notification whose options were "Trust Airtag" and "Close", people would choose to trust to make the notification go away. Thus enabling stalking.
edit: apparently Apple just disables the airtag in these situations so even the owner can't find it
Speaking of odd "Find My" notifications... Does this happen to anybody else:
When I take a flight, I'll put my backpack with my M1 MBP into the overhead. Like clockwork, when I land, I get a notification that I left the laptop behind at the origin airport. This happens when I don't even touch the laptop inflight, so I could not have disabled BT or wifi. What metric is making Apple think the laptop was left behind?
At a guess: AirTags (and all Apple devices) get their location from nearby iPhones. If nearby passengers turn on Airplane Mode before departure, their phones stick to being located at the departure airport. When they land and turn off Airplane mode, there’s a short window where they broadcast their “current” location (the departure airport) before getting a new GPS signal. That’s what your M1 is picking up when you land.
Whenever I get on the subway, right after I exit the train I get a notification that my MacBook's left behind at the train station I boarded at. That makes sense then
I get notifications that my AirPods are 'left behind' at the gym when I'm driving home, even though... I'm wearing them in the car and the case is in my pocket.
Yet... the one time I actually forgot the case in my gym locker, and got to the car... nothing.
Happens sometimes when I leave the office too; half a mile from the office I get an alert that I've left my AirPods at the office even though - again - I'm wearing them, they're connected to the phone I'm holding which is also with me (and moving) and the case is with me too.
This will become a 'boy who cried wolf' situation soon, if it's not already there.
Just speculating, but if the last Find My ping of the laptop happened at the origin airport, and you're disabling airplane mode on your phone at the destination, the Find My network could well believe your laptop is still at the origin airport until the laptop pings again.
My AirTags keep notifying me that I've left stuff behind and that it was last seen at my home address. Other times they notify me that something in the same room as me has been left behind 3 streets away.
> My AirTags keep notifying me that I've left stuff behind and that it was last seen at my home address.
After the 2nd or 3rd time this happened to me, the notification had an option to turn on like a "okay location" or however they phrased it. This stops that from happening when you lave it at a known/home address. That worked for me. You may have missed it?
> The problem is that the AirTag is registered to my partner’s device. That means that Apple doesn’t recognize my iPhone in connection with the AirTag, seeing the unknown tracker as a threat to my safety.
> The notification provides an option to disable the AirTag, which would be helpful to stop an unwanted third-party from knowing your location. That feature renders the AirTag useless, though, so it would no longer be able to track my dog if she did get out.
I'm confused. That doesn't make it useless? If you disable the notification on HIS phone, his partner would still get notifications on HER phone as it's link to her account? I'm confused what he means. And if it's not even linked to his account to begin with, how is he even able to track it besides the stalking notification? Something doesn't add up to me.
The disable isn't a disable of notifications. It disables the airtag from reporting its status as an anti-stalking measure. So it wouldn't work for anyone.
> The disable isn't a disable of notifications. It disables the airtag from reporting its status as an anti-stalking measure. So it wouldn't work for anyone.
OHHHH okay, that makes more sense. That was the part of the puzzle that was confusing me. Thanks!
It requires the iPhone to go "home" or "work" or any regular repeated location with the airtag following for some period of time.
That's why the dog airtag in the article continues to go off, when they take the dog on a walk, it follows the same path, then ends up back at the shared house. Their case would be solved by using an iCloud family plan, but they don't want to.
So does this mean person A could reverse stalk person B (who has their airtagged Macbook on them, for instance). Use the disable function to disable the airtag on person B's Macbook once IOS pops up a potential stalking notification. And then freely steal the Macbook?
What's the distance and time required to get a stalking notification? I presume close enough that it would be hard to do on the street, but potentially of use in a place like a cafe or an airport screening line?
> So does this mean person A could reverse stalk person B (who has their airtagged Macbook on them, for instance). Use the disable function to disable the airtag on person B's Macbook once IOS pops up a potential stalking notification. And then freely steal the Macbook?
If you've stolen the macbook, you can just... check the bag for airtags and throw them away?
I suppose disabling it first prevents them from potentially tracking the thief for those first 100m to the nearest trash box, but it also has a good chance to alert them.
This is a meta problem with a lot of account-based services. You have someone you share resources with, but not accounts.
So they have a dog, they have an AirTag on the dog, they'd both like to know about the tag, but they can't connect the tag to both accounts without making the accounts too intertwined.
Like how I can't realistically share my Amazon Prime Video account with my wife because it is also my Amazon everything else account. Which is also an issue with Alexa/Echo.
Which is kind of weird. Because this seems like a fairly simple graph. Users and service accounts are nodes and the edges describe which users have access to which service accounts.
So Apple needs a user account for her, a user account for her husband, and then an AirTag service account they can both connect to. But instead, AirTags are a part of her husband's user account.
A bit off topic, but with your Amazon account you can create an "Amazon Household" and share any prime benefits you have with another adult[0]. You both still keep separate accounts wiht separate logins, but you'll both get the benefit of a single Prime account.
Is there any reason to believe that air tags actually enables or encourages otherwise non-stalkers into stalking? I'm not really inclined to believe so. Stalking isn't difficult or technically challenging thing to do. If you can get the chip on them then you can just follow them home and know where they live. Then you can stalk them whenever you want. The airtag maybe makes it more convenient but I don't think convenience is what dissuades non-stalkers. I can see more insecure people tracking their partner but there's already many other ways to do so. I don't really think this is an issue.
I tend to agree; I think Apple’s efforts are mostly PR to avoid low quality media outlets ex. vice, etc. from being able to write AirTag stalking articles
It's a shame you can't share one air tag between multiple people. Like: car keys. Why can't me and my wife have access to the one air tag attached to our family car's keys? Why is this something someone at Apple hadn't thought of?
Did you forgot how everyone claimed what everyone would stalk everyone and hence this shit should be banned? Did you forgot that there were (and probably still are) people who tried to use AirTags to stalk?
Now everyone loves AirTags and A. can add more functionality which were deemed too controversial to include at the start.
but stalker would make his tag shared and the victim would never know!
It doesn't matter what to do this you need physical access to and the way to unlock the phone, it is still a valid way[0] and adding that at the start would clash with "you would know when [a predator's] an unknown AirTag would follow you".
[0] if you can't imagine this happening to you then it doesn't means it couldn't happen.
Depends on your definition of 'effective'. AirTags are tied to Apple Account, not to a specific iPhone, so trusting an AirTag would survive replacing the phone.
They also don’t want you to use it for people, but I found them very helpful in tracking a semi independent elderly in-law, who tends to wander, while on a family vacation.
People tracking is a sensitive topic but it is also useful and legitimate in some cases.
My kids school backpacks all have tags in them because they lose them from time to time.
That's simple. Things like this happen when people act without principles. It is like patching software without taking one step back to understand the underlying issues.
The underlying issue with airtags is supposed to be that people can use them to track other people. Well, rather than try to take a step back and understand what the problem is, Apple decided to just jump in and start figuring out some heuristics that will prevent most of the tracking by sacrificing the least usability.
The result is the product becomes unusable while tracking issue isn't solved either.
IMO tracking issue isn't really Apple's problem. A person that wants to track another person has a huge number of tools at their disposal. Go to any large online shopping platform like amazon or aliexpress and you can find hundreds if not thousands tracking tools. Some much better than airtags (cheaper and not retroactively traceable by Apple). Tracking should be solved legally and by educating people that tracking people without their permission is illegal and they potentially can face criminal charges, regardless of the method they use to track another person.
Imagine car makers reacted to first car accidents by putting pillows around the cars rather than figuring out we need legal moves (road rules, drivers licenses, car safety standards, infrastructure to separate flows of traffic, etc.)
There is a class of items that need to be restricted or nerfed because they are either inherently dangerous or they are of not much use except for committing crime or similar.
But there are also things that are very useful AND at the same time can be used to commit crimes.
I am not even talking about guns. Think kitchen knives. Knives are useful. Yes, we can live without them but having good sharp knives at home enhances our lives and makes it much easier to make good food.
Notice, knife makers do not make kitchen knives so that they are dull. They do not make them so short that you can't reach another persons heart. Instead, we know what the knives are for and we know that what you can't do is murder another person with it. Or murder them in any other way, regardless of the tool used.
> Imagine car makers reacted to first car accidents by putting pillows around the cars rather than figuring out we need legal moves (road rules, drivers licenses, car safety standards, infrastructure to separate flows of traffic, etc.)
I think this analogy may work but not in the way you are saying.
"Pillows" here would be seatbelts, and other actual car safety features. Those have been massively successful in reducing traffic deaths. As bad as it is today, take a look at what car crash fatalities were like in the 60s.
The car companies fought tooth and nail against safety features back in the day, and they didn't become ubiquitous until the government stepped in and required them. Which I'd image is exactly what Apple is trying to get ahead of here.
One can obviously find hundreds of tracking tools on Amazon, but all of them need at least a simcard or equivalent to connect to the internet and share the location back. One has to pay for such a network.
The beauty of AirTags is that it banks on the vast network of apple devices to localize and share the location. For 20$ one time payment to buy AirTag you have permanently free tracking capability and that is definitely Apples headache.
I bought a bunch of these for aging parents. Set them up on their phones, not my own phone, and put them on everything for my folks.
Dad lent me a suitcase, with one of his air tags in the pocket, and a week in I still had not received any warnings.
I thought it was troubling, and I wanted to see how long it would take. So I left it in my back seat for two months… at some point I just forgot it was there.
It provided Dad with my car’s location until the battery died. At no point did I get any warning it was there. I don’t have any sort of joint account or family plan for iPhones.
This made me really nervous about how these worked. I don’t think they do enough to tell people when they are being stalked.
This all happened a year or two ago when the tags first came out. I got rid of all my AirTags after. I don’t think they respect privacy and that makes them unsafe. It makes me happy to hear people saying they got notifications. But I didn’t.
Oh one more thing… I thought I turned off location tracking on my phone and it still knew where the tags that connected to my phone were. Just shows you can’t really ever turn location tracking off.
Airtags are such a mess. My partner has one on his keys. First it would just notify me when he left his phone in the car. No way to permanently dismiss that notification. Hmm. Then it started notifying me all the time whether he has his phone or not. I have a near constant notification that I can only "ignore" for 24 hours. Then it started beeping at random times like in a theatre.
I would gladly agree to a waver so that I stopped getting those stupid notifications. I have no stalking concerns for myself. I'm at home almost all day and that is a secret to no one.
These things are probably going in the trash soon.
That’s odd. My partner and I have two each and never have that experience. Like not at all. I wonder if the batteries are dying or the product is defective?
Yes, it's very clearly a bug. It didn't happen for the first month, then wouldn't stop. Turning on and off location services on his phone fixes it for a bit.
To clarify, your phone tells you he left his phone behind? Or the airtag on the keys tells you that the phone was left behind? Cus the latter sounds awesome for my use case.
There's a product feature that notifies you when you leave your tagged item behind in a place that's not home.
There's another anti-stalking feature that notifies other people if an airtag not paired with their phone is not with the phone it belongs to.
But I'm encountering a bug where I get notified all the time, not just when the paired phone is not present. I know it's a bug because it only happens with one airtag, not the other.
Not sure why the derision is necessary. That's been a constant topic of discussion ever since AirTags released because it's a real concern that has multiple examples and has informed the design of the exact feature that the posted article is about.
Nothing is necessary of course, it’s just to counterbalance the ‘hurr durr Apple bad’ crowd which seamlessly gaslights between ‘AirTags are terrible stalking devices and Apple is responsible for all stalkers and stalking wouldn’t be possible were it not for the terror of the AirTag’ and ‘I don’t care about privacy and why is Apple giving these stupid notifications to counter stalker use of AirTags.’
There’s tons of tracking devices on the market and Apple made choices to make the use of AirTags private and with a certain level of protection against stalker use. It’s known before you purchase them, if you don’t like it, don’t purchase them.
Reminds me of how Google keeps giving me security alerts saying that an unverified developer has access to my account. It highlights a particular Google Apps Script which I've granted access, and strongly encourages me to revoke it, because Google just doesn't know who this person is.
The person is me. I wrote the script. I granted my own account access to my own account. The account owning the script, and the account it has access to, are one and the same Google account. Yet still, constant alerts.
Is it just me or does the author not really understand what a family iCloud is?
It's not merging accounts as they seem to think it is. I don't gain access to my partners data just because we are on a family plan. Really the only "issue" we have is the credit card has to be the same but that's such a small issue to resolve since we have a shared credit card for shared expenses.
I don't really see the issue with going the route of just setting up a family link between your separate accounts if you have a dog together. Honestly that feels like more of a commitment...
Regardless of that for a moment. I think its better that the only way you can "share" a AirTag is through family. I can't really think of a reason that this would be an issue with friends that can't be easily solved by the 24 hour notice (or worst case needing to do that for a few days if you are doing a trip together or something).
Adding the ability to permanently do this otherwise I would worry could either be accidentally enabled or have a strong risk for abuse.
There are loads of comments here from people that don’t realize that you actually can turn off notifications for AirTags that belong to family members you’ve linked your iCloud account to. It’s mentioned in one sentence at the end of the article.
The Apple docks state that if you get a notification about an AirTag assigned to a family member, you have the choice of silencing the notifications indefinitely. Search for ‘family’ here:
I just got one of the expected “stalking” AirTag notifications from my wife’s tag and I can confirm there is NO option to silence it for more than a day. I was one of the rather early AirTag adopters so I’ll go ahead and unpair it and re-add it to her account to see if it behaves differently tomorrow.
But what if you have roommates? Like, what if I live in a 3 bedroom apt. I don't want to have a family plan with my roommates just so I don't get a stalking notification about my friends backpack being left in his bedroom. There are lot's of situations where non-traditional household arrangements make the 24 hour notice will be a real pain. You should be able to add other iCloud accounts to ignore specific tags, or something like that.
I recently bought a few AirTags to track our vehicles—two bicycles, a motorcycle, and a car—and have been fairly disappointed.
The inability to pair to a family plan (or even just multiple individual accounts) makes it useless for anything we share, like the aforementioned car. Ditto for our pets, which would be at least somewhat appealing if that weren’t an issue.
I’ve put them on the vehicles we don’t share, and have been mostly amused when I ride somewhere and walk away from the bike. I suppose it’s good I haven’t really tested it any more than that.
I’d order quite a few more if we could share them, but as it is I’ll even replace the ones we have in use if I happen across an alternative that fits the bill.
I also removed the speakers[0] to make them slightly harder to pinpoint in case of actual theft.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadI'd frame it more like Apple doesn't support the idea of shared resources except in a family account setting. A good example could be roommates living in a house and sharing a dog. A family account makes no sense here and the systems in place don't support sharing an AirTag for them.
The last few months when I go out I get notifications that some airpods are following me. As if someone dropped one in my jacket pocket specifically to follow me around popular bars, as opposed to someone else just going to the same popular local bars.
The first time it was screenshot worthy at best. I'm not the demographic to have predatory tactics done towards me, the likelihood was too small.
The following times its just a nuisance, a conversation starter for a pickup improv skit.
Annoyingly, every AirTag needs to be linked to a single iPhone. Even when everyone belongs to the same Family. AirTags also make annoying sounds every time I grab my keys to go out.
They’re still the best UX on the market, but I wish Apple would improve the UX just a bit more. Maybe their policy folks are worried about news stories about people using AirTags to stalk, which is unfortunately a reasonable fear.
Like the original article I use one in my dog. I know it’s not the purported use, but it has and does work for us.
I tried this but it’s annoying to have to keep feeding it to the dog every other day. We eventually just attached it to her collar.
I think it’s funny how people gripe about AirTags and how they have stalking notifications. This was never an issue with Tile because you couldn’t stalk someone with it if you wanted to. It is only an “issue” with AirTags because they actually work.
Tile is close to useless for tracking lost items [1] except when it's in you own home. Also, I am very annoyed they try to get you into a subscription model for sending you replacement batteries, but also for app features that have no business being locked behind a subscription. Juicero, anyone?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wefUV_bR0Y&t=83s
Maybe because they are in predictable contact with me / predictable routes.
Also the device ID's are already shared internally in some fashion across an iCloud family, as my key tracker doesn't make my wife's phone detect an unknown tag and vice versa.
Ideally you should be able to share beyond the family, IE I let my parents borrow the car, I should be able to "loan" the tag to their account (And I guess choose whether I can see tracking or not.) But if we don't have family plans we obviously won't get to this point any time soon.
Here's what likely happened -- they built the entire system from the ground-up based on a single-user because integrating with iCloud family wasn't part of the MVP.
By the time someone got around to asking about it, they realized that their data model was so thoroughly fucked it would take several weeks of risky migrations in order to add multi-user support.
So stakeholders are punting on it left and right. The things are selling, so is multi-user support really that important? It's an "edge case".
I expect Apple will eventually add “This AirTag has been traveling with you for a while, are you okay with that?” random pop-up notifications, the same way that it randomly confirms “Always Allow” location access and “Time-sensitive” notifications access.
I explain the little chirping sound the one in my glovebox sometimes makes when I start my car to anyone riding with me who doesn’t recognize it, so that they understand what that sound is and to pay attention and be conscious of what it means whenever they hear it.
If occasional chirps are the price I have to pay to inhibit abuse by a global tracking network, then that’s a small annoyance paid for a great good for others.
That being said, if you aren't comfortable with family members knowing your location, then why would you want to share AirTags or an iCloud with them in the first place?
I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that it’s a difficult and tricky use case.
My wife and I have shared an icloud account since before family sharing was an option but i was way too cheap to by multiple copies of a weather app etc.
It works fine short of having to make some new tweaks each time i update/restore/add a device (mostly around setting options in iMessage and Facetime to uncheck my numbers on her device and vice versa on mine.).
I have been increasingly mulling over setting up family sharing. But I am also planning a longer trip to another country and bought some airtags for luggage etc, but also to use for our keys/wallet etc.
These comments have me saying sticking with the current setup would be preferred. Specifically for the airtags.
I don't really get why Apple doesn't have an option to do that already. It seems much better for shared objects and people like the Author and it doesn't seem like there are any technical hurdles to providing that.
If I were building a system with such self-defeating requirements, I would take a step back and either roll it out very slowly, or conclude that this is a bad idea completely.
Aside from my partners' AirPods which are bugged up (unique to them specifically, not sure...) I've ignored alerts on all her other tags.
When you receive the tracking alert, tap it and you will have a few options. One of those options is to ignore alerts. When you tap it, it will ask you whether you want to Pause Tracking Alerts for the day or indefinitely. If you tap indefinitely, you'll stop getting alerts for that item.
You can see this referenced on Apple Support [1], but I've done this personally with success. The only devices it doesn't work on are AirPods but it works on my Chipolo wallet card and all my/their AirTags.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212227
edit: apparently Apple just disables the airtag in these situations so even the owner can't find it
Maybe a longer dismissal though?
When I take a flight, I'll put my backpack with my M1 MBP into the overhead. Like clockwork, when I land, I get a notification that I left the laptop behind at the origin airport. This happens when I don't even touch the laptop inflight, so I could not have disabled BT or wifi. What metric is making Apple think the laptop was left behind?
Yet... the one time I actually forgot the case in my gym locker, and got to the car... nothing.
Happens sometimes when I leave the office too; half a mile from the office I get an alert that I've left my AirPods at the office even though - again - I'm wearing them, they're connected to the phone I'm holding which is also with me (and moving) and the case is with me too.
This will become a 'boy who cried wolf' situation soon, if it's not already there.
People like you make me nervous when I drive.
Does that make you feel safer?
Guess what? It also exhibits the exact same behavior even when I'm a passenger (not driving) in the exact same circumstances.
After the 2nd or 3rd time this happened to me, the notification had an option to turn on like a "okay location" or however they phrased it. This stops that from happening when you lave it at a known/home address. That worked for me. You may have missed it?
> The notification provides an option to disable the AirTag, which would be helpful to stop an unwanted third-party from knowing your location. That feature renders the AirTag useless, though, so it would no longer be able to track my dog if she did get out.
I'm confused. That doesn't make it useless? If you disable the notification on HIS phone, his partner would still get notifications on HER phone as it's link to her account? I'm confused what he means. And if it's not even linked to his account to begin with, how is he even able to track it besides the stalking notification? Something doesn't add up to me.
OHHHH okay, that makes more sense. That was the part of the puzzle that was confusing me. Thanks!
That's why the dog airtag in the article continues to go off, when they take the dog on a walk, it follows the same path, then ends up back at the shared house. Their case would be solved by using an iCloud family plan, but they don't want to.
What's the distance and time required to get a stalking notification? I presume close enough that it would be hard to do on the street, but potentially of use in a place like a cafe or an airport screening line?
If you've stolen the macbook, you can just... check the bag for airtags and throw them away?
I suppose disabling it first prevents them from potentially tracking the thief for those first 100m to the nearest trash box, but it also has a good chance to alert them.
So they have a dog, they have an AirTag on the dog, they'd both like to know about the tag, but they can't connect the tag to both accounts without making the accounts too intertwined.
Like how I can't realistically share my Amazon Prime Video account with my wife because it is also my Amazon everything else account. Which is also an issue with Alexa/Echo.
Which is kind of weird. Because this seems like a fairly simple graph. Users and service accounts are nodes and the edges describe which users have access to which service accounts.
So Apple needs a user account for her, a user account for her husband, and then an AirTag service account they can both connect to. But instead, AirTags are a part of her husband's user account.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html%3FnodeI...
Did you forgot how everyone claimed what everyone would stalk everyone and hence this shit should be banned? Did you forgot that there were (and probably still are) people who tried to use AirTags to stalk?
Now everyone loves AirTags and A. can add more functionality which were deemed too controversial to include at the start.
And this way they annoy a huge number of people.
It doesn't matter what to do this you need physical access to and the way to unlock the phone, it is still a valid way[0] and adding that at the start would clash with "you would know when [a predator's] an unknown AirTag would follow you".
[0] if you can't imagine this happening to you then it doesn't means it couldn't happen.
They probably did, but decided they don't want to be part of divorces :)
People tracking is a sensitive topic but it is also useful and legitimate in some cases.
My kids school backpacks all have tags in them because they lose them from time to time.
The underlying issue with airtags is supposed to be that people can use them to track other people. Well, rather than try to take a step back and understand what the problem is, Apple decided to just jump in and start figuring out some heuristics that will prevent most of the tracking by sacrificing the least usability.
The result is the product becomes unusable while tracking issue isn't solved either.
IMO tracking issue isn't really Apple's problem. A person that wants to track another person has a huge number of tools at their disposal. Go to any large online shopping platform like amazon or aliexpress and you can find hundreds if not thousands tracking tools. Some much better than airtags (cheaper and not retroactively traceable by Apple). Tracking should be solved legally and by educating people that tracking people without their permission is illegal and they potentially can face criminal charges, regardless of the method they use to track another person.
Imagine car makers reacted to first car accidents by putting pillows around the cars rather than figuring out we need legal moves (road rules, drivers licenses, car safety standards, infrastructure to separate flows of traffic, etc.)
There is a class of items that need to be restricted or nerfed because they are either inherently dangerous or they are of not much use except for committing crime or similar.
But there are also things that are very useful AND at the same time can be used to commit crimes.
I am not even talking about guns. Think kitchen knives. Knives are useful. Yes, we can live without them but having good sharp knives at home enhances our lives and makes it much easier to make good food.
Notice, knife makers do not make kitchen knives so that they are dull. They do not make them so short that you can't reach another persons heart. Instead, we know what the knives are for and we know that what you can't do is murder another person with it. Or murder them in any other way, regardless of the tool used.
I think this analogy may work but not in the way you are saying.
"Pillows" here would be seatbelts, and other actual car safety features. Those have been massively successful in reducing traffic deaths. As bad as it is today, take a look at what car crash fatalities were like in the 60s.
The car companies fought tooth and nail against safety features back in the day, and they didn't become ubiquitous until the government stepped in and required them. Which I'd image is exactly what Apple is trying to get ahead of here.
The beauty of AirTags is that it banks on the vast network of apple devices to localize and share the location. For 20$ one time payment to buy AirTag you have permanently free tracking capability and that is definitely Apples headache.
I bought a bunch of these for aging parents. Set them up on their phones, not my own phone, and put them on everything for my folks.
Dad lent me a suitcase, with one of his air tags in the pocket, and a week in I still had not received any warnings.
I thought it was troubling, and I wanted to see how long it would take. So I left it in my back seat for two months… at some point I just forgot it was there.
It provided Dad with my car’s location until the battery died. At no point did I get any warning it was there. I don’t have any sort of joint account or family plan for iPhones.
This made me really nervous about how these worked. I don’t think they do enough to tell people when they are being stalked.
This all happened a year or two ago when the tags first came out. I got rid of all my AirTags after. I don’t think they respect privacy and that makes them unsafe. It makes me happy to hear people saying they got notifications. But I didn’t.
Oh one more thing… I thought I turned off location tracking on my phone and it still knew where the tags that connected to my phone were. Just shows you can’t really ever turn location tracking off.
I don't have a comparison for you, sorry.
I would gladly agree to a waver so that I stopped getting those stupid notifications. I have no stalking concerns for myself. I'm at home almost all day and that is a secret to no one.
These things are probably going in the trash soon.
Which seems weird because you'd think it would definitely trigger the stalker warning.
There's another anti-stalking feature that notifies other people if an airtag not paired with their phone is not with the phone it belongs to.
But I'm encountering a bug where I get notified all the time, not just when the paired phone is not present. I know it's a bug because it only happens with one airtag, not the other.
There’s tons of tracking devices on the market and Apple made choices to make the use of AirTags private and with a certain level of protection against stalker use. It’s known before you purchase them, if you don’t like it, don’t purchase them.
The person is me. I wrote the script. I granted my own account access to my own account. The account owning the script, and the account it has access to, are one and the same Google account. Yet still, constant alerts.
It's not merging accounts as they seem to think it is. I don't gain access to my partners data just because we are on a family plan. Really the only "issue" we have is the credit card has to be the same but that's such a small issue to resolve since we have a shared credit card for shared expenses.
I don't really see the issue with going the route of just setting up a family link between your separate accounts if you have a dog together. Honestly that feels like more of a commitment...
Regardless of that for a moment. I think its better that the only way you can "share" a AirTag is through family. I can't really think of a reason that this would be an issue with friends that can't be easily solved by the 24 hour notice (or worst case needing to do that for a few days if you are doing a trip together or something).
Adding the ability to permanently do this otherwise I would worry could either be accidentally enabled or have a strong risk for abuse.
> We currently have separate accounts, though, and aren’t interested in fully merging our clouds.
It seems like they are making out a Family iCloud to be a much bigger thing than it actually is.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212227
that is a valid use case that you would not setup a family account.
The inability to pair to a family plan (or even just multiple individual accounts) makes it useless for anything we share, like the aforementioned car. Ditto for our pets, which would be at least somewhat appealing if that weren’t an issue.
I’ve put them on the vehicles we don’t share, and have been mostly amused when I ride somewhere and walk away from the bike. I suppose it’s good I haven’t really tested it any more than that.
I’d order quite a few more if we could share them, but as it is I’ll even replace the ones we have in use if I happen across an alternative that fits the bill.
I also removed the speakers[0] to make them slightly harder to pinpoint in case of actual theft.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY-CGheQ53M