February 9, 2025

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Repossessions & Air Tags – A How To

How Air Tags Track

Since AirTags only register proximity to their owner, they can only be used to learn about you if they travel with you. If someone is trying to monitor your home, office, or classroom, an AirTag will not reveal any information. Because the AirTag must be in your clothes, wallet, or purse, something else you’re carrying, or a vehicle you use exclusively or at least frequently, this reduces the “surface area” of unwanted surveillance.

Even if you travel frequently by public transportation or through urban and suburban areas, other people’s devices will still be able to pick up and relay your AirTag’s location information. That could be something as innocuous as pulling over to a rest area on a highway and finding that someone 50 feet away is using an iPhone, or it could even be driving on a highway in close proximity to other people who have iPhones or iPads connected to a cellular network.

The range of Bluetooth LE is surprising long. I discovered that the AirTag I temporarily installed in my car, which was parked 50 feet from the house and two flights of stairs away from our ground floor, still provided regular updates about its location via my own devices and those of neighbors who were walking or driving by.

How To Know You Are Being Tracked

Apple sends out alerts to let people know that an AirTag that isn’t connected to their iCloud account is nearby. After a certain amount of time has passed or while you are moving and the AirTag is moving with you, these alerts occur.

If an unidentified AirTag is tracking you, you will see the following alert: AirTag found while you were moving. You will be prompted by Apple to open the Find My iPhone app in order to explore the various options for deactivating the tracking and locating the AirTag, which are discussed below. Moreover, you might also see an alert for any other Bluetooth trackers or AirPods that are moving along with you.

Apple offers the option to pause tracking notifications because it recognizes that it could be an innocent case of borrowing an AirTag-equipped item from someone else.

Follow these steps to make sure you get an alert like this:

An iPhone or iPad running iOS/iPadOS 14.5 or later is required.

Open the app called Find My.
Click the My tab.
Customize Tracking Notifications by tapping it.
Make certain that the Allow Notifications slider is green (it ought to be green by default).
You can see how long this AirTag has been with you via the alert. You can also see a map of the places the AirTag has been tracked while you have it, which might help you figure out where you got it.

Find The AirTag

Fortunately, Apple makes finding the AirTag that is tracking you simple. If an AirTag is following a warning from Apple, follow these instructions.

Using the Items That Can Track Me option in the Items tab, you can manually search for AirTags nearby using Apple’s Find My App.

The Tracker Detect app can also be used to look for unknown AirTags that are traveling with you if you have an Android phone. It requires manual operation and is significantly less robust than Apple’s Find My app.

1. Emit A Sound From The AirTag

You may find that the tracking AirTag will play a sound once if it has been separated from its owner for a time and then moves.

This happens after what Apple calls an “extended period of time” away from its paired iPhone or iPad (the company has disclosed elsewhere that this is three days). After this period, an AirTag makes a beep whenever it’s moved. If you hear an unexpected beep from something you’re carrying or within your vehicle, then it’s time to engage in the hunt for an AirTag.

The audio alert winds up being less useful than one might hope. If a stalker or other person engaged in surveillance can come within range of the AirTag at least every three days, and they know you don’t have an iPhone or iPad that’s running 14.5 or later, they can reset that counter. The beep that’s made isn’t ongoing or particularly loud, and it can be muffled without blocking the Bluetooth signal substantially.

If you haven’t heard a beep, or want to hear it again, you can force the AirTag to play a sound.

If you have received an alert about an AirTag that is travelling with you and want it to make a sound follow these steps:

  1. Tap Apple’s Alert.
  2. Tap Continue.
  3. Tap Play Sound.

You will have the option to play the sound again.

You may find that there is no option to play a sound, in that case the item may no longer be near you or it may be back in range of its owner,.

Another reason why you may not be able to find the AirTag is that it may have changed it’s identifier (which happens regularly). The Bluetooth ID produced by an AirTag, and by all Apple devices that participate in Find My crowdsourcing, changes on a regular basis to avoid becoming a reverse tracking item: if it were persistent, then someone could track your devices based on the “anonymous” Bluetooth ID. That means that your iPhone or iPad has to notice an AirTag moving with it over a relatively short period of time.

Another possibility is that the AirTag speaker has been disabled. After reports of people disabling AirTag speakers, Apple announced that it would adding a notification along with the sound on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch it is moving with. Apple also says it will adjust the tone sequence that plays when a user has an unknown AirTag traveling with them to make an unknown AirTag easier to find. In a 2022 firmware update version 1.0.301, Apple tweaked the unwanted tracking sound to “more easily locate an unknown AirTag.”

If you own the AirTag it is easy to locate it using the Find My app on an iPhone or iPad to play an audible sound on the AirTag. As part of macOS 13.1, this feature also came to the Find My app on Macs.

2. Use Precision Finding to find the AirTag

As well as the option to play a sound the alert will also give you the option to use Precision Finding, if that is available on your device. Your iPhone would need to support Ultra Wideband via the U1 chip to precisely locate an AirTag, which includes iPhone 11 and later.

If Apple’s Alert gives you the option for directions tap Go and you should see directional arrows pointing you in the right direction and a guide to the distance between you and the device. This should help you locate it.

3. Search for the AirTag

If you didn’t manage to get it to make a sound and Precision Finding wasn’t the answer for you you will need to look for the AirTag.

The first step is to get familiar with what it looks like. If you haven’t seen an AirTag before, consult Apple’s site. They have a rounded white top and a silver base, are somewhat larger than an American quarter or a dollar/pound/single unit coin in many countries, and about three to four times thicker.

As we mentioned earlier, the AirTag has to be moving with you for Apple to have sent the alert, so look inside things that you have with you when you move around:

  • Check pockets: In clothing, not just pockets but also check inside the lining or anywhere it could have been sewn in.
  • Check bags: Look inside purses, luggage, messenger bags, and other items, unzip and also feel for an AirTag that’s been placed or sewn in.
  • Check belongings: Someone could have posted you an item with an AirTag in it.
  • Examine your car: A car may have a number of locations that are unreachable or hard to check. Because an AirTag has as long as a year’s worth of power, someone might wrap it in cotton (to stifle the beep it may make; see below), slit a fabric seam, slip it in, and sew it back up. Parking your car away from homes and businesses and using a Bluetooth scanner can help you pinpoint if one is in your car.

Even if someone doesn’t have access to your home, work, school, or vehicle, and you don’t receive mail at the address at which you live—you might use a P.O. box or another person’s address—someone could ship you an item with an AirTag in it, and when you take that home, they could have your location. If you’re in that specific situation, you may need to examine all packages received elsewhere before bringing them home.

4. Find the AirTag using a Bluetooth scanner

Because AirTag regularly emits Bluetooth signals that Apple devices can pick up, you can use a simple Bluetooth tracker for iOS or iPadOS to scan the area around you and see if an AirTag is nearby. While these tracking apps can’t identify AirTag as such—AirTag changes its Bluetooth ID regularly to avoid being trackable themselves—the apps give you the lay of the landscape. That includes the names of Bluetooth devices that do label themselves in their broadcasts.

BLE Scanner is a limited but free app that provides a list of Bluetooth devices your iPhone or iPad can detect, and offers a mapping feature that roughly sorts them by signal strength into distance away. This is particularly useful if you’re checking out whether a car has a hidden AirTag; less so inside when there may be dozens of your own and neighbors’ devices close enough to register. Regular Bluetooth devices typically identify themselves generically (like my “HP OfficeJet Pro 9010 series” printer) or specifically, as with the sharing name of your Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, FitBit trackers, and so on.

Bluetooth BLE Device Finder (free to download, but $4.99 to unlock needed features) has the advantage of letting you drill down into Bluetooth technical details, which may give additional clues about which devices are legitimate and not.

It may be worthwhile to look further manually if you are able to eliminate all known Bluetooth devices, including by powering down equipment that you are unsure of, and if what is left has no associated name.

How To Stop An AirTag Tracking Capabilities

1. Opt out of the Find My network

While you can’t stop other iPhone, iPad and Mac users from relaying the location of the AirTag, you can at least opt yourself out of the Find My network, though this removes your ability to track your own lost or stolen iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, or an AirTag through this extended network. Earlier versions of iOS and macOS don’t include support for the Find My network.

  • In iOS 13 or iPadOS 14 or later go to Settings > Account name > Find My > Find My iPhone/iPad, and disable Find My network.
  • In macOS 10.15 Catalina or later, go to the Apple ID preference pane, select the iCloud link at left, click the Options button to the right of the Find My Mac item, and uncheck Offline Finding or Find My network (the text varies by macOS version).

2. Get the AirTag’s serial number and associated phone number

If you find an AirTag, you can safely determine more information about it without disclosing to the person who planted it that you’ve done so. The AirTag includes NFC, useful both for pairing the device initially and for letting any smartphone or tablet with an NFC reader pull up a URL from the device. That includes Android phones and other hardware, as it uses an industry standard for NFC encoding. On following the URL, you’re taken to a page that contains the AirTag’s serial number. That page can also show a phone number set by the owner if they marked it lost. The owner isn’t notified in any fashion about the page being loaded, and Apple preserves the owner’s privacy by providing no direct linkage at all.

However, if you want to file a civil lawsuit, obtain a restraining order, or get in touch with law enforcement, the serial number may be of assistance in the event of unwanted tracking. Anyone actively tracking you is also creating a trail of information that is stored on their phone, across the cellular network, and in other places because AirTag tracking requires device pairing, an iCloud account, and an iPhone or iPad that is logged into the account.

3. Disable the AirTag

Once you’ve found the AirTag and obtained the information you want from it, you don’t need a hammer or rock to disable it. Unlike most of Apple’s hardware, the AirTag has a removable battery.

  • Use pressure to rotate the AirTag’s metal underside counter-clockwise (from upper right to upper left).
  • Remove that plate.
  • Then remove the battery.

 

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