![]() That’s an understandable knee-jerk reaction many people would have after seeing the latest 60-second TV news broadcast or newspaper story on an AirTag “used to follow someone home!” These occurrences shouldn’t be made light of and they are a legitimate problem. In fact, some would probably call for the technology to be outright banned. This is scary, Apple (and Tile) need to do something!Īfter seeing just how scary effective the AirTag (and to an extent, Tile) is, you might think I’m for Apple potentially Nerfing its use further. In a dense area, it’s unlikely you’re ever out of radio range of an iPhone reporting that AirTag’s last location. It relies on your phone to report its location back to you. But she uses an iPhone that the AirTag would use to update its location.Īgain: An AirTag doesn’t have GPS. If she had the Tile app running, the location updates could have been better. The reason? My daughter has a Tile but the app is no longer active because she became frustrated with it just not working. ![]() But it still paled in comparison to the AirTag, which gave me updates on my daughter’s location that let me pinpoint her location by perhaps 25 feet to 50 feet and seemly updated every time I checked. The Tile Pro, again, did far better than I expected in a dense metropolitan area where there are just enough Amazon Sidewalk devices and Tile-enabled phones. To simulate that experience, I placed both the Tile Pro and the AirTag in my daughter’s backpack and watched her movements. The Sports Illustrated model that was tracked said that the culprit planted an AirTag in her jacket to follow her walk home. If you lose your AirTag, the vast Find My network will track it down for you. Find My, for example, reported my AirTag to be located inside the neighboring house, where I know the occupants use iPhones. I’m confident Apple’s AirTag could track you within a house or two of where you end up thanks the massive network of iPhones. In my testing, the Tile Pro was spotted by a neighbor’s house 150-yards away. It works well enough that it feels like a Tile Pro planted on your car could at least get someone within a few blocks of you. Any Echo or Amazon doorbell, security camera, or other Bluetooth-enabled device can also spot the Tile and report its last location. That’s not a lot, but its partnership with Amazon appears to have made a difference. That’s 5,000 people running the app that can spot a missing Tile in a city of 400,000. For example, in a 20 mile radius of my metropolitan home, the app reports roughly 5,000 Tile users. I had expected the porous Tile network to be so ineffective that the Tile Pro would provide no useful information at all. So I was quite surprised to see the Tile Pro work reasonably well as a tracking device. Again, my experience with my Tile Pros have been pretty much hit or miss for finding lost stuff in my home. Actively tracking you at freeways speeds is pointless but if the only thing someone wants to know is where you live, Apple’s AirTag is scary effective.
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