How do AirTags work? It’s a question I first asked myself in college, when my mother tried to put a stop once and for all to my monthly tradition of losing my wallet and canceling my credit card only to find it beneath a discarded piece of laundry or—in the most disappointing incident—folded into a wooden lecture hall seat that I had gone back to and checked after class. She bought me a Tile—a precursor to the AirTag, which I slipped into one of the wallet’s myriad slots (this being, as Jesse Ashlock once called it, a George Costanza wallet.) During the time before the Tile’s battery died, I did not lose my wallet once and so never used it except to redundantly check if it was still in my pocket. When the Tile died and I could not figure out how to charge it or replace the battery or whatever was required, I put it in a drawer of my dorm room desk, forgot all about it, and returned to the business as usual that was leaving my wallet here, there, and everywhere.
People buy AirTags and similar products, whether that be from the aforementioned Tile or Samsung, for quite a few reasons. WIRED has reported on the product’s misappropriation by bad actors for purposes of stalking and violence. More commonly, people like me use one to keep track of an item that lacks trackable capabilities (read: Bluetooth or GPS) of its own—you don’t need one for your iPhone, for example, which has Find My iPhone, but your keys and purse are other stories entirely. With regard to travel, there’s one big place where a tracking device can be of comfort: your checked luggage. Pop it in and you’ll know whether your bag is actually on the plane or not, and where it might have gone in the case of the latter. Sure, you may already have boarded. The cabin door may be shut. But at least you’ll know.
How do AirTags work?
So, how do these newfangled tracking devices actually work? They work at once so well and so poorly, I would argue, that they can be cause for great irritation—take an Uber with somebody, as I did the other day with my dear colleague Megan Spurrell, who has one on their person, and your iPhone will notify you incessantly, almost accusingly, that “AirTag Found Moving With You” along with a warning that the owner can look up its location. Even now, two days later, the notification has not gone away. So how does this little metal disc keep tabs on you in this way and make its little threats? How can Megan look up its location?
I thought the answer would be GPS, but it’s actually Bluetooth in this case that makes an AirTag work. You’ve probably heard of, if not used, the “Find My” network, which enables you to locate a lost phone, set of Airpods (you can track each earpiece and the case separately in case all three components have somehow become estranged), or even friends and family who have opted into sharing their location with you. The AirTag emits a Bluetooth signal that is tracked within the same Apple network, sending a signal to any iPhones or other nearby Apple devices, which in turn send the signal back to your own iPhone. A key word here is “triangulate,” as in, the signal from the AirTag hits nearby phones which contact your personal device. Each AirTag is affiliated with up to five Apple IDs, and you can only see where a certain AirTag is if you are logged into a corresponding account (per Apple’s website, “shared items everyone uses… like an umbrella…can be tracked by friends and family”).
