In a collaborative effort, Apple and Google have developed an industry-standard detection feature called “Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers” (DULT) for Bluetooth trackers. This standard allows users on iOS and Android devices to be alerted if an unknown Bluetooth tracker is monitoring their location.
I wonder what it will be like on a long flight with this feature: there is an army of unknown Bluetooth items moving with you.
My sister has encountered that issue, when a kid on her school trip had an AirTag in his bag. Everyone’s phones rang
You’d assume they wouldn’t ping other devices when a paired iCloud device is in range and travelling with it.
It has to keep pinging so the iPhone knows it’s still close. Other devices detect that ping; it can’t choose who hears it when it calls out.
That’s the whole thing: they are constantly calling out to any Apple device in the area so that device will report to Apple the tag’s location through the Find My network. It has to call out, otherwise it can’t function as a tracker.
Which is where this new standard comes in. Alerting you to an unrecognized device nearby that is pinging out while you’re moving, because previously there was no shared standard that permitted this across all devices.
But there’s really no good solution to this that isn’t going to be messy and trigger a lot of false positives. It’s a band-aid on a problematic technology that has been normalized, and now they’re trying to back-port privacy into it to save face. All of this discussion should have happened before they started selling anything.
It’s bad enough to sell cheap consumer tracking devices and provide access to a whole mesh network of other people’s phones to use them on, without any consideration for what they would be used for. It’s especially egregious that they made that technology proprietary so Android devices could not easily identify a tracker near them.
That is how it works. Unwanted tracking notifications only trigger if separated from the owner for some time. It’s possible the paired iPhone was drained or had Bluetooth disabled which would cause the tracker to think it’s separated.
I bought airtags for my luggage and keys, but they’re registered to my iPad which is not my EDC device and is large. My main device is an Android. If I don’t take the iPad with me, eventually my Android will pop up with an “unknown tracker following you” message. The message iets you ring it to locate it, but nothing else. The annoyingest thing is that i cannot tell the android phone it is mine and known, and please stop pinging me about it.
Hopefully there’s a special case built in where it doesn’t do that if the original owner is still nearby?
I use AirTags when I’m traveling and would feel bad if mine set off 100 phones all at once.
For airtags that was, at least until recently, the case. You could only detect “lost airtags”.
Which makes sense, since only then they are relevant for stalking etc.
I’ve got an app that does this, it will detect them and send a notification but you can just ignore it
though I am very tempted by the little button that makes the device in question play a sound
Some airlines were trying to ban airtags in flights, probably for this reason.
No, they were trying to ban them (from checked luggage) because they are powered by a “Lithium” battery and airlines confused them with Lithium-Ion batteries. The latter ones are indeed forbidden in checked luggage.
I figured they were trying to ban them so we wouldn’t learn what they actually do with lost luggage.
No, that’s stupid. They don’t get anything from keeping that from you. And the main source of frustration comes from luggage handlers that are usually employed by the airports and not the airlines.
When they don’t give a damn, you won’t get your luggage. Like in this video where they insisted the luggage is still at a different airport. Because that’s what the computer said. And nobody looked for themselves which would’ve easily shown that somebody clearly forgot to do the arrival scan.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
in this video
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No, both types are:
Since most people have no idea how many grams of lithium are in their lithium batteries, airlines just ban them from checked luggage outright.
It clearly says:
This is in general for carry-on and checked luggage. And then there’s the other paragraph about Lithium Ion batteries needing to go into the carry-on.
The solution would probably just be to dismiss the alert with a response like “I am on a plane, bus boat, etc. I’m traveling with strangers and their stuff”. Then it would temporarily remember all the local devices, and then dump that list after a set period of time.
The service already excludes any geographical tracker that is within range of its owner (as determined by whether the owner’s primary device is moving with the tracker).
They could probably use a few other rules, too, like excluding trackers that are moving with more than 10 other people simultaneously, so that some keys left behind on a bus, train, or plane don’t trigger the alert for a bunch of strangers.