A user has placed an AirTag inside a package they sent to a friend and tracked it successfully as it traveled all across the United Kingdom. This basically means that there was an iPhone nearby to help pin-point the location at every step of the journey and is just one more confirmation about the power of Apple's Find My network.
Apple officially says that an AirTag is meant to help you find your lost items like keys for example, but this latest AirTag journey with the postal service shows that with a bit of technical knowledge, you can also track an item as it moves. Now, don't imagine a movie action scene where the hero tracks a car speeding at 60mph in real time, but still tracking an item's location with AirTags every minute or so is definitely possible.
Back to the UK story, the user, Intego's Kirk McElhearn was able to locate the AirTag first at a local sorting station, and then track it on its way in a delivery truck to a mail center, then a sorting center, and finally at a friend's house. Once the package with the AirTag arrived at its destination, it doesn't seem to have notified the receiver in any way, even after days of the AirTag staying idle at their home:
After the AirTag was delivered, my friend left the envelope on a table in his house. He has an iPhone, so I expected him to be notified of the presence of the AirTag after a while. According to Apple, anyone who is in the presence of an AirTag that has been separated from its owner for three days will get an alert on their iPhone. They are supposed to get an "AirTag Found Moving With You" message. It's possible that this alert only displays when the person is actually moving with the AirTag, but that seems somewhat limiting; imagine that you leave an AirTag in someone's bag at their home, but they don't take the bag with them right away. Should it take another three days for them to get an alert? Apple isn't clear enough about the way to prevent AirTags from being used by stalkers.
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This raises all sorts of questions. Since an AirTag is so tiny and it's easy for someone to slip one in your backpack or purse without you noticing, Apple has built in protections so that people cannot covertly track your location, but it's not certain how actually helpful those protections really are.
The AirTag indicated the friend's location but never alerted the person they might be stalked
Apple says that "if someone else’s AirTag finds its way into your stuff, your iPhone will notice it’s traveling with you and send you an alert. After a while, if you still haven’t found it, the AirTag will start playing a sound to let you know it’s there." It then continues to clarify that "if you happen to be with a friend who has an AirTag, or on a train with a whole bunch of people with AirTag, don’t worry. These alerts are triggered only when an AirTag is separated from its owner."
Notice that Apple says that an AirTag will only notify you if "it's traveling with you", but does not say anything about a case as explained above where an AirTag arrives with a package via the post and stays at your place after that. And the fact that the friend who got the package never heard any signal that would help them identify they are being tracked is worrisome.
You can read the whole story about the journey of the AirTag across the UK and how it successfully reported its location every step of the way at the Mac Security Blog over at Intego.
Victor, a seasoned mobile technology expert, has spent over a decade at PhoneArena, exploring the depths of mobile photography and reviewing hundreds of smartphones across Android and iOS ecosystems. His passion for technology, coupled with his extensive knowledge of smartphone cameras and battery life, has positioned him as a leading voice in the mobile tech industry.
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