![]() ![]() ![]() The first time I ordered a LandAirSea tracker on Amazon, the device for finding things, incredibly, got lost in the mail. “Keep track of movement in real-time with your very own private eye.” “The ultimate in discreet tracking,” its Amazon page brags, where it is ranked as the best selling GPS tracker. The AirTag and Tile are marketed to find lost things, but LandAirSea describes the purpose of its GPS tracker somewhat differently. Tile said it planned to release a similar app for people worried about unwanted tracking.) (Android owners, meanwhile, have to download a special app to look for AirTags. Forty million Tiles have been sold, the company said last year.Īnother key difference between Tile and AirTag is that if an iPhone detects an unknown AirTag continuously moving with it, the iPhone owner gets a notification, along with a map showing where the tracking started. Its system is similar to Apple’s but far fewer people have the Tile app on their phones than own Apple devices. The Tile tracker was not quite as well-informed. When he got into Manhattan, the AirTag became my most powerful tracker, outperforming the GPS device, and allowing me to tell a photographer exactly where he was at all times. It was a good thing I did, though, because he wound up switching coats that day, and not wearing the one I had originally loaded up with devices. This felt incredibly invasive, and was the moment I felt most conflicted about the experiment. The day before his trip, when I knew he was far from the house, thanks to the car trackers, I sneaked into his office and hid an AirTag, a Tile and the GPS tracker in various pockets of his backpack. To help track down AirTags, Apple enlisted, per its own description, “hundreds of millions of iPhones, iPads and Mac devices all over the world.” That meant the AirTag’s effectiveness skyrocketed the day my husband traveled to New York City, because he was surrounded by people carrying iPhones. Rather than communing with satellites circling the planet, they ping devices within 30 or so feet of them, such as the smartphone held by another person standing in line at the pharmacy. That’s because these devices rely on Bluetooth technology. The Tile, intended to “ find misplaced things nearby and far away,” never realized it had moved from our garage. The AirTag, designed to find keys left behind “ at the beach,” took an hour or so to reveal that the car was in the hospital parking lot. The other trackers in the car - the $34.99 Tile and $29 AirTag - didn’t work as well in real time out in the sparsely populated area where we live. I saw that he parked at 4:55 p.m., so I wasn’t surprised when I got a text from him 12 minutes later reporting that they were in the waiting room. The app has an “InstaFence” feature that can alert me when the car moves, and a “Playback” option to show where the car has been, so I could see the exact route on windy roads my husband had taken. I chose the cheapest plan, $19.95 monthly, to get location updates every three minutes the most expensive plan, for updates every three seconds, was $49.95. To activate it costs extra, because it needs a cellular plan to relay where global positioning satellites have placed it. Thirty minutes after my husband and youngest departed for the hospital, I opened an app linked to the most precise tracker in my arsenal, the $30 LandAirSea device. A little privacy is good for any marriage. When an editor proposed sending a photographer to surreptitiously follow him in person one day - to show visually the movements I was tracking digitally - a small part of me worried I might discover something I didn’t want to know. All these people received warnings on their iPhones, a feature Apple had built into the AirTag system to help prevent unwanted tracking. A Sports Illustrated model, Brooks Nader, said she found one in her coat pocket after visiting a Manhattan bar. They were scared about being stalked or followed by someone wanting to steal their vehicles. Given the company’s history of introducing products - such as the original iPhone - that lead to mass adoption, AirTags could well lead consumers to location track everything all the time, so that nothing is ever lost again, ushering in a surveillance state with the cleanest of aesthetics.īut every new convenience comes with a price: In recent months, people have freaked out after finding AirTags hidden in their bags and on their cars. It was for journalism.Īpple released chic, sleek AirTags early last year as a way to keep track of keys and purses. I realize I sound like the worst wife ever, so let me explain. I put a quarter-sized Apple AirTag in a seat pocket a flat, credit card-shaped Bluetooth tracker made by Tile in a dashboard pocket and a hockey-puck-like GPS tracker from a company called LandAirSea in the glove compartment. Instead, I turned to the location-monitoring devices that I had secretly stashed in our car a week earlier. ![]()
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