this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
118 points (98.4% liked)
Public Freakout
2491 readers
1 users here now
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm confused how airtags work. I thought they had to be near your apple cell phone. Like bluetooth?
How do they work if they're not near your iphone? Do they have their own cell service/sim card/battery?
They have to be near any iPhone, which will then tell apple where the airtag (which is using Bluetooth) is. It has a CR2032 button cell battery. More recent iPhones can use ultra wideband to more accurately track the airtag position.
Does it only have to be phones (and specifically iPhones) or can it triangulate from wifi, like a ton of other tracking things do? Even if you don't connect to the wifi, the polling for available Wi-Fi connections can still be used to triangulate position.
All the tracker does (to my knowledge) is sending out a Bluetooth signal every Bluetooth-capable device that has ~~been backdoored~~ the appropriate software running and Bluetooth enabled, which is at least all IPhones, as well as many Android smartphones, will pick up. Those devices will calculate the rough distance based on the delay, and then send the rough location to the Apple servers. The Airtag itself does not calculate anything.
Reminds me a bit about how the German covid app worked. Obviously not for location tracking, but to track whether you got in contact with someone who's potentially infected.
My understanding is that most modern iPhones, iPads, and Mac laptops will respond to Air Tags and forward their pings to Apple.