LOS ANGELES — Need to find your lost bag? Trying to locate your neighborhood mail thief? Apple’s AirTag can help you with both.
Released in 2021, the $29 Apple AirTag was created to help users easily locate items through a Bluetooth signal. Some people are even using it to find their stolen property.
In a recent case, a woman in Santa Barbara County who was fed up with her mail being stolen from her post office box decided to bait the thieves and mailed herself a package containing an AirTag.
It worked.
Her mail, including the packaged AirTag, was stolen and she shared the tracking information with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office.
Deputies found the woman’s mail and the mail of more than a dozen other people; the suspected thieves were arrested.
This isn’t the first time the quarter-sized AirTags have been used to find stolen items. Santa Barbara County sheriff’s officials have noticed the trackers being used on commonly stolen items, such as e-bikes, wallets, purses, cars and electric scooters, said Raquel Zick, a spokesperson for the department.
How do AirTags work?
To use an AirTag, it needs to be registered with your Apple ID and paired with an iPhone, iPad or other product that has the “Find My” app. Apple’s iOS 17 operating system allows users to share their AirTag with up to five people.
It works by emitting a Bluetooth signal to a device in the Find My network, that signal goes to iCloud and the location of the tracker is then viewable on the map in the Find My app.
The AirTag itself does not connect to Wi-Fi, however, you do need cellular data or Wi-Fi to open and use the Find My app.
You also can locate an AirTag by using the Find My app to make it play a sound through its built-in speaker.
AirTags rotate their device’s identifying signal every 15 minutes when within range of their owner devices, but reduce the rate to once every 24 hours when out of range.
If the tracker is nearby, you can use “precision finding,” which shows you the exact distance and the direction of your AirTag.
Technically an AirTag can be detected anywhere an Apple device is and a signal can be sent to the iCloud.
The AirTag’s location is encrypted, and it doesn’t house any of the user’s data or information. Only its registered and paired user can see the AirTag location.
Other tracking devices include Tile, Samsung SmartTag, Cube Shadow and Chipolo ONE Spot. Tile, Cube and Chipolo are alternatives that can be used by iPhones and Androids. Cube Shadow, a GPS tracker, requires a subscription to a data plan in order to report location, speed and history via cellular connection.
