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Would it use Apple devices that aren't officially signed up to 'tags' too? It's an interesting and maybe worrying concept!
Squaredisk-
Would it use Apple devices that aren't officially signed up to 'tags' too? It's an interesting and maybe worrying concept!
Yes, that's the whole point, every Apple device (once it had been updated to the right version of iOS) would be tracking any tags it can see, if BlueTooth is enabled, etc.
Not really worrying as the only thing it should be reporting the status of are tags that people want to be located, which is the whole point of buying them.
Also as long as the location of tags that aren't marked as lost/stolen is not retained on any device or centrally for anything longer than a small one or two day window to give the owners a chance to mark it as lost/stolen.
Also as long as the ID of the device that was in contact with the tag was not recorded, otherwise that information could be used to track to location of a device (and not the tag).
Greenbank
I know the data considerations for this are going to be small, but they're going to be non-zero, which makes it interesting to see how Apple is going to solve that.
Apple devices can't report every tag it sees all the time as a walk through a busy area could result in hundreds of tags each one of which could chip away at mobile data allowances.
If they only need to report tag IDs that have been marked as stolen/lost then they'll need to download these lists (or updates to them) periodically.
I guess it'll work in a similar way to the Covid location app. The device will keep track of any tags it sees (along with a timestamp and geo-location) and then cross check what it has seen against the list of lost/stolen tags, and report anything it has seen of interest, and discarding anything that wasn't. The downloads of the lost/stolen tags of interest will either be small enough to be done over mobile data (especially if divvied up regionally) and/or augmented by larger downloads when the phone has a wifi connection.
So the chance of a "Find my tag" screen showing a bike being ridden away along a street in real-time as it passes lots of people with Apple devices is unlikely to be a thing.