Using Apple AirTags in My Car?

My experience after receiving an unsettling message

My daughter often drives my car to work. It sits in her employer’s parking lot for her entire shift. A while ago she got an unsettling message from her coworkers. They said that at some point during her shift, a stranger was taking pictures of the car’s license plate. Though perfectly legal, I can’t think of any non-nefarious reasons someone would do that. My daughter told my wife, who told me.

My first thought is that someone might be stalking her. However, her coworkers insisted that the individual seemed interested in the car, and they didn’t think he was around when my daughter arrived to work. There appeared to be nothing connecting her to the car.

So, my thoughts next turned to the car itself. With the license plate number, anyone can lookup our home address. If they wanted to steal the car, that would be an easy way to find it later. Fortunately, my car is kept locked in our garage when it’s home. There are other possibilities, which I don’t want to go into here, but the thought occurred to me that I need a relatively cheap and easy way to track the car.

I decided to hide an Apple AirTag in the car.

What do Apple AirTags do?

According to the product description on Amazon, the AirTags can do the following, which I’ll expand on below:

Keep track of and find your items…in the Find My app

When an AirTag is attached to an item, it is also registered in the Apple Find My app on any Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

My understanding is that it could be any Apple smart device, but for the purposes of this explanation, I’ll will pretend it’s always an iPhone.

Its location appears as a named pinpoint on the app’s map, allowing you to find it easily.

Play a sound on the built-in speaker to help find your things

In the Find My app, you can select the item that is being tracked by your AirTag. After opening the item’s details, you can then have it play a sound.

As you might imagine, if a thief steals my car, I wouldn’t want it to be too easy. But since this isn’t the primary function of the AirTag, Apple wants them to be easy to locate. I hid mine inside a panel somewhere in the car. Testing this feature while sitting in the front seat, I could hear the AirTag beeping, but it was faint enough that it would take some time to locate it. At once point, I would have sworn its sound was coming from the opposite direction as the tag itself.

Find items further away with the help of hundreds of millions of Apple devices in the Find My network

This is probably the most clever functionality of the AirTag. Whenever it comes within about 30' of an iPhone with location services enabled, the AirTag will report its unique ID to that phone.

At that point, the iPhone will record and anonymously submit its current location and the AirTag’s ID to Apple. The owner of the iPhone will not receive a notification of this happening (with an exception I’ll address below).

Put AirTag into Lost Mode to be automatically notified when it’s detected in the Find My network

Normally, my iPhone will never tell me when it gets a new location of any of my AirTags. It’s very silent about that unless I change some settings. One of those settings will alert me whenever the AirTag is not with me, and is also not found at a list of “safe” locations. Given that my car is often not with me, I decided to leave that turned off in this case.

However, in the event my car does get stolen, I would put the AirTag into Lost Mode, so that it will notify me immediately whenever the AirTag is found.

How far can an Apple Air Tag track?

The beauty of the way the system works is that there is no theoretical limit on how far away the AirTag can be from me. The only limitation is how far it can be from an iPhone. As long as it comes in contact with an iPhone at some point in its travels, that iPhone will report its location to Apple, and thus to me.

The only real drawback would be if the AirTag is taken somewhere very remote with no iPhones around. In that case, it would be very difficult to find. Fortunately these days, such places are increasingly difficult to find.

Can you use AirTag to track someone?

Unfortunately, yes. If you can find a way to hide the AirTag on them or something with them (like their car, perhaps), it is conceivable that you could track that person without their knowledge.

In fact, should someone eventually steal my car, that is exactly what I would be doing.

How do you tell if an AirTag is tracking you?

If you have an iPhone

If you are on an iPhone, and it repeatedly detects the same AirTag not registered to you, you may be warned that an “unknown” AirTag has been following you around. My understanding is that this only happens after some period of time (an hour or two) where the same AirTag seems to be moving with you, and the person to whom the AirTag is registered is not nearby.

I can confirm that something like this definitely occurs. Earlier this year, I was a chaperone with my daughter’s high school marching band. We went to a competition at another high school about 100 miles away.

Around lunch time, one of the other chaperones showed me a warning she got on her iPhone, informing her of an unknown AirTag seemingly traveling with her. We eventually tracked it to a student’s instrument case. This is a perfect use case for an AirTag, and it made sense that at least one student would have one. You don’t want to misplace an expensive trombone.

The student and the chaperone had both been on the bus. While the student was around, the chaperone’s iPhone was silent. However, once we arrived at the competition, the students took their instruments and went to another part of campus to rehearse for their performance. They all left their instrument cases in the cafeteria, where we were.

The student was no longer with her AirTag, but the chaperone was. After a while, the chaperone’s iPhone decided that a time threshold had passed and notified her of the unknown AirTag.

In this case, the message was a false positive, but it did lead to an interesting conversation amongst the chaperones. No one else got the notification, which we assumed was because this particular chaperone was the only one with an iPhone on the bus.

If you have an Android

None of the chaperones present with an Android device got notified, which makes sense. Google and Apple would have to work out some sort of information sharing agreement to make that work natively. However, to address privacy and safety concerns, Apple released a product called Tracker Detect. Judging by its reviews, it appears to be a half-hearted effort at best. Android users might be better off trying a different app called AirGuard.

Note, I haven’t tried either of these yet, as I use an iPhone. However, I plan to have my wife and daughter try these on their Androids and will report back once I have more information.

Does it Work?

So far, I’m pleased with the results. I can pull up the Find My app on my phone and see where my car is (or was last detected). It hasn’t been stolen, which is a plus.

Bottom Line

I still can’t imagine a benign reason for photographing someone else’s license plate. Putting an AirTag in my car is certainly not fool proof. I hope I will never need to locate it, but at $29 it was a pretty cheap short-term option.

I actually bought a 4-pack because it works out to about $24 each. I’m considering putting one of the others in my wife’s car. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the others. Maybe my and wife’s key rings?

Note: The links on this page are affiliate links, and I might receive a commission if you purchase something from them. The link to the Google Play app is not one. Other than that, I am not affiliated with these companies or products.

If you have a good use for AirTags or a better Android app for safety around them, please share them with me in the comments section.

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