this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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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.
How far is "close"? Unless these people left their phone in their car, it eould have to be more than 30 feet like bluetooth, right?
10-30 meters from airtag to the random apple device, pending environment conditions.