I USED APPLE AIRTAG TO TRACK MY WIFE AND KIDS: HERE'S WHAT I LEARNED

CREEPY? YES. BUT I DON'T THINK APPLE NEEDS TO NERF ITS TRACKERS.

- GORDON UNG

An Apple Air Tag was used to stalk a Sports Illustrated model (fave.co/3qy2DMN). Thieves are placing AirTags on cars (fave.co/36MOxlm) to track them home, where they can later be stolen-or you could be tracked yourself (fave.co/357ph70). If you're like me, you may have been freaked out by those headlines recently pushed your way. But since a lot of headlines can be overblown, I decided to experiment with an AirTag to see if they are justified-by tracking my wife and kids.

Full disclosure: I'm an Android user and I've used Tile devices for some time. When the headlines started to accumulate recently, I heard Apple fans throw out whataboutisms (fave.co/3wulUCu), saying, “Tile does it too! And Samsung!"

I dismissed Tile as being much of a threat since in my experience Tile didn't work more often than it did. How can a technology that can't find my misplaced portable SSD (fave.co/3n5NIMC) inside my home be used to track someone 20 miles away? Still, I decided to include a Tile Pro (fave.co/3LfM4Nd) (a 2020 model with a new battery) and a shiny new Air Tag (fave.co/37NWHgC) in my testing. I did this with my family's knowledge, and I also followed them via a phone-based GPS tracking app to compare that with what I was seeing in the Tile and Apple Find My app.

Before we go too far, you need to know how the Air Tag and Tile Pro work. Both are very simple devices that emit a Bluetooth beacon every few minutes via radio frequencies. That beacon reports the last location of the phone, tablet, or IoT device that it pinged.