How can you protect yourself from theft? Keep an eye on your belongings and consider hiding a few AirTags in them as a precaution. If your other security measures fail, they may help you find your things again.
Apple introduced the AirTag tracking device in spring 2021. It is a small metal disc about the size of a large coin. The clever part is that it works with any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch: the devices’ locations are stored in iCloud, and when Apple devices come near one another, they report where they encountered each other.
Its main purpose is to help you find things, and, potentially, pets and children 🙂, using a secure Bluetooth signal. In the Find My app, simply select the AirTag in the Items tab and make it play a sound. AirTag has a built-in speaker, and its coin-cell battery should last at least a year.
On its official website, Apple says that AirTag uses a secure Bluetooth signal and the worldwide Find My network of millions of devices. This lets you see a lost item’s location on a map and use Precision Finding to navigate to it.
So far, I have used AirTag most often to find my wallet and to keep track of my two-year-old son at a children’s entertainment centre. My husband Martin appreciated the AirTag he put in the tool bag under the seat of his e-bike.
In the summer of 2022, we were on a family holiday in Italy when someone stole that bike right from beside our caravan at a guarded campsite near Venice. Neither the campsite management nor the police seemed very eager to find it, so we had no choice but to rely on ourselves and Apple’s network of users. Every day, Martin received a notification about the AirTag’s location on the bike. Luckily, the thief had not found it in the bag or removed it. After four days of exhausting trips to a town about 40 km away, the location settled on a building in a remote complex. It turned out to be a truckers’ hostel, where some of the people staying there supplemented their income with small and large thefts.
Working with the local Carabinieri, we eventually got into a locked room. Under blankets and piles of handbags, electronics, and other stolen goods, we were relieved to find Martin’s dismantled bike, and the AirTag that helped prove it was ours.
And that is how a little AirTag saved our bike and the rest of our holiday.
You might also like
Agentic EngineeringHow to Build an AI Agent You Can Trust: 6 Steps from Prompt to Production Workflow
From the first prompt to a reliable AI agent. 6 steps tested in practice.
AI & QAAI in QA: From ChatGPT Experiments to Agentic Testing
AI is changing how developers work. But what about QA, and where does AI fail?
ProjectsTeam as a Service: When You Need a Team, Not Another IT Department
What is TaaS, when does it make sense, and how is it different from agency…