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…placing at least seven AirTags on his ex-wife's car to surveil her.
Assuming the tags weren’t checking in with an owning device (iPhone) that car would’ve been beeping up a storm.
I recently lent a set of work keys to a colleague that I forgot had an AirTag on them, in their words: “fucking things beeped all weekend and my phone kept telling me I’m being followed!”
You would need a phone that can detect that stuff in the first place. Maybe she didn't.
Unfortunately, yes. iPhones will check passively and Android phones can get an app but you have to check actively. Hopefully Apple and Google work on a solution for active detection on Android devices.
Is there a way to temporarily disable tracking for circumstances such as this when you loan your keys or something?
I suppose not, or people would disable it and then re-enable it later, unless they require proximity or some other protection against that.
Not that I’m aware of, for the reasons you mentioned. I believe you can now share AirTag locations with family members and that’ll count towards ‘checking in’ and not beep but nothing for sharing with someone outside of family members.
And the woman probably had an iPhone herself and therefore literally gave him her position all the time herself. How nice of her.
Do you mean how nice of Apple? How the hell did you turn this around to be the victim's fault?
A more charitable reading might detect irony in that comment. Their intent might not have been victim-blaming.
It's in poor taste at best. This is a trafficked woman who was being kept on a leash by her trafficker. Whether she had an iPhone is completely irrelevant, as long as she went near people who did the tracking still worked. But if her trafficker was forcing her to carry around an iPhone it's even more sad.
At the very least one has to take a moment and chose their words when commenting on trafficking topics. This is actually one of the happy cases — there are traffickers who implant tags into their victims' bodies in various ways. It's nothing to make light of.
My hot take: hostile reads are in pore taste. It's unique to the internet, and we need less of that.