'I Used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS Tracker To Watch My Husband's Every Move'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times, written by journalist Kashmir Hill: In mid-January, my husband and I were having an argument. Our 1-year-old had just tested positive for Covid-19 and was occasionally grunting between breaths. I called urgent care and was told we should take her to the emergency room. But, because I had been up all night with her, I was too exhausted to drive. "I'm worried," I told my husband. "I want you to take her to the hospital." "Doctors always tell us to take the baby to the E.R. whenever we call about anything," he replied, exasperated. (This was true.) "She is fine. She is eating and playing and happy. This is not an emergency." He eventually caved and set out for the hospital a half-hour away. Knowing he was already annoyed by me, I did not want to pepper him with questions about how it was going. Instead, I turned to the location-monitoring devices that I had secretly stashed in our car a week earlier. I put a quarter-sized Apple AirTag in a seat pocket; a flat, credit card-shaped Bluetooth tracker made by Tile in a dashboard pocket; and a hockey-puck-like GPS tracker from a company called LandAirSea in the glove compartment.I realize I sound like the worst wife ever, so let me explain. It was for journalism. [...] I shared the feed from the LandAirSea GPS tracker with the photographer Todd Heisler so he could follow my husband around New York City. When my colleague and I reported on this, experts we spoke with were of two minds about Apple's attempts to prevent nefarious use, with some saying the alerts were inadequate and others praising the company for unearthing a larger problem: widespread surreptitious tracking, usually done with devices that don't notify a person of their presence. I decided to examine both claims by planting three AirTags, three Tiles, and a GPS tracker on my husband and his belongings to see how precisely they revealed his movements and which ones he discovered. [...] Thirty minutes after my husband and youngest departed for the hospital, I opened an app linked to the most precise tracker in my arsenal, the $30 LandAirSea device. To activate it costs extra, because it needs a cellular plan to relay where global positioning satellites have placed it. I chose the cheapest plan, $19.95 monthly, to get location updates every three minutes; the most expensive plan, for updates every three seconds, was $49.95. The app has an "InstaFence" feature that can alert me when the car moves, and a "Playback" option to show where the car has been, so I could see the exact route on windy roads my husband had taken. I saw that he parked at 4:55 p.m., so I wasn't surprised when I got a text from him 12 minutes later reporting that they were in the waiting room. The other trackers in the car -- the $34.99 Tile and $29 AirTag -- didn't work as well in real time out in the sparsely populated area where we live. The AirTag, designed to find keys left behind "at the beach," took an hour or so to reveal that the car was in the hospital parking lot. The Tile, intended to "find misplaced things nearby and far away," never realized it had moved from our garage. That's because these devices rely on Bluetooth technology. Hill went on to say that she hid an AirTag in her husband's backpack, which became her most powerful tracker, "outperforming the GPS device, and allowing me to tell a photographer exactly where he was at all times." "Within two hours of my putting all the trackers in our car, my husband, who has an iPhone, got an alert about the AirTag, after running an errand," adds Hill. "The problem was that he couldn't find it. [...] The one time his iPhone connected to the AirTag in the car, so he could play the noise, it was so hard to tell where it was coming from that he gave up looking for it after five minutes." In response to the surreptitious tracking, Hill's husband said: "For all the bad press the AirTags have gotten, and as flaky as the detection mechanisms were, at least I was consistently getting notifications they were following me. The privacy dangers of the other trackers were way worse."

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