Incredibly cool. I am constantly amazed by these efforts and the find my network is a really impressive thing. What’s stopped me from using anything like this ever is the fact that I’m confident that at some point Apple will either embrace this sort of piggybacking on the network and open it up more officially, or it will ban any Apple ID that has ever been associated with such things. Right now they know about this and are not commenting either way.<p>Hope in the future either Apple supports this more officially, or there is a way to use it with no direct link to my Apple ID or account. Until then, I am a spectator in these things.
Story time. My wife and I were vacationing in Portugal last summer. She left her purse in a uber car on the way to the airport. The driver found the purse and dumped it after taking 20$ and some costume jewellery. We tracked it to an abandoned parking lot later that day using an AirTag and we ended up finding it using the Location app. We have AirTags in every bag now and we change the batteries on a schedule.
I hope in the future we can determine the position of beacons to within a cubic metre or less.<p>My wife has ADD and she loses items often. Tiles aren't very loud and are flaky, we don't have an iPhone to use Airtags. I'm too exhausted to try to master the math needed to locate Bluetooth beacons, but I wish I could. I'd love for there to be a "just add 4 small Bluetooth boards" kind of software project, but it doesn't seem to scratch that itch for most open source devs.
Is it just me or this whole find my network capability is a security nightmare? I mean I understand its usefulness but can the [insert authority here] just request apple to tell them where this person is even without cellular coverage? Ive decided to move away from the apple ecosystem either way because of this but it just seems to me to be a surveillance nightmare.