…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.
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.
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.