AirTag & Co.: Apple and Google want to work together to draw attention to stalking and surveillance

Bluetooth trackers can be very helpful if you lose items. However, they can also be used to monitor or stalk people. A new industry standard should now ensure that suspicious tracker notifications appear regardless of the manufacturer and smartphone.

Cross-platform and manufacturer-independent alerts

Less than two months after AirTag went on sale In June 2021, Apple released an Android app that was designed to protect against stalking by Bluetooth trackers. On the iPhone, the protection function is integrated into iOS. In February 2022, further announcements followed, which were intended to prevent unwanted tracking or at least draw attention to it.

Problem: The measures only applied to AirTags and could only be implemented in conjunction with a newer iPhone without additional tools. But an industry-wide solution is in sight. As Apple announced, a new industry standard has been agreed with Google and other tracker manufacturers such as Samsung, Tile, Eufy Security and Pebblebee.

This standard should provide warnings on Android and iOS if you are being followed by a Bluetooth tracker that does not belong to you. The specifications of the standard are to be tested over the next three months. Apple and Google then want to incorporate it into their software by the end of 2023 and display warnings with new versions of iOS and Android from 2024.

Reactions to the announcement have been mixed. Erica Olsen from The National Network to End Domestic Violence is hopeful: "These new standards will minimise the opportunities for misuse of this technology and reduce the burden on survivors to track down unwanted trackers." For Alexandra Reeve Givens of the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), the new standard is just a first step: "The CDT continues to focus on ways to make these devices more detectable and minimise the likelihood that they will be used to track people. A key element in reducing misuse is a universal solution at operating system level that is able to recognise trackers from different companies on the variety of smartphones that people use on a daily basis."

However, the new standard does nothing to change the fundamental criticism of Apple's decision to bring AirTags onto the market in the knowledge that "unwanted tracking has long been a social problem". Back in February 2022, security researcher Fabian Bräunlein found it amusing that Apple was advertising the first proactive protection system in front of its own product. After all, the new standard should make it more difficult or even impossible to circumvent Apple's first protection measures with a homemade tracker.