AirGuard VS openhaystack

That's true for Apple's Tracker Detect app, but any thief could simply use the free and open source AirGuard app, which has more functionality than both Tracker Detect and the AirTag features built into iOS:

https://github.com/seemoo-lab/AirGuard

For example, AirGuard lets the user activate the alarm on any AirTag in range immediately without waiting any period of time. iOS and Tracker Detect only lets the user do this if it determines that the AirTag is following the user, and Tracker Detect adds another 10 minute waiting period for no good reason.

Good time to remind people that AirGuard exists.

Apple doesn't develop the Android OS, it's up to the Android developers to integrate tracking bluetooth low energy devices if they so choose. They could simply integrate the open source project AirGuard, for example.

use something like apple's tracker detect app or airguard (github) to check for other air tags, in case theru was more than one, then follow bigbadbuff's advice.

Yes! https://github.com/seemoo-lab/AirGuard

Not natively. You need to install a specific app, for example:

- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.trac...

- https://github.com/seemoo-lab/AirGuard

The beacons should just use BLE. For Android there's an app that lets you detect beacons tracking you. You can check out the source code to see how they parse the packets https://github.com/seemoo-lab/AirGuard

Looking through the code, it looks like this uses your personal Apple Mail entitlements to pull the locations that get collected by devices on the FindMy network:

https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack/blob/8d214aa5eb68...

I wonder if this were also possible by making an Apple developer account.

How? The README [0] states that a Mac is required.

[0] https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack?tab=readme-ov-fil...

There's some info about Apple's network here:

https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Seems like in theory you could do that, though there are definitely heuristics you could apply to detect those tags, depending on how stealthy they are being.

Also on the servers side Apple could just limit you to a reasonable number of tags.

> For Find My, since they can even locate switched off phones

They can't. Find My is actually truly end-to-end encrypted, at least the version used for when a device is off (I'm not 100% sure how encrypted the self-reported version is for powered on iPhones with data).

Copy-pasting my summary about how Find My works from another comment in this post:

> The master private key used by the system is generated locally and never leaves your Apple devices in a state that anyone except your devices can read it.

> The master key is used to derive an AirTag specific private key which is provisioned to the AirTag and is in turn combined with an increasing counter which generates a third private key that's never stored anywhere. The ID broadcast is the public key of this third key. It changes every 30 minutes or 1 hour, I forget which.

> Other devices see this key, use it to encrypt their own location, and upload that encrypted blob along with the public key to Find My, and in order for Apple to even know which account the encrypted blob they can't decrypt belongs to I have to actually request the location of my AirTag by locally deriving the keypair it used for a certain point in time.

This has all been proven through [1] where they read the whitepaper (which I can't for the life of me find now but know exist because I've read it, or at least parts) and implemented OpenHaystack which proves Apple aren't lying about anything because if they did then OpenHaystack wouldn't work.

1: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack