The English speak of “stalking“. It is the fact of “following someone’s trail”: a reprehensible practice, on the border of harassment and espionage, sometimes seasoned with a touch of mistrust or jealousy. Since the arrival of smartphones, the “stalkers” had learned to load spyware, without the knowledge of their victim, on their mobile phone.
Now they have another, even more formidable ally: trackers, which are easy to use, very inexpensive, and precise. Just slip them into a purse or stick them to the bumper of a car to get the location of the person being tracked.
If consumer tracers were launched by Tile, Samsung and then Apple, it is to help us find a lost or possibly stolen object, whether it is a wallet, a backpack or of a bicycle. But this accessory that we imagine very well in the 2022 panoply of a private detective, is now diverted from its primary vocation by another category of users: car thieves and burglars.
These ill-intentioned spirits have seen the windfall, and reports of car thefts and burglaries linked to these tracers have multiplied in recent months, in Canada but also in Texas, Georgia, Colorado and Michigan in particular, to the point that a specific law, supported by the elected Democrat John Galloway, is about to be passed in Pennsylvania. This would be a first in the United States.
Compact (they measure barely 3 to 4 cm on each side), light (about ten grams, battery included), the tracers are round, flat – to be slipped into a wallet or under the bottom of a travel bag – or squares and cost between 25 euros and around sixty euros.
Thanks to Bluetooth Low Energy technology, they last between 1 and 3 years with a single button battery. And they locate themselves thanks to the smartphones that pass nearby. Tile was the first to arrive, followed by Samsung with its Galaxy SmartTag. And then the market exploded with the release of Apple’s AirTag in April 2021.
Concretely, how do car thieves, burglars and other apprentice spies take advantage of these devices? The starting point is the car. A nice car preferably. They spot it in the street or in a parking lot, and manage to hide a tracer under the bodywork or behind a bumper. They will thus follow the vehicle to a less exposed place, where they can seize it more easily.
But the second danger is that the car ends up showing the address of its owner. The burglars then take action, loot the house and seize the beautiful car. And then there are all these women and men, followed, in spite of themselves, by a tracer placed in their belongings, without their knowledge. James Bond used these gadgets before they actually existed.
Fortunately, security exists but it is not universal. If an Apple AirTag that doesn’t belong to you is detected – quote – “travelling with you”, an alert automatically appears on your iPhone, which allows you to search for the tracker near you, report it to the authorities and deactivate it.
If you are on Android, unfortunately, this alert assumes that you have downloaded Tracker Detect, a specific Android app capable of detecting the presence of an AirTag on you. Tile, the precursor, promises to integrate more or less identical security later this year. Apple has also just updated its guide of good advice (only in English) to ensure the protection of users and their personal data on a daily basis, by including advice related to AirTags.
During this time, in New York and in Idaho, the police began to make information of proximity to alert on the diverted use of these trackers. And in Pennsylvania, this law could therefore soon specifically punish the misuse of these small yet brilliant devices.