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Privacy respecting alternative to airtags
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this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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A few answers say "they aren't private by design," but don't really go into the "why." There's the obvious "it's an electronic tracking device, duh" reason, but there's also a more nuanced reason:
Airtags are able to be picked up almost anywhere because they connect to the nearest bluetooth-enabled Apple device, and then send location info across the internet to you. Without this functionality (the ability of any and every Apple device to locate it), they wouldn't have any way to send their location back to the owner.
Your best "privacy respecting" alternatives are something that uses meshtastic (and hoping there's enough repeaters near you), something that uses cellular data and GPS (which is about as privacy-respecting as Airtags are), or just a key finder/beeper (which only works within a small radius)
I mean if you look at the white paper they seem pretty private by design. Unless people are seeing stuff I missed.
What white paper?
Thanks for the explanation and advice. I'll get a beeper while I'll get into meshtastic and can get tracking working that way.
I have a itag pros, they're no good for what I wanted but they don't require a subscription and you can see where you last had them. Unfortunately they beep whenever they go out of range and the range isn't far
Hey I do meshtastic and tried it for object detection and used a homemade beeper and an off the shelf tile beeper and I ended up going to airtags instead.
You really will be better served by just using airtags.
If you can be clear about what kind of privacy invasion you’re trying to avoid I can help you figure out how to make that work.
Thanks for the help and advice. What was the issue with your meshtastic experiment? If it's location granularity that's something I might be prepared to deal with.
My privacy expectations are as follows:
Meshtastic didnt work and it wasn’t private.
To locate something by radio signals like meshtastic you need to triangulate it. That means you need to make contact with three transmitters whose position on earth you know then calculate the differences between round trip signals for each one then solve for those differences for a point inside the smallest triangle described by the three transmitters you heard from.
I ran into two problems with this, number one I was never in range of three nodes and Lora is so los dependent that when things were on the ground or other “lost” locations I rarely had even one! Number two was that I didn’t have a beacon with enough memory or processing power to calculate its location with the quickness without a bulky battery, which leads me to the other meshtastic problem:
Meshtastic isn’t private yet! Yes I know I’m being pedantic but the reason I ran into that was the alternative to some doohickey calculating its physical location from pings like a submarine navigator was having the council of nearby nodes do it for the device or at least send along unmolested data to my server that would do so. The former would have required all the nodes to actually do that, which none of them were particularly well equipped to do since several ran on solar and batteries, and the latter didn’t always work and caused me to realize that one node was inspecting packets. Even if I was magically in range of three meshtastic nodes, they all agreed to do the math for my location and then tell me what it was now three public nodes know my location. Suddenly not private in a way that isn’t nebulous or abstract.
Those are solvable problems. They were far, far beyond the scope of my operations.
Your first privacy requirement is one you should abandon in order to succeed at your goal. It precludes the use of any distributed tracking system run by a major tech monopoly. Here’s how: any distributed tracking system needs id and auth. Otherwise anyone could just track all the fobs at once. Once you have id and auth that’s an account. If a major tech monopoly (however that’s defined) has used its major tech monopoly to create a distributed tracking network and you want to use it securely you need to have an account with that major tech monopoly.
It’s a kind of weird pretzel tautology to this use case. Now there might be some major tech monopolies whose account systems can’t be made to meet your requirements for privacy but that’s a separate thing.
The second part is easy and I really recommend you look up about airtags. All you gotta do to make apple stuff e2ee is turn on adp. I think with airtags you can have contact data sent to the finder but that doesn’t happen fob to phone, it happens over the normal phone cell data connection when you authorize it.
They really honest to god tried to figure out some of the insane edge cases with those little fuckers.