I used to have a Tile and the AirTag is so much better with updating location just because the sheer number of iPhones.

If I do you the favor of watching your dog, I'm going to be pissed if you're spying on me during the process.

I'm sure they knew about it, so I don't think it's unethical, just sort of ugly.

It's more useful to know when someone is X minutes away when you're being picked up or whatever, so it's certainly not "ugly" to anyone that watches my dog either.

At least here in Germany I would imagine that the only answer to a question like that would be "do you want to resurrect the stasi?".

> It's more useful to know when someone is X minutes away

Usually a quick message is enough for something like this.

This isn't to say I'd allow this with anyone, or that everyone should do this—far from it—but it's a convenient tradeoff in this case, at least, for my friends.

I would guess that my father would have also said "who cares" if his best friend knew where he was at all times. Until he found out that his "best friend" did detailed reports on him to the stasi for Years. You never know with these kind of things.

Giving up your privacy for the tiny convenience of not needing to spend 5 seconds to write a message after you arrived home sounds insane to me.

> If I didn't want them to, I'd just disable the location.

Why is that the logic you apply here? It could easily be applied the other way around: If I want them to know, then I can enable it temporarily.

Doesn't that make much more sense than the opposite?

What would be the point of that?

Speaking as a fellow German, I would never share that info with friends, but using that feature with my SO or future kids, sure. Not to spy on them, but e.g. to know they're safe when I expected them to be home already.

There are much more dangers than just the government even if I chose to use the stasi as an example. I just thought that it makes for a good example where you can know a person for years and still get betrayed by them.

To your edit: Especially using this with kids (probably pressured to do so) is icky. You can claim that you are not spying on them, but you are. Maybe for their safety, but safety is often used to remove rights like this. You still spy on them.

I remember my cousin and I got lost in Disneyland once, because we both somehow forgot where the meeting spot was. We didn’t have phones, and we were, of course, fine—truth be told, Disneyland is probably among the safest places to get lost. But it would have been nice if we’d had a tracker that could just tell Dad where we were.

The negative I see here is that it teaches your child that giving up rights for the promise of more safety (or more likely just because an authority figure says so) is something good and normal.

Also teaching that the concept of constant surveillance is good and normal.

I don't understand why you would like to do this just in case or because "it would have been nice".

- Going on a date

- While out running

- Going to a bar

Plenty of other things too but those come to mind first

It also comes in handy if, for example, she goes to the store and I realized I forgot something and want to see if she's still there so she can pick it up. Or when she wants to know how soon I'll be home so she knows when to start dinner (my bike ride from work is around an hour)

Why do it then? In another comment I shared that even people you consider best friends for years could betray your trust and even if we take that possibility away there is still the question of how secure that data is in their hands.

Are they going to leak it inadvertently? Can someone else gain access to their systems and spy on you through them?

> many younger people don't think it's too too odd

Don't you think that is bad? People are just getting used to loosing their rights for minor "convenience". Not to mention that getting used to constant surveillance isn't great either.

My dog has a "Whistle" GPS tracker on her collar. Friends have no problem with it when they watch her even though they know what it is and that it can track them every time they take the dog out. They even keep it charged.

That is a little bit of a different context to what the comment above claimed.

"Curious, do you find an Airtag on your dog's leash to be effective?"

"It's just to see what they're doing with her"

"If I do you the favor of watching your dog, I'm going to be pissed if you're spying on me during the process."

"but how do you ask a friend if you can track them 24/7 without sounding like a giant creep?"

So it's not clear how a GPS tracker on the dog's collar is different than an air-tag on the leash?

> We're all on each others' Find My Friends, and have no problem knowing who is where. I even have non-blood-related friends on there, as do some of my other family members.

Along with a lot of replies that try to explain how constant surveillance of their friends is fine.

You tracking your dog and incidentally tracking a friend while they are walking said dog is completely different then tracking your friends 24/7 via their iPhone.

It does not make a difference if you track your dog with a GPS tracker or AirTag, but it is fundamentally different than what the comment was about.

I'd find that more invasive if I was worried about tracking. At least with an app in my control, I can turn off tracking when I want to, but if I watch my friend's dog while he's out of town and he sees me walking the dog to his girlfriend's house every night, he's going to ask questions.

Would you really prefer to be tracked by your friend every hour of every day instead of only when you are walking their dog?

I do not believe that.

So I've also been looking for a way to use an airtag unobtrusively. My cat isn't outdoors, but I have a big house and she's very old and likes to hide. I'm afraid someday she'll be sick or worse and I won't be able to find her, so something like this would make me feel a lot better.

Worst case if it falls off the caller is you just go find it (and come up with a better system).

This is probably the one aspect where Tile has been superior (for my use case). I never noticed the bulk of the Tile tracker on my keyring.

I'm keeping an eye out for less bulky attachments online. Everything I've seen so far emulates Apple's bulky keyring design.

[1] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP840?viewlocale=en_US&locale=e...

[2] https://www.thetileapp.com/en-us/store/tiles/mate

https://www.elevationlab.com/products/tagvault

But if you forget your bag on the train, it would start alerting people on the train after a while.