If it's not patched yet: I heard you can just power cycle a tag on a timer to evade detection. Add a large battery with a simple timer circuit, remove the beeper and you got yourself an amazing tracking device.

IIRC this came up in the context of tracking shipments with expensive equipment, where it can be in transit for many months. The tags are so power efficient that they work for ages on a large battery, existing GPS solutions just didn't cut it.

I use them out of the box to track expensive equipment in cases and the batteries are good for 6-12 months or so, sometimes longer.

>If it's not patched yet: I heard you can just power cycle a tag on a timer to evade detection

I'm not sure how apple could ever patch it. If you were willing to add a power-cycling microcontroller to your airtag, it wouldn't be that much effort to also add a bank of airtags to cycle through, which would make the apparatus totally indistinguishable from a group of airtags coming in and out of range constantly.

Well, not totally indistinguishable. But hard to write hard coded rules for.

> Ex: Get N donor tags. Have it cycle through the N tags every 24/N hours. Therefore, to apple (/ device tracking), the "stalkee" is never being followed by a single tag for an extended period of time.

If you have to cycle the tags constantly, couldn't you just physically follow the person and spend less effort/money at that point? Or get a GPS tag that doesn't use the AirTag "network" at all, no cycling needed.

(in case elaboration is useful: AirTag relies on GPS location reports from user unaware iOS phones. This enables a stalker to throw a tag into your backpack and follow you. iOS notifies this happening to the user based on tag ID, and presumably GP meant that cycling through fake IDs could bypass triggering that.)

You wouldn't actually physically cycle/replace the tag. As you can see in the README, you can clone real tags, which could be advertised by the device in intervals.

right, I'm actually wondering if one could build an esp32 device that did this itself (i.e. without the need of a flipper zero). Basically something in a similar form factor of an actual air tag.

the anti-stalking features make airtags less useful for anti-theft (or theft discovery), as any aware thief can just disable the tag due to the anti-stalking feature (apple does note that its not designed for anti-theft purposes). But if one can defeat the anti-stalking feature, it makes it much more practical for this.

Personally, I wish Apple allowed one to permanently put their air-tag into law enforcement mode, which would prevent you personally from tracking it (and remove it from stalking alerts), but would provide legally recognized law enforcement the ability to request the tracking record (i.e. same process that they might use for requesting cell phone location data).

What is purpose of the law enforcement feature? Would it be like donating an AirTag to police?

In the case that one is using an airtag for ant-theft purposes and they do not want to alert the thief of the existence of the airtag while maintaining the intention of the alerts (anti-stalking).

ex. You notice your bike is stolen. immediately turn on law enforcement mode. The anti-stalking notifications are disabled but the owner can no longer track the airtag. However, after alerting the police, they could access the location of the device and investigate or recover the bike.

"they could access the location of the device and investigate or recover the bike."

Umm, where do you live that the police give a hoot about a stolen bike? Maybe Japan?

If a bunch of bikes keep ending up in the same place, they can likely sting some organized crime. That actually happens here in the Netherlands.

You can, there's been ESP32 firmware out for years that does this: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack/tree/main/Firmwar...

ah, would be easy to extend it to do what I said, just need to store multiple keys and rotate through them on some schedule.

> law enforcement mode

> provide legally recognized law enforcement the ability to request the tracking record

Where do you live where law enforcement cares about stolen property? 1985 America?

In my experience, their efforts are directly correlated with the tools and information at their disposal. Report stolen property? They’ll take a report. Report the location of stolen property? Much more likely to investigate. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that they are loath to expend a limited amount of resources on anything other than triaged harm reduction. If they can recover stolen property while securing a successful prosecution of the thieves, without exerting a ton of time and effort, they probably will. That said, I have experienced needlessly unhelpful police encounters, so YMMV with pragmatism.

No need to be snarky. There are many places where police does its job.

And in other places you can probably bribe them to do it.

For anything that may be insured, they likely just want to get you your paperwork, so you can file a claim. Why bother getting something you can replace? For other things, they may care if there is an evidence trail to follow.

Why do you need donor tags? The README for the project has instructions for generating tags.