I think that's ok though, right?

As long as you do a good job placing/hiding it, the thief can't easily find and remove/disable without the speaker.

How big is your item and how hard is it to search? If you know a bag has an airtag in it, it won't take that long to find.

True, a suitcase could be quickly dispatched but you could hide it very very well on something like a car.

Maybe, but is any old car thief on the street going to hang on to a car they know has an airtag in it? They probably were going to joy ride it for the afternoon, maybe commit some other crime, wreck it, and dump it regardless.

I have an airtag in my car, but I don't think I'm going to get much value out of it other than finding my car when I forget where I'm parked.

If you want to catch a criminal in the act, you usually need to observe surreptitiously or they'll change behavior.

> but is any old car thief on the street going to hang on to a car they know has an airtag in it?

No, and that's mostly the point right? If they get in the car, get an alert they're being tracked, then dump the car, at least you find it faster.

By the point it's stolen, it's probably already too little too late. Not only will it probably be going to some impound lot before I can get to it -- it'll probably be on track to be my insurance company's car at that point. Seeing it on a map might be fun for curiosity's sake at that point, I guess.

If you get a bit creative you can definitely hide it well enough that "removing the air tag" is no longer the weak point in the plan.

I've got a Pelican 1510 that has a suitcase-style pop up handle and wheels on it. It's just screwed on there. I took the screws out, took it off, filed the sides of the air tag down slightly so I could fit it in a little cranny and then held it in place with some black tape so it's hard to see. Even if you use an iPhone to try and find it, it looks like it's hidden in the liner or something. But it takes tools and about 15 minutes to get it out _even if you know exactly where it is_ and how to get to it.

For one of my backpacks it actually came with an "air tag pocket" which is just a spot on an inside seam where there's a small gap you can slide the air tag in and it's held securely. I know it's there and it still takes me a while to find the thing to take it out.

For my other, I pretty much just get by on it having a bazillion little pockets and pouches and lot of random stuff in it. The air tag's nestled in there beside the flashlight that the TSA spent almost a half hour looking for after x-raying my bag repeatedly before finally telling me what they were looking for and me pulling it out for them.

I'm relatively certain I'd recover my bag with the air tag still in it. Whether or not the _valuables_ are still there is a different story.

I have a feeling that thieves aren't going to spend any time fooling around if it isn't obvious, they'll dump the valuables out of the bag, and discard the bag.

Yeah that's kind of what I was alluding to in the last line. Was mostly responding to the idea that "it won't take that long to find".

With a bit of creativity they can be made pretty hard to find. At least hard enough that they're no longer the weak link at all.

The next step would be trying to make it more integral to whatever thing you're trying to track. If you disassemble an air tag and hide it inside your laptop, no thief is gonna pull out some precision screwdrivers and start trying to figure out where the hell it is. They're just going to get rid of it.

... Which I've thought about, but that's a level I don't think is really necessary for my own situation.

Presumably quite often the bag and the airtag are worth more than the contents?!

In my case definitely not.

If I had nothing of value or only antifragile things I'd just throw everything in an old backpack. The reason I own the pelican case is for when I'm flying with $15k of computers, camera gear, etc. If anything I'd see the pelican case as _increasing_ my risk of it being stolen (who puts some clothes and some deodourant and a toothbrush in a $500 hard case?), but massively decreasing my risk of physical damage which is way more likely.

The air tag isn't even really in there for "sophisticated thieves stole my stuff" purposes so much as "airline made me gate check it and now they've lost it" purposes. Though I imagine the air tag and some basic padlocks would definitely help my chances with most unsophisticated thieves.

It's a vehicle and fairly hard to search.

I wonder with customizations like in OP you could bypass this. For example, if the alert comes after 20 minutes of being near an air tag - if the power to the circuit was automatically cut for 1 minute every 15 minutes, would the alert still activate?

I don't think it works like that, anyway. The alert is not generated by the airtag, it is generated by the phone. And the phone knows what is around it because it scans for beacons on a periodic basis.

Right - the phone itself is what is keeping track of the air tag, but if the phone doesn't detect the airtag for some period of time, I assume the anti-stalking timer resets. This is why if you walk past an airtag on the way to the store, and then walk by it again 20 minutes later, you won't get an anti-stalking alert.

Only if a thief has an iPhone or manually installed the Android App.

The latest version of Android shows this now. I had to install nothing on my phone for this(I get a full map showing the tracking behavior)

From a year ago https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/newest-android-feature-aler...

Ah I completely missed that, thanks! Very nice that this is supported everywhere now.

But it doesn't do this right away.I was traveling with a group of people that had AirTags, and I only start getting alerts by day three.

I get them within 30 to 45 minutes, consistently. You won't get them if the people are traveling with you.

You shouldn't get them ever if you are traveling with the owner of the AirTag. The criteria for notification is:

1. the airtag is following you

2. the owner of the airtag does is not near the airtag