I have a friend with an iphone who's apparently had some random devices (airpods, airtags) which are not theirs show up as tracking their device.
Is there a way to forcibly disconnect them without having them in hand?
On a personal note, the entire situation creeps me out and I know how awful tech made by companies named after fruit is.
Solutions only, please.
@RussSharek so whats happening here is not actually that the devices in question are tracking their phone — if you remember during the beginning of the the pandemic when many states implemented anonymized contact tracing airtags works fairly similarly ( https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/20/1012325/do-digital-contact-tracing-apps-work-heres-what-you-need-to-know/ ) with regularly rotating codes that aren’t used for anything else.
Airtags just send these codes out passively 24/7 — thats literally their job — but phones don’t send anything back, the tracking alert isn’t actually a result of any kind of mutual data exchange. However if your notices you’re suddenly getting a bunch of pings from a device it doesn’t recognize, your phone will send you an alert in case, say, someone stuck an airtag inside your car. Usually when I get an alert its because I’ve been spending time with someone who has an airtag on their keys or similar.
@RussSharek the “find my” app will list recent alerts, along with a bit more info about the device than you get in the standard notification so if there’s reason to be concerned that this person might have actually ended up with an unwanted airtag/headphones in their things i would go check there
but yeah apple definitely leans towards ‘better to over notify than under’ when it comes to letting people know about airtags & similar nearby which can be a bit disconcerting