Translated from the original Spanish article. Read in Spanish
This eleven-gram disc has no GPS… and yet it can find your keys on the other side of the world. How? With a trick: it uses strangers' phones.
What's inside
No GPS, no Wi-Fi, no cellular chip. Just Bluetooth, a coin battery and a tiny speaker. The battery lasts about a year.
The trick: a whisper
It constantly sends out a signal, like a whisper. Any iPhone that passes nearby, within about thirty meters, hears it.
That iPhone notes where it is, encrypts that location and uploads it to Apple's cloud. All in the background: the owner of that phone never notices. And only your phone holds the key to decrypt where your things are.
Apple has more than 2.5 billion active devices: that's why there's almost always one nearby.
On top of that, the signal changes its identity roughly every fifteen minutes, so nobody can follow it.
When you're already close
When you're a few meters away, another chip, using ultra-wideband, shows you the distance and direction with an arrow on the screen.
What if someone uses it to spy on you?
That's the big concern. That's why your iPhone warns you if someone else's tracker is traveling with you, and the tracker can also play a sound so you can find it.
This story is also a video
We tell it in a short video on our channel (in Spanish). Subscribe: there's a new story every week.
Watch the video on YouTubeWould you use it to keep track of your things… or does being tracked scare you?
Tell us in the comments on the video.
Sources (in Spanish)
- Funcionamiento de la red «Encontrar» y del AirTag: Apple (soporte técnico y documentación de seguridad de la red Encontrar).
- Características, pila y avisos contra el rastreo no deseado: Wikipedia, AirTag.
- Dispositivos activos de Apple (más de 2500 millones): Apple, resultados financieros de 2026.
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