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Find My

How Find My Works: Devices, People and Items

by Dave Johnson

Find My is a clever interconnected system that emphasizes privacy while also providing often near-continuous location tracking.

Find My lets you discover the current or last known location across three categories:

  • People: If other people have shared their location with you, you can see their current position, derived from Apple devices they carry and how they chose to indicate their presence. You can also share your location with others.

If you share Find My items, they don’t reveal someone’s shared location, only the items’ location or locations; see below.

  • Devices: Apple lets you track Apple-made devices (their term for this category) connected to your iCloud account or, as with Apple/Beats audio hardware, paired with an iPhone or iPad. If you’re in a Family Sharing group and members of the group have shared their location with you, you can also see the locations of their devices.
  • Items: You can deploy low-power, non-networked tracking devices, like the Apple AirTag, on or in your stuff, and find their locations on your devices by relying on a crowdsourced system. You can opt to share the locations of these with up to five other people. Apple refers to this category as items.

Hardware support for Find My services covers a variety of equipment, each of which may have a different set of remote capabilities and limitations. This support affects how your location and that of other people who share their position with you may be viewed, too. The hardware differences are as follows:

  • iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch: You can see the device’s location. If it can connect to the internet, you can also play a sound on it, lock it or mark it lost, or erase it. (An Apple Watch picks up this setting from the iPhone with which it’s paired.) These devices are also relied on to locate you for someone else on a Find My map, or to identify other people’s location shared with you.

U.S. phone carriers also offer phone-tracking services, which can work across a family account and different smartphones and dumb phones. Each comes with a separate fee and various enhancements and limitations. If everyone in your family is using an iPhone, there is no advantage to the carrier’s plan.

  • AirPods and supported Beats devices: When paired with an iPhone or iPad, Find My is automatically enabled for all Apple audio hardware and most Beats devices. If you have Apple or Beats earbuds, check whether the earbuds, charging case, or both are tracked—it varies. For instance, the AirPods 4 (Active Noise Cancellation or ANC) and AirPods Pro 2 and later can track each earbud and the case separately, marking each as lost as well. Audio hardware appears in the Devices tab or in Find Devices apps.
  • AirTag: An AirTag’s location may be tracked via ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless and Bluetooth over inches to hundreds of feet (centimeters to tens of meters) from a nearby paired iPhone or iPad; or from anywhere, whenever it’s away from you and near anyone’s iPhone, iPad, or Mac that has an internet connection and has enabled Find My network participation. An AirTag can’t receive commands via the internet, but it can over Bluetooth. (See how the Find My network tracks a lost AirTag.)
  • Third-party items: Apple allows other companies to embed Find My technology inside their products. These products must be paired with an iPhone or iPad and, just like AirTags, can be found within Bluetooth range of paired devices and broadcast their secret identifier to other people’s iPhones, iPads, or Macs with Find My network enabled.

Some third-party Find My devices have a hybrid mode: they support Find My network features for Bluetooth and crowdsourcing but have their own set of features that works only over Bluetooth. The bike-attached Knog Scout, for instance, has a motion alarm that can be set by hand or via Bluetooth, and delivers an alert within Bluetooth range.

How Find My works out where a device is

Find My’s device-based tracking and personal location sharing relies on an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch sending Apple’s servers a regular update of their location derived from Wi-Fi and cellular data and GPS signals. All devices with Find My support provide details using Wi-Fi; iPhones and cellular iPads and Apple Watches add cellular radios and GPS.

With Find My active on a device with GPS, that device pulls down location information from the global satellite network. If it also has a cellular radio, it can derive location information from nearby cell phone towers. The Find My system on the device regularly sends location updates over a Wi-Fi or cellular network, allowing a fairly precise position to be calculated via trilateration.

You may be more familiar with the term triangulation, which relies on known fixed positions and angle measurements, such as using landmarks. Trilateration uses the intersection of geometric areas, such as the signal-strength radius from cell towers. (A researcher whose work played a key role in developing trilateration for GPS, Gladys West, died at 95 on January 17, 2026.)

All iPhones, iPads, and Macs also scan for nearby Wi-Fi networks and send a snapshot of that information to an online system run by Apple whenever the device has an internet connection.

Apple integrates that with information fed to it by iPhones and iPads with GPS and examines the signal strength of Wi-Fi gateways, allowing it to figure out fairly precisely where each is located. (Gateways broadcast a unique hardware network identifier along with a network name, which can be scanned without connecting to a network.)

Apple caches some information about location on the phone for up to seven days to avoid frequent network access to look up information, or to use Wi-Fi positioning in an area you’ve been in recently, even if you don’t have current internet access.

This is a two-way connection: through the Find My app’s Device tab or a Find Devices app, you can push a sound and message, as well as lock or erase the hardware.

Using Find My also tells your remote devices you’re looking for them, and when they receive that message, they update their position more frequently, typically even when they’re in standby mode. There’s a flaw with this finding process: a lookup requires an active connection.

Which device stands in for you

Use the Me view in the full Find My apps to see how your devices locate you:

  • On an iPhone, iPad, or in macOS 27, tap or click the Me button.
  • In macOS 26 or earlier, click People, click Me, and click the Info button next to your avatar on the map.
  • On an Apple Watch with watchOS 27, tap People and then tap Me. With watchOS 26 or earlier, tap the Me entry in Find People.

Details about how your location is derived appear under My Location. Your current location appears with an address, a map, or a label like Home if you’ve defined it in Find My (see how to see someone’s location). To the right of or below the Sharing From label, you see the location used to derive your location as shared with other people. If it’s literally the current device, it’s shown as This Device, like “This iPhone”. Otherwise, the device name appears.

Find My determines a person’s location by picking one device that the person owns as representing their presence: the person is assumed to be wherever that device is. If you own at least one iPhone, Apple picks your primary iPhone for presence by default. A person’s current location always reflects the device’s updated location.

Apple lets you switch presence among any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch you own; Macs and Apple Watches don’t qualify. You can’t change presence from the current device that’s providing it. Instead, go to the device you want to use. In the Me view, tap Use This Device Name as My Location.

If you own a cellular Apple Watch and the paired phone is set to My Location, Find My switches to the watch as your current location when it’s on your wrist and you’re out of Bluetooth range of your iPhone.

Apple shares people’s locations in Find My as “continuous streaming updates” if they’re on a robust enough connection and have enough battery life, seemingly depending on other variables. You can see the difference when you’re looking at the device’s details: a label with the last updated time will show Now if it’s recent—typically within the last minute—and Live if it’s currently streaming. (See how to read the Find My app’s status labels.)

The three apps, and their limits

You access Find My through three kinds of apps:

  • Full-featured Find My native app: The Find My app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch (watchOS 27) provides access to all categories of items.
  • Find Devices, Find People, and Find Items apps for Apple Watch (watchOS 26 and earlier): Apple previously split up the single Find My app into three smaller apps, one of each category, on an Apple Watch.
  • Find Devices web app: iCloud.com offers a “Find My” app called Find Devices, which locates only devices and audio hardware.

Devices and items appear in Find My apps in the following circumstances:

  • Family Sharing: If you have Family Sharing enabled, you can see the location of the devices of any member who is sharing their location with you. This includes audio hardware. You can view their devices in any Find My app, including the web app. The same is true for anyone in the group with whom you share your location. (On an Apple Watch, you have to tap Show Family Devices.) If they aren’t sharing the location, you still see the device. To take action on their device, such as marking it as lost, you need the other person’s Apple Account password.

Family Sharing doesn’t automatically share a person’s location, even though you can see all their devices.

  • Find My item sharing: You can share or have shared with you any Find My item. This is entirely unrelated to Family Sharing. A Find My item can be shared with up to five other people, and each item can be shared with a different set of people. Shared items appear in the Items view in any Find My native app—but not the web app.

Apple’s central user account, Apple Account, is how you access Find My on devices, indirectly via items, and through the iCloud.com website. When you’re signed in to this account from a device and have Find My enabled, all your other devices, your account at iCloud.com, and people in your Family Sharing group with whom you’ve shared your location have access to the location of that device. Find My items paired with an iPhone or iPad are available from native Find My apps via the same Apple Account connection.

Apple’s two-factor authentication for Apple Account can trip up family members trying to help you recover a lost item. See how to find a lost iPhone, Mac or AirPods for how to prepare.

How far back Find My works

Find My Device has a surprisingly long look-back. It works on iPhones and iPads running iOS 5 or later; for marking as lost, iOS 6 is the minimum; for Activation Lock, iOS 7. Any version of watchOS can use Find My, as it’s relayed via an iPhone. On Macs, OS X 10.7.5 Lion or later is required.

The only significant version-based limitation is that to receive alerts about Google trackers near you or traveling near you, you must have an iPhone or iPad with iOS 17.5/iPadOS 17.5 or later installed.

It took a little while after Google’s introduction of the Google Find Hub in 2024 for third-party manufacturers to ramp up production of compatible trackers. At first, several companies released Find Hub versions alongside existing Apple Find My items. However, over the last year, many companies have gone a step further and developed trackers with components for both networks.

This reduces the SKU (stock-keeping unit) count for makers—it’s cheaper to produce a bunch of one thing and keep it in stock than two things and have to guess at production. As a user, you can buy a multi-pack and not worry about compatibility. During setup, you can activate the device on just one of the two ecosystems. But you can later reset it, then configure it for the other one.

Tags: Find My, iOS, iPadOS, macOS
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How to Play a Sound on a Lost Device or AirTag

by Tyler Stephen

You can tap or click Play Sound when you can’t find a device or item but think it may be nearby, or for a device when you’re trying to alert someone remotely to notice that it’s there—and potentially get in touch with you. This includes everything from iPhones to earbuds to AirTags.

After you tap or click Play Sound, a loud pinging noise will play on a device (if sound is active) or the device will vibrate (if muted) for two minutes. You can also tap to stop it sooner.

With a 1st-generation AirTag, the sound has an ostensibly friendly tone and lasts for about 10 seconds; the 2nd-generation AirTag may seem less so, as Apple measures it as 50% louder. They also raised the pitch one whole tone (from F to G). Other Find My items vary in the sound they produce: the Chipolo ONE Spot says it blares at up to 120 decibels during its sound pattern—the level of a chainsaw or a plane taking off.

An Apple/Google anti-stalking specification (see how Apple and Google detect an unwanted AirTag) now in effect requires devices produce sound of a “minimum 60 Phon peak loudness” at 25 cm (10 inches), a measurement which means 60 dB at 1000 hertz (Hz), a mid-range in human speech, and about 75 dB for higher-pitched tones.

Play Sound communicates differently with devices and items:

  • For an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch, the signal is sent via a local network or the internet.
  • AirTags, Find My items, all AirPods models, and Beats audio devices with Find My support have to be within Bluetooth range to receive the signal from a paired device. (This is true even for Apple and Beats audio devices.)

The 2nd-generation AirTag includes a newer generation of Bluetooth chip, and should be reachable at dozens to hundreds of feet (say, 10 m to 100 m) further than the 1st-generation model.

  • AirPods Pro (2nd generation) can play a sound on their charging case as well as through earbuds.

For audio hardware, you should receive a warning about the potential for hearing damage.

With Apple and Beats earbuds, you can typically pick which earbud should play a sound: either or both.

If your earbuds are in their case or haven’t been “seen” by Find My for some period of time—Apple doesn’t say how long—you won’t see the left/right option.

Apple also alerts people who discover an item traveling with them and gives them an option to play a sound on it; see what an “AirTag Found Moving With You” alert means.

If a device is unlocked, a notification appears that reads “Find My Device Alert”. If an iPhone or iPad is locked, it has to be unlocked to disable the ping or vibration. On a Mac, the dialog can be dismissed at a sign-in screen.

Ping your watch from your phone

On an iPhone, you can add an Apple Watch ping option to Control Center. Swipe to reveal the Control Center, touch and hold on the background of one of the views, tap Add a Control, search for Watch, and add Ping My Watch. Swipe to reveal Control Center and tap the icon to ping. Waking or tapping your iPhone or Watch stops the terrible sound!

Get directions to a person or item

The Maps app offers a quick way to retrieve a path to a person, a device, or an item via Directions. You can tap or click Directions on the sheet in People, Devices, or Items in a native app. You can also use an info pane for a person in Messages, where it appears as a blue-tinted button with a suggested travel method and a time estimate derived from Maps.

Selecting Directions in Find My or tapping the blue directions button in Messages opens the Maps app on your device with the destination being the current location of the person, device, or item. You can then fine-tune things in Maps, such as choose a method of transportation (walking, public transit, driving, etc.)

If someone can’t be reached by car or transit, you just see their location, of course. Maps doesn’t plot boat or air trips.

Work out when someone will arrive

While Directions takes you to someone, you can also figure out how long someone will take to get to you—though it requires a few steps. When certain relatives visit us with their families or when we’re trying to figure out when our kids are due home, my spouse and I use Directions like this:

  1. In Family Sharing, select the person or device associated with them.
  2. Bring up the actions sheet and tap Directions.
  3. In Maps on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, reverse the direction by dragging the hamburger button to the right of the person’s name to the position above the entry labeled My Location.
  4. Select the mode of transportation the person is using.

Now you have the approximate time someone will arrive. While you can use the more direct method, this is a quick method less reliant on the accuracy and notification delivery of Find My and Apple.

Tags: Find My, iOS, iPadOS, macOS
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Why Find My Shows the Wrong Location

by Kevin Hollington

You might encounter one of two situations that provide no location information—or the wrong location—for yourself (or someone you’re allowed to follow).

A router that moved house

Apple relies on a combination of satellite navigation signals, cellular tower communication, and Wi-Fi positioning to estimate the location of a given device. That’s not always the correct location when a Wi-Fi router you’re near has been moved from its previous location.

Apple continuously grabs information about the strength and publicly broadcast information of any Wi-Fi router from all its devices that have internet connectivity and from its Apple Maps capture vehicles as they drive around the world. (Some countries prohibit some or all of this information gathering.)

But there’s a scenario in which a relocated router retains its old location in Apple’s database, because every device near it connects to the router over Wi-Fi.

This happened to a friend’s mother who lives in a rural location. A router belonging to one of her kids was moved to her house and suddenly her iPhone said she was at the router’s old home.

Let’s say the router is in Utah and a person moves to rural Kentucky, far enough away from a road that their Wi-Fi router isn’t picked up in a short enough period by people or vehicles passing by.

Whenever the router’s owner connects to the internet, their cellular equipped devices default to Wi-Fi if they’re within range; this also means they don’t capture GPS or cellular tower information to update the location, which is instead derived from the most powerful Wi-Fi signal nearby.

Apple doesn’t offer any direct way to report a moved router, but there’s a way you can try to push this into their database:

  1. With Wi-Fi enabled on a cellular device, open Apple Maps.
  2. With a blue dot showing your current location in the wrong place, swipe down and tap Report an Issue.
  3. Tap Report Street Issue.
  4. Move the dot to your correct current location. Tap “Something else.”
  5. Type a comment that explains your Wi-Fi router has moved.
    • For extra points, find the BSSID (unique hardware ID) of your router and enter that, too. Hold down the Option key on a Mac while selecting the Wi-Fi menu and the router’s BSSID appears in a list of technical details.
  6. Click Send.

You can also disable Wi-Fi on a cellular device near the router for periods of time, allowing it to upload sufficient new locations about the router that Apple’s Wi-Fi positioning database updates.

No location at all

Sometimes Find My simply breaks: location isn’t provided even with all the right switches flipped. Everything will appear set up correctly on devices, and disabling and re-enabling the service doesn’t fix the problem. The only solution I’ve found is backing up an iPhone or iPad, erasing it, and performing a restore.

Tags: Find My, iOS, iPadOS, macOS
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How to Share an AirTag With Someone Else

by Emily Long

For each Find My item, you can opt to share with up to five other people. Apple expanded this in late 2024 with Share Item Location, a secure way to create an expiring link for a lost item that you can share with “airlines and trusted people.”

The sharing limit of up to five other people matches Family Sharing group limits, which can have six people total, but you don’t have to share with others if you’re in a group.

Accepting a Find My item sharing invitation means you won’t be notified in the future when the item is near you. Conversely, you will always be able to see the item in your Items list.

Apple lets you share an AirTag only with someone who uses a phone number or email address associated with an Apple Account, or a contact in your address book that contains an Apple Account-linked phone number or email address.

Share an AirTag

  1. Go to the Find My app and click or tap the Items button.
  2. Select a Find My item.
  3. On a Mac, click the More button in macOS 27, or the Info button in macOS 26 or earlier.
  4. Click or tap Add Person beneath Share This AirTag/item.
  5. Apple alerts you about the risks and benefits of sharing a Find My item.
  6. Click or tap Continue to proceed, or Not Now or Cancel to exit.
  7. In the Share Item view, you see all your contacts. You can:
    • Click or tap a contact that is shown in blue. That indicates an Apple Account-linked element in the contact. (Gray entries have already been added.)
    • Click or tap the plus button to view the full contacts list and search within it. These entries are not color guided for Apple Account.
    • At the To: prompt, start entering a phone number or email address. You’ll see matching contacts until you pass a point at which there is no match.
  8. Click or tap the blue checkmark button..

The person you selected appears with a Pending label until they accept. You can click or tap their entry to withdraw the invitation. This item now appears under the oddly named Items I Shared label in Find My.

If you tap a gray entry in the contacts list or try to add someone through another means whose email or phone number lacks a link to an Apple Account, Find My displays an alert that the person isn’t eligible for sharing. I’ve also seen a bug in which nothing happens—a brief stutter and no error—but that person is not added.

When someone shares an item with you

If you’ve had an item shared with you, the shared item appears under Items Shared With Me. Find My reveals the same information as the owner sees on their own devices. On the item’s sheet of actions, click or tap the owner’s name to view the contact associated with them. If you want to stop the item being shared with you, click or tap Remove at the bottom of its detailed view and then, after being told the owner can still track it and you’ll get notifications again when it’s near, click or tap Remove to complete the process.

For someone who has accepted, tap or click their name in the item’s sheet. This presents a simple dialog that lets you tap or click View Friend to show them in Find My’s People view if they’ve shared their location with you; or, you can tap or click Remove and confirm removing their permission to see the item. Click Cancel to exit or tap outside the dialog on an iPhone or iPad.

Share contact details instead

If you want to provide more information to someone finding something of yours, you can use Show Contact Info. Also found under Lost AirTag or Lost Item, the Show Contact Info item lets you add either your phone number or an email address. See what someone sees when they find your lost device.

If you cannot share an item

If you want to share an item and can’t—either sharing it to someone or accessing a shared invitation—it may be one of these reasons:

  • Both the sharer and recipient must be running at least iOS 17, iPadOS 17, or macOS 14.
  • You can view shared items, but not initiate sharing, on an Apple Watch.
  • Only people with the 26.2.1 or later releases of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, or watchOS can view shared 2nd-generation AirTags. See AirTag 2 vs AirTag.

Stop sharing an AirTag

If you’re the owner of an AirTag and no longer want to share it, you can stop sharing in Find My.

  1. Go to the Find My app 656662b1-6b5c-469e-9d04-915022f44dae on your iPhone.
  2. Tap Items b44f9563-4315-48bf-8490-64ca27d3e29c, tap the name of the item you’re sharing, then tap the More button.
  3. Tap the name of the person you’re sharing it with.
  4. Tap Stop Sharing, then tap Stop Sharing again.

The person you were sharing with no longer sees the AirTag’s location, but may still get tracking notifications when the AirTag is moving with them.

Tags: Find My, iOS, iPadOS
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How to See Someone’s Location in Find My

by Moses Johnson

The People view lists everyone with whom you share your location, whom you follow, or both. The list reveals basic information, such as their current location (address or name), how far away they are, and the last update received.

With no one selected, the portion of the view with the map plots everyone you follow for whom a current location is known. This view zooms the map to show them all if they are in reasonably close proximity to one another. People are identified with their avatar.

Apple used to zoom the map in tightly, so I could see everyone near me in Seattle. However, in some update I missed, the zoom factor now encompasses my entire region. For me, that means I see my father in Port Townsend, about 56 miles away as the crow drives.

However, if your people aren’t within some reasonable distance of one another—say one of your children is in Europe, and you live as I do in Seattle—you only see the people nearest you. Apple doesn’t define this distance, but it seems to be within a few hundred miles.

You can also tap or click someone’s image or initials in the map view, and Find My zooms in to their surroundings just as if you had tapped or clicked their entry in the People list. In the version 27 releases, tapping or clicking on a zoomed-in, selected person in the map deselects them and zooms back out.

How exact the position is

Find My indicates its confidence about someone’s location by varying the diameter of the area around their profile image and the color—either blue or green. With a translucent blue circle centered on the person, the confidence could be described as high (within a few feet or a meter), medium (within about 100 feet or 30 meters), or low (about several city blocks). When the location is very precise and the person isn’t moving, you may see no blue circle—a pulsating green one appears instead.

If a person can’t be plotted that precisely, the circle of confidence can be quite large, and Find My calls out the lack of exact knowledge.

If someone is off the grid and has updated their location via satellite, you can see their location in Find My for iPhone: it appears as a tiny satellite icon next to their photo, and Satellite Location appears in the text on the sheet of actions. See how to send your location by satellite.

If you’re within about 150 to 200 feet (roughly 50 to 60 meters) of someone else who has shared their location with you and you both have an iPhone 15 series or later model, you can use Precision Finding, which gives precise directions. See how to use Precision Finding — the feature first appeared in AirTags. (This person-to-person finding relies on the UWB chip introduced in that series.)

When you use Precision Finding to locate someone else, they’re notified you’re looking for them and can likewise enable the feature (or start a game of cat and mouse).

Select a person and reveal their sheet for more ways to interact with their location or presence. You can click or tap Contact to view their contact card. You can also add them to Favorites, which sorts them to the top of the list.

Give a place your own name

You might notice an option called Location Label (the version 27 releases), Label Current Location, or Edit Location Name. This lets you assign custom labels to frequent locations—or any location—so that it appears more comprehensible when presented in a list. By default, Apple shows the best label it has, like the closest address or a building, park, or other geographical name.

You can choose to label a location your home, work, school, or gym, or add a custom label to make it more meaningful to you. For a friend I mutually follow, I’ve given his home a nickname rather than its address. These location labels appear in People, Devices, and Items.

Find someone from Messages

In the Messages app on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, if someone has shared their location with you and their current location is known, a broad approximation appears below their profile photo, like the city and state in the United States. You can drill down further to see an inset map and bring up a larger one:

  • On an iPhone or iPad, tap the avatar in a conversation entry.
  • On a Mac, select a conversation entry and click the avatar (Tahoe or later) or the Info button in the upper-right corner (Sequoia and earlier).

Tap or click the inset map to reveal a larger one while remaining in Messages. Tap or click Open in Find My to switch to that app with the selected person. (In Sequoia or earlier, you can’t jump to Find My.)

If someone has remained at a location, the inset map shows the street name, city, and state in the United States; the larger map in Messages shows a more precise address, if available, like 5404 Ravenna Blvd NE, Seattle, WA 98115. (Not a real address!) If they’re in transit, the inset map shows more concise information, while the larger map provides more detail, such as the district or neighborhood they’re in.

In addition to the map, Messages overlays a link to get directions, showing car, transit, or walking time if close enough. A Stop Sharing My Location link appears below the map on the info pane. (See how to play a sound on a lost device or AirTag.)

Tags: Find My, iOS, iPadOS, macOS
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How Apple and Google Detect an Unwanted AirTag

by Moses Johnson

Efforts to find unknown AirTags and other trackers received a big boost with an industry standard released in 2024 by Apple and Google. Called Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers (DULT), the two companies have implemented it in their ecosystems.

A few other companies expressed initial support for this specification, but only Chipolo and Pebblebee have incorporated the required features into aspects of their apps and hardware that aren’t part of the Apple Find My and Google Find Hub requirements. The rest of the industry has fallen down entirely—but lacks effective crowdsourced tracking due to a small installed base.

One of the only significant elements of the standard that wasn’t part of Apple’s existing framework is a requirement that each ecosystem’s operator requires an email address and phone number from a tracker’s registered user, which wasn’t necessarily the case across all current crowdsourced trackers.

When someone discovers or is alerted to a tracker near them, an app can access those details. Both the email address and the phone number are masked. The spec explains the reasoning:

The specification explains the reasoning. In many cases the person being tracked already knows the tracker’s owner. An obfuscated email address or phone number gives a victim “some level of information on the owner”. It also protects owners merely separated from their property.

Makers must maintain a database of serial numbers and associated phone numbers and email addresses under this proposal, and provide the registered details to law enforcement on request—no subpoena or other judicial process required. However, there’s also no process noted for how the email and phone number are validated. We know that Apple associates your Apple Account information with an AirTag and Find My items, and those require validation.

This raises some privacy concerns. On the one hand, we should preserve our digital and real-world privacy as much as possible, and Apple has been a stalwart defender of our rights against companies and governments in that regard.

However, on the other hand, when there’s clear evidence of potential criminality and the likelihood of harm or violence—like someone finding a tracking device they don’t own placed in their stuff—making information available to police with proper credentials to pursue the tracking person seems desirable. The issue in practice will be how well companies mediate providing government access to the tracker registration database.

How the Google stalking alerts differ

When Google announced their Find Hub Bluetooth tracking devices in 2024, they explained that crowdsourced relaying of location would be much more restricted than with Apple’s network:

  • A tracker’s location is relayed only when it’s in what Google calls a high-traffic area, like an airport, café, “busy footpaths,” or public transit. This prevents location tracking in places like homes or on a solo bike ride or drive.
  • If you let Google know your home address via your Google Account (a wasp’s nest of privacy issues, to be sure), any Android device you have won’t relay location information for trackers when you’re in or near your home.
  • A tracker’s owner can’t continuously request the device’s location. Google hasn’t provided details, but says they “rate limit” and “throttle” requests, as most lost items remain in stationary locations.

These are excellent additions to the privacy and safety arsenal that I hope Apple ultimately adopts as well.

What the reports actually showed

An odd report came from the York Regional Police in Ontario, Canada, in December 2021: car thieves were using AirTags to track down and steal cars. The police said they found AirTags used to “mark” expensive vehicles in public locations (and offered a photo of one instance) so that thieves could locate them later in easier-to-steal locations, like a public street or driveway.

Following this report, news media and other police departments issued a flurry of accounts of both car thieves and stalkers using AirTags. Some reports are sketchy; some lead with a strong headline, but then note that it was probably a false positive. In one case, a 17-year-old discovered her mother was tracking her. How prevalent is this, really?

Apple responded to these reports and others on Feb. 10, 2022, with a statement called “An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking.” Along with a host of improvements, nearly all rolled out in 2022, Apple also noted, “Based on our knowledge and on discussions with law enforcement, incidents of AirTag misuse are rare; however, each instance is one too many.” (Apple also updated their unwanted tracking support document.)

For a period, the phenomenon seemed to disappear, in 2023 and 2024. However, I’ve seen a new resurgence of reporting. The scope of the issue is impossible to gauge.

Police suggest the reverse use

Many police and sheriff’s departments suggest turning AirTags around: to help recover cars and be aware of thefts, law-enforcement groups suggest sticking an AirTag in your car. In fact, after a huge surge in thefts of certain Kia and Hyundai models due to a security flaw, the New York City mayor gave out 500 AirTags donated by a nonprofit to residents in heavily affected areas. Police warn, however, not to try to recover your own car; this has led to deaths and injury.

Regardless of how often AirTags are misused, Apple suggests contacting law enforcement if you feel endangered. All Find My items provide a little help here, as you can connect to a webpage associated with the item and see the last four digits of the phone number associated with the device. You may recognize the number, or the police may use it to track down the person who is tracking you.

An AirTag makes it easy: you tap or hold the AirTag near anything with an NFC reader, and it prompts with a webpage link. For other devices, a finder has to go through a multi-step process (see how to identify an AirTag you have found).

Where to get help

There are many organizations beyond law enforcement eager to help people trapped in situations of domestic abuse or child subject to violence and an unsafe environment. For adults in the United States, that includes the National Domestic Violence Hotline; for children or those concerned about their welfare in the United States and Canada, the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline.

For those being stalked, one starting point is Safehope. It’s more likely you will need the help of police or federal authorities. Local police departments have their own paths to navigate, but for online or cyber stalking, it may be better to start with the FBI.

If the person you are worried about may be watching your device, use one they cannot see. Removing a tracker or turning off sharing can be noticed, and advocates warn that it can make a situation worse rather than better, so it is worth talking to someone before you act.

Tags: Find My, iOS, iPadOS
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How to Turn On Find My on iPhone, iPad and Mac

by Emily Long

Find My comes in three flavors:

  • Device-based, two-way short-range and internet: This version is the original and better understood, and can be enabled on devices: an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and, by extension, an Apple Watch paired with an iPhone. The device actively sends its location over the internet whenever the internet is available. Find My Device allows the owner of a device to send remote events, like playing a sound or triggering erasure, to a device. Apple and Beats audio devices near their paired device act like this as well.
  • Find My notification network: The Find My network is a one-way notification system that relays location via other people’s internet-connected devices. It can be enabled on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and is an inherent attribute of “items”: AirTags and third-party Find My products. Audio devices like AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, and several models of Beats earbuds and headphones act like Find My items when away from their paired device. An owner can’t send commands via the Find My network.

The AirTag, some audio devices, and other items can receive a command to play a sound via Bluetooth from a nearby device. This allows either an owner or someone whose device has been relaying Find My network location data to play a sound on an AirTag.

  • Device-based, Bluetooth range: For Apple AirPods, you can track location only when they’re near their paired iPhone or iPad. They use Bluetooth and don’t participate in the broader Find My network, but their current or last-known location appears in the Devices view in Find My (and the Apple Watch Find Devices app in watchOS 26 or earlier). An owner can trigger a sound when they are near these audio devices.

Because devices can connect to either the two-way or notification network, the other way to look at it is this way:

  • Devices can use both networks: An owner of a device can perform a remote action whenever it’s connected to the internet (or its paired device is and is nearby, with audio hardware), but can see its location when it’s picked up via either form of Find My.
  • Items can use only the Find My network: Items can only ever report their location.

Turn on Find My for a device

Local- and internet-based Find My on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac requires an active Apple Account associated with iCloud. You likely already set up Find My when upgrading or setting up your device.

To enable Find My on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, if you haven’t signed in with an Apple Account yet, go to System Settings/Settings > Account Name > iCloud and enter your credentials.

On an iPhone or iPad, tap Settings > Account Name > Find My to view and make changes in settings; these settings also affect any paired Apple Watch. On a Mac, go to System Settings > iCloud > Show All. If Find My isn’t enabled, turn it on. Once Find My is active, you can tap or click the Find My item to access additional settings, like the Find My network or, on an iPhone/iPad, Send Last Location.

Enabled devices are automatically added to your iCloud account’s list of devices. For supported devices, Apple enables Activation Lock.

Turn on the Find My network

Find My network tracking has distinctly different options depending on whether you’re enabling it on devices or using it with items. Here’s the breakdown for those categories.

Apple enables the Find My network on iPhone, iPad, and Mac by default. Any Apple Watch, AirPods (3rd generation), AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation, AirPods Pro or Max, or supported Beats audio device paired with an iPhone is similarly tracked. You can toggle this setting as follows:

  • iPhone (plus Apple Watch)/iPad: Change the Find My network option in Settings > Account Name > Find My > Find My iPhone/iPad.
  • Mac: Go to System Settings > Account Name > iCloud, click Show More Apps, and click Find My Mac.

Disabling the Find My network also removes your device’s participation in finding other people’s lost items.

There’s one hidden requirement that Apple doesn’t document, because it’s implicit; the company has spoken about it publicly. Because finding devices over the Find My network requires the use of encryption secrets stored only on devices, you have to have two devices enabled on the network in order for one to find the other. That way, they exchange the necessary secrets using Apple’s privacy-preserving framework without Apple possessing any of your encryption keys. (This is quite similar to how iCloud Keychain works.)

In other words, if you have a single device that’s lost and it can connect to the internet, you’re using the two-way Find My system. A single lost device that can’t connect to the internet also cannot use the Find My network to find it, because there’s no other trusted device that can query Apple for the secret Find My network details. You can’t use iCloud.com for crowdsourced device location, as iCloud.com doesn’t store the Find My network secrets, much as it doesn’t store iCloud Keychain password entries and other secrets.

This requirement isn’t in place with items, because you can already discover the location of items that aren’t nearby only by using the Find My network from a device.

Powering off no longer hides a phone

When an iPhone series 11 or later model is in the extremely low-power “power reserve mode” or “powered off,” as long as your device has any battery power available (or is plugged in), it will continue to send Bluetooth beacons for location discovery if the Find My network setting is turned on as described above; you can also disable the network temporarily, as described next.

In this power reserve mode, you should be able to use Express Mode for transit system payment even if your iPhone (or Apple Watch) can’t do anything else.

Powering down a device offers up a warning in small type that highlights this change. Tap the warning to get the full details. You can tap Temporarily Turn Off Finding, enter your device passcode, and then power down; on the next power up, Find My is reactivated.

Items are always on

AirTags are designed to work both via short-range networking directly with a paired iPhone or iPad and through the crowdsourced system. When you set up an AirTag, it’s enabled for use on the Find My network, as described in how to set up an AirTag.

Third-party Find My network items have a slightly different pairing process, but remain active at all times, too; see how third-party Find My trackers differ.

Apple and Beats audio devices appear under the Devices view in the Find My or Find Devices app because they report their location via a paired device when in range (which is almost certainly often). When not in range, they rely on the Find My network. AirPods can only be tracked via the paired device, while all the other Apple and Beats hardware can use the Find My network. (I guess Apple didn’t want to confuse audio device owners by classifying these higher-end devices with single-function trackers.)

You can reset a Find My item, remove its battery, or use a special disable sequence to stop it sending out a stream of location data. See how to reset or disable an AirTag.

Tags: Find My, iOS, iPadOS, macOS
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How to Stop Leaving Your Phone and Bags Behind

by Kevin Hollington

Notify When Left Behind helps with absent-mindedness, exhaustion, and theft. Using your presence, whenever you move a certain distance away from a device or item—Apple doesn’t define how far—you receive a notification on that device.

Found on the sheet for any device or item in native Find My apps, it’s enabled by default under Notifications. You can choose to disable it on a per-item basis. Apple also excludes the place you defined as Home or Apple inferred was your Home.

The device on which you would be notified is listed as part of the explanation when you tap or click Notify When Left Behind.

Your Apple Watch doesn’t alert you when something is left behind (and the Find My app explains this); instead, the alert comes only when the item is separated from your primary presence device, typically an iPhone. (See how Find My works.)

Notify When Left Behind helps in a bunch of scenarios I can imagine:

  • Forgetting you placed an iPad in the seat-back pocket on an airplane. (This is certainly a main cause of loss for iPads and Kindles.)
  • Leaving an iPhone, iPad, or Mac in a coffee shop or restaurant.
  • Forgetting your backpack that has an AirTag in its pocket at someone’s house.
  • Checking your luggage at an airport or train station for a trip.
  • Leaving items at a hotel room, hostel, Airbnb, or the like after checking in during a trip, such as in a hotel safe.
  • Not packing your laptop in a bag you’re carrying with you before leaving for school or work—or vice versa!
  • Locking up a bike that you’ve attached a Find My item to at your destination—then forgetting you biked there and taking a bus home. (Folks, if you bike regularly and you haven’t made or almost made this mistake, count yourself lucky.)

Trust a place

When you’re notified, you can tap Don’t Notify Me, and the location where your Find My item or device was left will be added as a location. If you have an Apple Watch, a notification on the watch also lets you tap Trust Location or Dismiss.

You can also suppress this notification in a Find My app on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac by selecting the item or device, which then shows where it was last seen. You can tap or click Don’t Notify Me Here.

When you add a location through this method, the operating system prompts you, “Don’t notify at map description of location?” You can then tap or click “For all Items or Devices,” “For this Item/Device,” or Cancel.

You can also manually add other locations to exclude by tapping or clicking Notify When Left Behind, then New Location. The map interface for location selection is identical to the one for People. You have the additional option when you click Done to add the location to select “For all Items and Devices” or “For this Device.”

You can accumulate a list over time of places that you don’t want to be notified about items being left behind at. For me, this has become an interesting travelogue of all the hotels, homes, and workplaces I’ve been at.

You can clean this list up by removing locations. On an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, tap or click the remove button to a location’s right. The exception is the Home location, which can be removed only on the device that establishes presence. You can view those locations on an Apple Watch, but not remove them.

It is not an anti-theft feature

Because the notification occurs only when the device remains static and you’ve left it behind, it is not an anti-theft feature. Conceivably, we need Apple to add the opposite case, too: Notify When Moves Away. Perhaps this could cause both the device that’s taken and the hardware that notifies to both squeal uncontrollably until reunited?

A bag in a hotel safe

As I was revising this edition, I received a text from a friend. After a trip out of state, he’d realized he’d forgotten to retrieve a small bag in the hotel safe. He didn’t care much about the bag—except that it contained his passport! The bag also contained an AirTag, but he wasn’t alerted that it was left behind for several hours.

He could see the AirTag in what appeared to be the parking lot. A few slightly clueless hotel front-desk people seemed helpless, although one walked out into the parking lot and said the location appeared to be a grate. Maybe a thief had thrown the AirTag down its openings? But that would mean someone had stolen it from the room safe or lost and found after he had checked out.

After a day or so, a more clued-in staffer called back: it was in the lost-and-found safe, which apparently other people hadn’t checked. For $60, the hotel used a third-party service to return the bag. And then he watched as it didn’t move for days—requiring three more calls to the hotel—before it finally landed at the airport near us. And then sat there for a day before UPS put it on a truck.

The related setting: Notify When Found

Device notifications don’t let you see when something comes or goes, but instead provide you useful feedback related to losing something or having it stolen.

Find My enhances its Lost Mode/Mark as Lost option by providing a notification option after you mark a device as lost. This notification can occur when that device is “found”—that is, when it’s back online, however briefly (see what someone sees when they find your lost device).

Notify When Found is disabled by default on the sheet of actions for a device or item in a native Find My app unless it’s been marked as lost. Then you have just the option to turn it on or off. If enabled, a notification appears on your devices in one of two cases: a piece of your equipment detects the missing item; or the device or item reports its location through Find My or the Find My network.

Tags: Find My, iOS, iPadOS, macOS
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How to Track Lost Luggage With an AirTag

by Tyler Stephen

Apple lets you create a link you can share beyond the maximum of five people who can have continuous shared access. You can create a link to track an item that you can share with anyone.

The link expires after seven days, or you can disable it manually. It immediately stops working as soon as you are within Bluetooth range of the AirTag or Find My item, or if someone you shared the link with is close to it. Airlines have also added a way to use this link for baggage traffic, either for normal use or when your baggage is misplaced.

This requires at least iOS 18.2/iPadOS 18.2 or 15.2 Sequoia on your sharing device and the person who wants to view the link.

Create the AirTag luggage link

Share Item Location under Lost AirTag or Item is the pathway to obtain this link. Tap or click that label to start. First, you’re given a disclosure about what someone with the URL will see. If the item is nearby, you can’t obtain this URL and see an alert about it. Otherwise, tap or click Continue.

Find My generates a URL on a screen labeled Item Location Ready to Share. Tap or click the copy button to copy the URL or tap or click Share Link to use an option on the share sheet.

Apple continues to preserve end-to-end Find My item privacy, even when you’re sharing a link. In fine print, Find My notes, “At least one of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac devices needs to be online to provide updated locations.” That’s because the only way to retrieve the crowdsourced location is via one of those devices.

After the link is created, you can return to the same location to copy the URL. If you want to stop sharing, tap or click Stop Sharing Item Location. Disabled links can’t be reused: Apple generates unique links for each shared item every time.

What the other person sees

If the recipient has an iPhone, iPad, or Mac with an operating system recent enough to support Find My item sharing, the link—labeled Find Lost Item in some contexts, such as when sent via Messages—will prompt to open in the Find My app. Tap or click Continue in Find My. In the Find My app, you see an alert that lost items appear only when viewed in this fashion; tap or click Continue. Finally, you see the item tracked.

For people opening the link on any device other than a supported Apple one, they are taken to a webpage that automatically updates when the item’s reported location changes.

Share the link wisely! Anyone in possession of the link can use it to track the item’s current location for as long as the link is valid.

Once an item is found, Apple automatically disables the links and notifies the lost item’s owner.

Give the link to an airline

Share Item Location can also be used in a privacy-protecting way with airlines and baggage-handling services to report a missing or delayed bag. Apple said 50 airlines had signed on to support the feature. The last count, as of February 2026, was that 36 were online, including American, Delta, and United in the United States, along with major airlines worldwide. However, there’s no official list.

Apple says that safeguards will be in place at airlines so that only a limited number of people with authenticated logins can view shared tracking information.

If your bag is delayed on a supported airline:

  1. In a native Find My app, use the process above to generate a shared item link.
  2. Open the airline’s iPhone or iPad app or go to their website. Find the delayed-baggage form.
  3. In the field labeled Find My in some variation, paste the URL.

Because the 2nd-generation AirTag requires version 26.2.1 or later of Apple’s operating systems to use this kind of item tracking, it is possible that some airlines and baggage-handling services still don’t support these newer trackers. Big organizations tend to lag in updating their devices. I haven’t heard any reports, however.

Tags: Find My, iOS, iPadOS
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How to Reset an AirTag Before Giving It Away

by Abigail Shilets

AirTags and other accessories are locked to the phone they’re paired with. Apple calls this Find My Lock instead of Activation Lock, which is available for Apple devices, like iPhones and Macs. (See how Activation Lock protects a lost or stolen device.)

You can remove an AirTag from an Apple Account using the native Find My app but only on an iPhone or iPad linked to your iCloud account. You cannot use a Mac to remove a Find My item pairing; Apple has not explained why.

Go to the Find My app, tap the Items button, tap the AirTag, and at the bottom of the sheet with actions, tap Remove. Apple lets you know this means someone else can use it by pairing it. Apple also alerts you with shared items about others being unable to see it after removal.

If the AirTag is within Bluetooth range of the device you’re using to remove it from your Apple Account, it is automatically reset and ready to be paired with another device. Otherwise, it has to be physically reset after removal. Apple has instructions in a support document, but I found them a little difficult to follow in their formulation.

An AirTag remains connected to its paired device and unusable with another device until or unless it is removed from your Apple Account. Resetting it has no effect on pairing.

I highly recommend avoiding purchasing used AirTags or Find My items, as there’s no way for a seller to provide an assurance that the item has had its Find My Lock removed. At worst, only buy from a source that promises a full refund and free return, including shipping costs, if the item can’t be used.

I’ve sometimes found I have to restart my iPhone to re-pair an AirTag with it after removing it.

Here’s what I hope is a clearer sequence:

Reset your AirTag

  1. Remove the back cover: Holding the glossy white front, push down to twist the metal back panel counter-clockwise. It only needs to move a small distance before the cover pops off.
  2. Remove the battery: Inside, you’ll see its small coin cell battery. Remove the battery, making note of the right side up: the + sign on the battery will always face you.
  3. Press in a sequence: This next step may seem peculiar, because the back cover remains off. Put the battery back in place and then press down lightly. The AirTag makes a faint bleep. Repeat this four times: remove the battery so it makes no contact, put it back in, press it lightly, and wait for a sound. The fifth time you do this, the sound will be slightly different. That means the reset operation completed successfully.
  4. Reattach back cover: Now you can look at the cover to see the extended tabs and align those with the hole in the top. Press in and then rotate the cover clockwise against its top until it’s firmly in place.

The small size of the AirTag, its cover, and the battery within are all choking hazards for small children or pets. If you have either or have visitors with them, keep track of loose AirTags or parts.

Now you can pair with another iPhone or iPad.

Stop an AirTag transmitting

Removing an AirTag from an account stops it from relaying location data. However, if you want the device to stop sending any signal, remove the cover and the battery.

In a pinch, you can disable an AirTag’s or third-party item’s capability to transmit its signal by wrapping it in aluminum foil or putting it in a bag designed to block electromagnetic fields (a so-called Faraday cage). These items emit fairly weak Bluetooth signals, so the foil approach will, uh, foil attempts to track you if you can’t figure out how to remove the battery or you want to leave the device intact to give to law enforcement.

You can find advice all over the internet about how to disable the sound-producing part of an AirTag. I won’t link to any such advice, and I recommend you avoid it in nearly all cases. Why? Because the intent isn’t, as often stated on these webpages, how to keep an AirTag from bothering you. Rather, it’s clearly advice on producing a more effective electronic stalker. (Apple also may have made it harder to remove the sound-producing component in the 2nd-generation AirTag, but the company declines to discuss that.)

You might have a perfectly good reason to dampen the sound! But in some countries (or even certain cities, states, or regions within a country), unless an AirTag is continuously within your control, disabling the intended audio alert could run afoul of privacy and anti-stalking laws and get you into real trouble. (For when this sound occurs, see what an “AirTag Found Moving With You” alert means.)

Tags: Find My, iOS, iPadOS
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