Air Tags and Sleeping Muses

I don’t seem to sit down to write much anymore. It’s been months since I enjoyed banging away on my keyboard. No loss, I’m sure, but it used to be fun, well, for me at least. My writing group has outgrown me and my blogs are on the verge of being just repetitive old political or religious peeves. I really think my muse has simply wandered off somewhere and found other things to do.

I’m happy I wore a long-sleeve shirt and long pants because it is sixty-eight degrees here in my dentist’s office waiting room. I sit with my laptop deflecting the forced, cold air from overhead vent away from my legs, but it still hits me square on the shoulders and the top of my bald head. There is no respite from the constant, chilly blast from the ceiling. My wife is getting a crown on a molar and I am simply being the conscientious husband, who after sixty-two years, still thinks being here matters. She does it for me. She once slept overnight in a chair in my hospital room as I recovered from an emergency appendectomy. She didn’t have to, and I didn’t really want her to, but it was right thing for her. I have always felt the same way. In fact, the reason I’m writing now is she waited on me in this very same office just a couple of weeks ago when I recently had an epiphany about air-tags. Yes, air tags.

My wife waited for me while I underwent my semi-annual visit just a few weeks before. When I came out, she was standing at the counter talking with the receptionists. They were both laughing and my wife was quite flushed, as if she had been embarrassed. She told me why as I distractedly checked out.

A man walked into the dentist’s office and told the receptionist his cellphone had tracked his daughter’s car keys to their office and asked if she could help find them. My wife, sitting in the waiting room, glanced up, but went back to reading. As the man began pinging for the keys, a beeping response could be heard from somewhere near where she was sitting. In one of the nearby cushions, modern technology was doing exactly what it was designed to do: respond to an electronic stimulus both by sending an electronic SOS, and by meekly beeping. My wife stood up to help look through the cushions, and was absolutely stunned when she realized the beeping came from her purse. She opened her purse to find two sets of car keys, both with the same type of fob and colors. One was hers, the other set of keys belonged to the young woman, who the day before, had placed her keys on a counter top while my wife, standing on the other side of the counter, was finishing paper work while leaving the yoga class she had just taught. My wife simply picked up everything, including the keys, and shoved them in her purse. A day later, a dutiful dad tracked down his daughter’s keys, now in a different town, even a different county. He pushed an icon on the screen of his cell phone, and a little, innocuous piece of plastic said “Here I am!” in a dentist’s office nowhere near where his daughter lost her keys. The technology involved in this seemingly simple feat is astonishing.

When I casually tapped my credit card on a scanner and the two entities communicated with each other, I assumed this logic was similar to other popular wireless services such as Apple’s AirTag or any of the other tracking devices now common with people who have cellphones and worry about the whereabouts of their suitcases and dogs, or even their children, too. Husbands and wives are tracked as well, along with guitars and violins, anything else that might unexpectedly go bye-bye, and I naively thought it was done without batteries or because of cell phone towers. I was wrong on both counts. Welcome to my world of incessant curiosity. Needless, usually, but it does give me something to write about since my muse wont do it. Let me explain.

The locator tag he used is different from the medallions we wore on the Island Princess several years that told my wife where to find me whenever I wandered off exploring the ship. I really liked the pretty, small, round little device that I simply wore on a lanyard. I assumed since it was sealed and did not have any ports or plugs to recharge it, it was a dormant, inactive responder much like the little RFID chips on your credit card. You know, that strange little metallic looking thingy embedded on one side of your credit card. It is a really, really smart little computer chip. While they react to stimulus from a sensor that queries with a low power signal that only travels a few inches, they use that radiated energy to respond without having any of their own battery power. I was only partially right about the medallion, it does have RFID but it does also have a three volt, nickle-sized battery. It is sealed not replaceable and is used to do the heavy work such as the Bluetooth tracker.

We were mailed the small, sealed medallions shortly before we embarked on our Panama canal cruise. Princess cruises waits until the last minute to ship the medallions to it’s passengers so not to needlessly deplete the battery. I found out later from passengers we befriended on the cruise who remained on the world cruise long after we left the ship after transiting the Panama Canal, the battery on the medallion ran out just before the end of the 60 day around-the-world cruise. The battery powers a long-range Bluetooth sensor used for doors and the basic ship tracking which is such a pleasure for passengers, but the NFC, the Near Field Communication feature of the RFID, just like a credit card, is not powered. The medallions reverted to the RFID capabilities that required the familiar tap or touch of credit cards to work. While the battery, a standard CR2025 was designed for up to 30 day usage to deliver the normal functions, such as unlocking your cabin door as you approached, the around-the-world trip was simply longer than the battery life. Once the battery expired, the little piece of technological wonder reverted to the other RFID function that works as a backup as it does not require a battery.

So, basically, the medallion worked like a basic GPS positioning systems using Bluetooth, but the Apple AirTag does not use GPS. Nope! So, you ask, where are you going here? Obviously my muse is giggling with delight as I head into the crux of another dilemma. The Bluetooth chip in an Apple AirTag can transmit no further than 100 feet or so. AirTags only “chat” with other Apple devices, such as iPhones, iMacs, or other iOS devices as it only has the same battery as the Princess medallion. It simply doesn’t have the power to connect to a cellphone tower.

If the apple AirTag doesn’t communicate with cell phone towers, what does it communicate with? Ever heard of Crowd Sharing? Apple calls it Find My Network and it is ingenious. The situation is unique because the unsuspecting cellphones or computers have no indication they are being used as information carriers, they are simply not involved with the process. The AirTag transmits an identification beacon signal out into the world almost constantly. When any other Apple device, it doesn’t matter where, when or who, receives this beacon, it encodes the identifier beacon and sends it upstream to the Mind My Network system where is logged for any query to find it. It is done anonymously without alerting any user that the activity is happening. There are no indicators to any local user how many tags or who they are to anyone being sent upstream to the network. The intercepting Apple device has the power to transmit the information to the cellphone tower that the AirTag simply does not have itself.

The Android systems and apps used by cellphone companies other than Apple use similar technologies to make their trackers work as well, and there are trackers available that talk directly to cell phone towers or even receive GPS signals as well.

My muse is sound asleep. So are you, probably, but I feel better now, My fingers work, at least a couple of them, and my keyboard actually feels looser than when I started. My wife has come out of the dentist’s office with her new, computer printed 3D crown permanently mounted and all she has to do is not floss for a few hours. Modern technology has eliminated the old waiting days for the crown to be built and the fitting appointments that followed. Someday in the future they may even embed an RFID chip in the crown, but I have no idea where they would put the required cellphone.

George