The Accuracy of “Find My” AirPods
Mark Frauenfelder (via Slashdot):
A SWAT team terrorized an innocent St. Louis County family last May, all due to a pair of stolen AirPods and questionable police tactics. Brittany Shamily and her family, including a three-month-old baby, were terrified when heavily armed officers smashed through their front door screaming searching for evidence related to a carjacking that had occurred earlier that day.
The police relied on the “FindMy” app to track the stolen AirPods to Shamily’s home, despite the app’s known inaccuracies. This led to a search warrant being issued, and the SWAT team descended upon the unsuspecting family with overwhelming force.
“FindMy is not that accurate,” says the family’s lawyer, Bevis Schock. “I actually went to my house with my co-counsel and played around with it for an hour. It’s just not that good.”
[…]
After this had gone on for more than half an hour, the AirPods were located — on the street outside the family’s home.
Previously:
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AirPods are dependent on other radio sources such as nearby WiFi. The position as only as good as those sources.
This story should focus entirely on out-of-control police culture in America rather than the accuracy of Apple‘s Find My feature.
Regarding the latter, a while back I had one of my AirPods fall out of my ear while biking in a sudden rain storm. I only realized it was missing half an hour later after arriving at home. While Find My my accuracy wasn’t perfect, it did allow me to find and retrieve my lost AirPod, which was laying on a curb several blocks from my home in a spot that gets very little foot traffic.
