Unwanted tracker alerts: the Apple and Google standard

How it worksPublished 11 August 20265 min read

A phone face up on a passenger car seat beside a jacket, screen glowing in low evening light inside the vehicle

An unwanted tracker alert is your phone telling you that a Bluetooth tag which is not yours has been travelling with you for a while. It is the single most important safety feature in this category of product, it now works across both major phone platforms rather than one, and it is worth understanding properly whether you own a tag or have simply received the notification and want to know what it means.

What Apple and Google agreed, and when

Bluetooth finding tags created an obvious misuse risk the moment they existed: a cheap object that reports its position through a stranger's phone is a good way to find your keys and an equally good way to follow a person. Apple built countermeasures into its own network early, but they only warned iPhone owners. Somebody carrying an Android handset got no warning at all, which left an enormous gap.

That gap closed on 13 May 2024, when Apple and Google jointly announced cross-platform support for unwanted tracking alerts, built on an industry specification the two companies wrote together called Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers — DULT for short. Apple shipped the capability in iOS 17.5. Google shipped it for Android 6.0 and later. Apple's announcement framed its own position this way:

AirTag and third-party Find My network accessories were designed from the beginning with industry-first privacy and safety protections.

The specification is not a closed private arrangement. The two companies took the work to the Internet Engineering Task Force, where a working group of the same name continues to develop it in the open alongside other manufacturers.

What the alert looks like on each platform

The wording differs, the behaviour does not.

Platform	What you see	Minimum version
iPhone	An "[Item] Found Moving With You" notification	iOS 17.5
Android	A "Tracker travelling with you" notification	Android 6.0

In both cases the alert fires on a pattern rather than on proximity alone. A tag has to be separated from its owner and moving with you, over time, before anything appears. That threshold is deliberate: an alert every time you walk past somebody's tagged rucksack on a train would be useless noise, and useless noise gets switched off.

Crucially, the alert works regardless of which network the tag belongs to. An Apple-network tag raises an alert on an Android phone; a tag built for Google's network raises one on an iPhone. Apple's announcement noted that manufacturers including Chipolo, eufy, Jio, Motorola and Pebblebee had committed to building trackers compatible with the specification.

What to do if you get an unwanted tracker alert

Apple's own guidance, in its support article on the subject and in its Personal Safety User Guide, runs roughly as follows, and the Android flow mirrors it.

Tap the alert. Do not dismiss it. It opens a screen with details of the tag.
Play a sound. The tag can be made to buzz so you can locate it physically. This works even though the tag is not paired to your phone.
Search methodically. Coat linings, bag seams, the underside of a pram, a car's wheel arch, a jacket pocket you have not used in a week.
Read the identifier. You can view details about the tag, and in some cases the last four digits of the owner's phone number if it has been placed in a lost mode.
Disable it if you choose. The alert screen includes instructions for removing the battery, which stops it broadcasting.

If you believe you are being followed, the priority is not the tag. Contact the police — 101 in the UK, or 999 if you are in immediate danger — and consider leaving the tag in place and powered until you have spoken to them, because a live device is evidence and a dead one is not. The National Stalking Helpline, run by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, exists for exactly this situation.

What the standard does not do

Three honest limits.

It does not detect tags that are with their owner. If the person who owns the tag is in the same car as you, the tag is not separated from its owner and no alert is expected.

It does not cover devices outside the specification. A GPS tracker with its own SIM card is a completely different technology and does not advertise over Bluetooth in the way DULT describes, so an alert will never fire for one.

And it does not make finding networks and tracking networks the same thing. Alerts are cross-platform; finding is not. An Apple-network tag still only works with an iPhone, as covered in our guide to Bluetooth tracker Android support.

How BlueTag behaves under the standard

BlueTag is an Apple Find My accessory with an MFi-certified chip, and Apple's anti-stalking alerts apply to it in full. If a BlueTag that is not yours travels with you, your phone warns you and can make it play a sound — that is not an optional feature we chose to enable, it is a condition of being on the network at all.

The privacy side works in the same direction. The identifier the tag advertises rotates and carries no name attached to it, and the position a passing device reports is end-to-end encrypted so that only your Apple Account can read it. Not us, not the manufacturer, not Apple.

BlueTag runs on iPhones and iPads from iOS 14.5, and on no Android device whatsoever. Bluetooth covers 60 m / 200 ft, the buzzer is 80–100 dB, the shell is IP67 and the coin cell is good for a couple of years. You get two tags in the box, free postage anywhere in the UK, and a bill under £15 — see the full specification here.

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