In immediate danger? If you find a tracker and you are leaving an abusive relationship or fear for your safety, don’t remove it before you have a plan. Removing it alerts the person watching. Call iCall at 9152987821 (India) or a local domestic-violence helpline first, and read the “If you’re in an unsafe situation” section below.
Brooks Nader, a Sports Illustrated model, discovered in December 2021 that a stranger had slipped an Apple AirTag into her coat while she was at a bar in New York. She didn’t know it was there. The stranger tracked her home. She posted about it on Instagram the next morning. Within days, police departments across the United States were fielding reports of hidden AirTags found in wheel wells, handbags, and jacket pockets. They had been placed by ex-partners, jealous spouses, and people who had no business knowing where anyone was going.
This is not a hypothetical threat. The devices cost less than ₹3,200. They fit in a pocket. They work.
How AirTags work
Apple launched AirTags in April 2021. The pitch was simple: attach one to your keys, drop one in your bag, and if you lose them, Find My will tell you where they are. The engineering behind that promise is what makes the product alarming in the wrong hands.
An AirTag doesn’t have its own cellular connection. It doesn’t need one. It broadcasts a Bluetooth signal, and every iPhone nearby silently detects that signal and relays the AirTag’s location back to its registered owner — through Apple’s servers, encrypted end-to-end, without the relay phone ever knowing it participated. Apple calls this the Find My network. It has hundreds of millions of nodes. In any city, coverage is essentially continuous.
Put an AirTag in someone’s wheel well in a Mumbai apartment complex parking lot. Within minutes, you know which car belongs to which building. Within hours, you know where that person works. Within a week, you have a detailed map of their life.
What Apple did — and didn’t do
Apple wasn’t naive about the risk. They built in anti-stalking measures from the beginning, then upgraded them after the wave of reports in late 2021.
The main safeguard: if an AirTag is separated from its owner’s phone for 8 to 24 hours, it starts beeping. The range on that alert is variable — Apple never published the exact logic — but it means a tracker left in your car will eventually make noise. Apple also added “Unwanted Tracking” alerts to iPhones: if an AirTag that doesn’t belong to you travels with you for long enough, your phone will notify you.
Android users had nothing at launch. Apple later released a Tracker Detect app for Android — but users had to find it, download it, and run a manual scan. Google has since built Bluetooth tracker detection into Android directly, though the gap between iPhone and Android protection remained significant for years.
The 8-to-24 hour beep window is real protection. It’s also genuinely exploitable. If you want to confirm where someone lives, you don’t need 24 hours — you need a few. And the beep can be muffled: wrap the AirTag in cloth, tuck it inside foam padding in a wheel well, and the sound carries much less. Several stalking victims have described finding AirTags they never heard.
Apple has faced lawsuits from stalking victims. The company’s position — that they’ve done more than any other tracker manufacturer to address the problem — is accurate. It isn’t a complete answer.
Other trackers you should know about
AirTags are not the only option. They’re just the most visible one.
Tile, now owned by location data company Life360, makes Bluetooth trackers that work on their own network. Tile doesn’t have Apple’s scale — fewer relay devices — but in urban areas it’s effective. Tile trackers don’t beep autonomously, but Tile’s app includes a “Scan and Secure” feature that checks your surroundings for Tile devices registered to other people.
Samsung SmartTags use Samsung’s Galaxy network and Ultra-Wideband technology for precision finding. Samsung Galaxy phones will alert users to unknown SmartTags traveling with them. If you don’t own a Samsung phone, the warning won’t reach you.
Then there’s the category that’s harder to detect: dedicated GPS trackers with no Bluetooth at all. Search “vehicle GPS tracker” on Amazon India or Flipkart. You’ll find dozens of options priced between ₹1,500 and ₹5,000, sold under marketing copy like “fleet management” and “vehicle security.” They run on 3G or 4G SIM cards and report location to an app in real time. No proximity dependency. No Find My network. No beep after 8 hours. You won’t find these with a Bluetooth scan. They only show up when they’re actively transmitting, so detection requires either a physical search or an RF scanner.
At the professional end: hardwired trackers that draw power directly from a vehicle’s electrical system. These are what private investigators use. They have no battery to die, they leave no dangling wires, and finding one requires a physical sweep of the vehicle or a professional counter-surveillance inspection.
How to check your vehicle
Start outside.
Run your hands around both front and rear wheel wells — magnets hold well against the steel brackets inside. Use your phone’s flashlight and camera to look at the undercarriage, particularly around the frame rails and near the spare tire compartment. Check inside the front and rear bumper covers; there are recesses where a small device sits invisibly. If you have access to a mirror on an extendable stick — the kind mechanics use — the full undercarriage sweep takes about five minutes.
Move inside. Check under both front seats, particularly back against the seat rails. Check the fabric pockets on seat backs. Check the trunk corners, especially where the liner meets the body. Check the OBD-II diagnostic port — usually below the steering wheel on the driver’s side. Hardwired trackers sometimes run through that port; a device that doesn’t belong there is immediately visible.
On your phone:
- iPhone: Open the Find My app. Under the “Items” tab, there’s a section called Tracking Notifications — make sure it’s enabled. If an AirTag is traveling with you, you’ll receive an alert. You can also tap “Identify Found Item” if you find a physical AirTag to see its serial number.
- Android: Google’s Find Nearby Devices (built into Android settings under Safety & Emergency) now scans for Bluetooth trackers from multiple manufacturers. Additionally, Apple’s Tracker Detect app is available on the Google Play Store — run a manual scan.
For non-Bluetooth GPS trackers, you need a radio frequency detector — available on Amazon India for ₹2,000 to ₹8,000. They detect active transmissions, so the tracker must be sending a signal when you scan. Some GPS trackers only transmit periodically to save battery. A few minutes parked while running the scan increases the chances of catching one mid-transmission.
The legal situation in India
There is no law in India that straightforwardly criminalizes placing a GPS tracker on a vehicle you don’t own. It falls into a patchwork of provisions.
Section 66E of the IT Act covers privacy violations through capturing or transmitting images of a private area — not a precise fit for location tracking. Section 354D of the IPC covers stalking: following someone or monitoring their movements and electronic communications without consent. A GPS tracker placed on a vehicle could fall under 354D, but you’ll need the physical device and evidence of intent to file an FIR. Bring both to the station that covers your residence.
If you’re in an unsafe situation
If you find a tracker and you’re in a domestic violence situation or leaving an abusive relationship, don’t remove it immediately — not without a safety plan.
Removing a tracker alerts the person monitoring it. A sudden loss of signal, especially at your home address, tells them you found the device. Depending on the situation, that can escalate risk rather than reduce it.
Contact iCall at 9152987821 before taking action. The same principle that applies to removing stalkerware from a phone — don’t disturb the evidence without a plan — applies here. Decide with support whether to remove the device, leave it in place temporarily, or hand it to police directly as evidence.
What you can do right now
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