Can you share AirTags with family members?

Engineer_Who_Loves_Apple wrote: "Need to share these within the family!"

"...it will never happen. Apple has made AirTags impossible to share for an extremely important reason. Privacy.

If it were possible to share an AirTag, then it would be impossible to stop coercion. Someone in a domestic abuse situation could be made to share access to their AirTag and Apple has therefore prevented this.

Regrettably, the answer to everyone with a good reason to share an AirTag is the same solution that will work for anyone with a bad reason. Buy two AirTags.

True, it's more money, and you can imagine Apple is both glad about that and also figuring that the extra cash is an extra barrier to abusers. But the people arguing that you cannot share an AirTag also seem to unthinkingly assume you can't put two AirTags on an item." Source:

Review: AirTag sets out to do one thing, and does it near perfectly

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Not having family sharing is a major oversight by Apple!

Sure, family members can choose to "permanently ignore" the alert once it comes up. And Apple has mitigated others from getting an alert if a tracker is nearby them when the owner is absent by not triggering the alert unless the tracker is moving with them. In other words, a stationary (not moving) tracker will not trigger the alerts. Ok that's fine, but here's a real scenario that is NOT mitigated and needs to be, which has happened 2 times in the last week and I've only had these AirTags for a week!

1. My tracker is attached to my set of car keys. My wife has her own tracker on her keys. We have a daughter of driving age that borrows the car frequently and will take either my or my wife's keys (obviously) when she does.
2. 1st time my daughter does this, she gets the alert and chooses to "ignore permanently" which is fine (though she has to do this for each sets of keys).
3. My daughter then picks up 2 friends and goes to the mall. Now what happens?!?!?! Each of her friends now get an alert as they are traveling with my daughter (with my keys), as does every person in the mall that happens to cross paths with my daughter 2-3 times throughout the day.

3b: Hasn't happened yet but will in September when my daughter occasionally borrows the car to go to school... at which point EVERY student in the school, or at lest those within her classes will now get alerts, while at the same time my daughter will be getting reciprocal alerts at the same time from others doing the same thing who happen to have AirTags of their own (borrowed parent's car/keys).

BTW, adding her own (a second) AirTag to the set of keys does not solve this problem.

...going a step further on this REAL scenario....

5. I meanwhile borrow my wife's keys and take our 2nd car to do some grocery shopping. As I travel up/down the grocery aisles, I notice that people around me start looking at their phones! What's happening??? Turns out everyone in the grocery store that has an iPhone is getting nuisance alerts that an AirTag is traveling with them!!

Why? Because I have my wife's AirTag with me (obviously without my wife's iPhone) and now everyone in the grocery store thinks they have a stalker AirTag on them.

Both situations above would be entirely eliminated with Family sharing... where the AirTag, although "owned" by one person could "Family Share" it with everyone in my family and thus the system would realize the tag was traveling with an "authorized" person and not issue these embarrassing, nuisance alerts to everyone in the area when the one "owner" is not also in the area.

MASSIVE oversight by Apple on this one and if not addressed shortly, we'll be disabling the AirTags we currently own because of this and my guess is that so will everyone else.

Cheers...

I just spoke to Apple Support and this is going to be a problem for many. If I setup an air tag for my wife camera. It will warn her that she is traveling with someone else’s air tag.

This is going to be a problem for sharing of items such as luggage. If I use the luggage it will be fine but if my wife was to use it it would warn her she is traveling with someone else’s air tag. Hopefully they fix this ASAP.

Unfortunately you cannot do this for some reason. Very dissatisfied with this product because of this, and I will sadly have to return it until they fix via a software update. My wife and I share both of our vehicles, so it’s annoying to see either of us getting warnings that we are stealing each other’s car, not to mention that he inability to track those keys if they aren’t matched to the correct phone. Lol. Back to tile it is.

No. The answer is no.

So, the scenario is: your household has 2 vehicles, 2 sets of keys. You have two airtags, one for each set of keys. You attach an airtag to your keys, and your family member to their's and you each sync the airtag to your own phone. Your keys are attached to an airtag on your phone and their's their's. Make sense? You and a family member primarily drive different cars, but occasionally drive each other's car (for any of a bunch of different reasons).

For whichever reason you are in a position where they other family member has taken the car you primarily drive and you are also going to go somewhere and you need to find their keys can you do so with your phone? No, no you cannot. Unless you have their phone.

You would think you could share an airtag, just like you can share the location of your phone with someone, but you would be wrong. You cannot.

The airtag is attached to a single appleid. You could remove it and someone else could sync to it, or vice versa, they could remove it and you could sync to it. But in the case of keys or just about anything else you could share, tv remote's etc. The answer is no, no you cannot.

What you could do is take 2 air tags, and sync one to your phone and one to another phone. And then you could take both airtags and attach them to one thing. Then you could share location finding of a single thing with 2 people, but if you're asking if you can use one airtag and attach it to a device that might get misplaced regularly and have 2 people find that one thing with 2 different devices, the answer is no, you cannot.

Say you're married and have 2 kids. And between you, you have 3 phones. Say the oldest kid has a phone, but the youngest doesn't. And say also that the oldest kid also drives a car to school. Basically, how about say you have 2 cars with 2 sets of keys each, a remote control to the tv, and something else, like say a wallet or purse, or toddler or cat, or something, and you want all 3 people to be able to find those 6 things (4 sets of keys, a remote, and something else) using their 3 devices.

To do this you would need, 3 airtags for each thing. So that would be 12 airtags for keys, 3 for the remote, and 3 for the something else. So 18 airtags, for 6 things, able to be found by 3 devices with different appleids. And, of course, each thing would have to 3 airtags attached to it. So, yeah, no you cannot. You can, sort of, but no, you won't.

Will Apple fix this, yes, eventually. Will it be so long from now that you don't care anymore and ApplePro

Airtags 6's are out in 2030? Yes....probably.

Range is about 20 feet before precision kicks in. So you still have to search your entire house to narrow it down but once you're in the same room it will probably give you an arrow, which is cool. You have to search the whole house but you probably won't have to tear it apart.

That should be the airtag pitch right there. "If you know what you lost is within 20 feet you're good, and if you lose something at home, it will keep you from having to tear the house apart, but you still have to look everywhere."

Apple AirMarcoPolo's. That's it. Apple if you're hiring I'm your guy, just rebranded a product for you. Marco Polo without a pool, and you don't have to tear your house apart. And also you can't close your eyes or precision tracking won't really work.

New single person game, Single player Hide 'n Go Seektags. That's it. Nailed it.

And for people that want to complain just imagine a scenario where someone wants help finding whatever the Airtags are attached to but you just really don't want to help...Well Apple has you covered. They thought of everything.

Wife: "where's the baby"

You: "IDK, I'd help you look but the airtag we fed him is attached to you're appleID so...."

Wife: "You're right honey, have you seen my phone?"

You: "No, you have to find that with your Apple watch"

Wife: "You're right have you seen my watch?"

You: "Here, I can help you find it since we attached two Airtags to it"

Wife after finding apple watch, her phone, and eventualy the baby: "We need to go"

You: "Where for what?"

Wife: "We need to get the baby a retirement gift since that just took 50 years."

Both: "Thank you Apple!"

End Apple ecosystem commercial.

Noyoucannot.

I just received the 12 AirTags I ordered. There should be an option to assign an AirTag to a family ID so we can all see family things - keys, dog, backpack, etc. If one family member has something only they want to track, they can assign it to their own Apple ID.

So I'll assign "joint items" to my ID and my family will have to contact me if the item is lost but without the ultra wide band ability, I'll only be able to say the spare keys are in the house, good luck!

I hope they fix this soon!

And just to be clear, if my wife has an airtag setup with her apple id on her phone I can't track it on my phone. It can only be tracked by her phone. That means I can't locate our keys shared keys unless I use the ONE phone that can track it.

We could of course all sign into our iOS devices with the same account, but then we couldn't message each other among many other things since we'd all be sharing the same icloud and everything else. You get why that wouldn't work, right?

After finding out that the airtaga can only be registered to one device and does not show up under the family find my app I came up with the following solution as my bf and I constantly switch off cars.

all of our main keys like house, mailbox, work keys are attached to our own airtag via a clippable key ring… I find it easier to switch off the actual car key since the clips are easier to remove items then the standard key ring that you have to pry open to get keys on or off. So far this is the best solution I’ve come up with in the mean time. It’s easy for us because my SO is trained to put the keys on the key ring so we are able to switch out as we please. If we had a dog to track on the other hand not really sure that’d work the same way. Hoping they change this feature to share with family members in any case. Was honestly stunned they left this feature out and thought I set our family sharing up incorrectly. Anyways good luck out there.

No, but Family Sharing members can at least turn off the safety alerts on shared items like car keys as per: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT212227 "If the AirTag is attached to an item you're borrowing, you can tap Pause Safety Alerts to turn off "AirTag Detected" notifications for one day. If you're borrowing an AirTag from a member of your Family Sharing group, you can turn off Safety Alerts for one day or indefinitely."

Fingers-crossed that Family Sharing of AirTag location was a feature that just was not ready for prime time at AirTag launch, but whose development will be hastened if enough people post feedback.

Please add your name to requests to Add Family Sharing of AirTag location: https://www.apple.com/feedback/airtag/

I received my first two airbags today. One for each of our dogs.

I was disappointed to see I couldn’t share them with my wife. That would have made a lot of sense.

I’ve just hit the same problem. We already have Tile but wanted to take advantage of the much larger Apple ecosystem’s tracking network. One specific use case for us is a tracker on our dog’s collar.

We can easily share the dog’s tracker with Tile but I can’t find anyway to do it in Find My with Family Sharing. It never occurred to me that any of us in the Family Share wouldn’t be able to see the Airtag. Seems so obvious a need and not just in our dog use case but for car keys as well (was really looking forward to the proximity direction sensing on our family’s various car keys).

Unfortunately really reduces the usefulness of the Airtag.

cmhgarner wrote:

Agree… I have mine on my keys, and God-forbid I drive the children anywhere, we go out to dinner, have a family vacation, etc. My husband and kids get continual alerts that I’m tracking them. Similarly, there’s no way for my husband and I to both know where the kids or our pets are. Very disappointed & quite a lot of money to spend only to be disappointed.

Apple never advertised AirTags as something that could be shared. It's unfortunate that you didn't research them before spending money on them. If you can still return them, do so. I also encourage you to give your feedback to Apple:

Product Feedback - Apple

I have the same problem.

Apple support confirmed this can't be done. "For security reasons". So, I can track my wifes iPhone, her Apple watch and see her location, but I'm not allowed to see were she left the car keys when we swapped cars. I think "Oh, I made a bobo", to quote Sheldon, is the appropriate reply from the Apple engineer who made this design choise.

We purchased 4 of these for the main purpose of tagging our two dogs. The problem we encountered was that each of us can only track one dog even though we share iCloud accounts with the family sharing on. One huge frustration is that when I travel internationally and my wife is home with the two dogs and the one with the tag I can track gets out. What am I supposed to do have her call me and try and get directions as if that would even work. Apple really needs to rethink the implementation. Our only choice is to have two tags on each dog which is ridiculous but a real money maker for Apple.

This seems to be a major issue with AirTags, that Apple will need to address. The answer to your question currently is “no”.

My wife left her phone at home when we went shopping today. When arriving home, I got a warning that an unknown AirTag may be tracking me - the one in her backpack. I’m only able to “pause” alerts like this for 24hrs - so it’s going to happen again. Apple need to allow sharing of AirTags and do it as soon as possible.