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Google’s new Find My Device network is designed to help you find a misplace or stolen phone or other supported gadgets.
The company has long offered the ability to show your phone’s last known position on a map, make your phone ring so it’s easier to locate in the couch cushions or bottom of your bag, or even initiate a factory reset. But the new, more powerful Find My Device network uses crowd-sourced data from a billion different Android devices to help you locate your gear even if it’s offline. The network is rolling out now to users in the US and Canada.
In a nutshell, phones and other devices running Android 9 or later work with the network, allowing you to ring or locate your device on a map. But some newer Google Pixel-branded devices, including the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones, get a special feature: you can locate them even “if they’re powered off or the battery is dead.”
Next month Google also plans to add support for third-party Bluetooth trackers from Chipolo and Pebblebee, allowing you to put a tag on your keys, wallet, luggage, or other devices and track them using the same network. Google says later this year we’ll see support for more tags from other companies including eufy, Jio, and Motorola. Support is also coming to headphones from JBL, Sony, and Google, among others.
There’s support for sharing tags so that multiple users can keep track of your keys, TV remote control, or other tagged items. And users with Nest home products can also use the network to get fairly precise notifications letting them know, for example, that their car keys were “last seen near Living Room Speaker at 9:15 AM.”
In a nutshell, the new network is basically Google’s answer to Apple’s Find My network, or the Tile network. And like those networks, Google is aware that there’s a possibility that this network can be abused to stalk somebody, so the company has integrated unknown tracker alerts that will let you know if somebody is tracking an unknown tag that appears to be moving with you, and the company has also imposed limits on how frequently you can request the location of a device, because folks who’re trying to track down a phone left at a cafe probably won’t need to ping it repeatedly for real-time tracking data the way a stalker would.
And if you don’t like the idea of having your phone be part of the Find My Device network which helps locate other people’s devices in the wild, Google notes that users “can either stick with the default and contribute to aggregated location reporting, opt into contributing non-aggregated locations, or turn the network off altogether.”
is basically the company’s answer to Apple’s Find My network, and
If someone has nothing to hide from their family, real-time tracking will not be a problem.
I wonder if there will be lower cost, no monthly tags by the Chinese suppliers.
While it may be nice to be able to find my Pixel 8 Pro even if it’s turned off, the question I have is about how I can disable this functionality if I want to. We already have enough tracking devices in a modern world, I don’t need yet another tracking feature that I can’t turn off.
Settings -> Security -> Device Finders -> Find My Device -> Toggle from on to off.