ZeroTrace AirLeak
Tracker Detection
How ZeroTrace AirLeak spots item trackers, AirTags, SmartTags, Tile and Chipolo, and reads their owner or separated state.
Tracker detection
Item trackers are small, cheap and everywhere, and that is exactly why they get misused to follow people and belongings. AirLeak treats trackers as a special class of device: its tracker fingerprint plugins are checked first against every advertisement, so a recognized tracker format wins the identity before any other classification is considered, a Tile or an AirTag is always flagged as a tracker, never mistaken for a generic accessory.
The trackers it identifies
| Family | Recognized as | Owner / separated state | Re-identified across sightings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple Find My / AirTag | Find My network tracker | Yes, where the accessory broadcasts it | Type only, rotating key by design |
| Samsung SmartTag / SmartTag+ | SmartTag finder | Yes, owner vs. separated, read directly | Type only, rotating key by design |
| Tile | Tile finder | Not exposed by the format | Yes, stable-enough signal to link the same physical tag |
| Chipolo | Chipolo finder | Not exposed by the format | Yes, stable-enough signal to link the same physical tag |
| Google Find My Device (FMDN) | FMDN / Android tracker network | Not exposed by the format | Type only, rotating key by design |
Owner state and separated state
Some trackers broadcast whether they are currently with their owner or separated from them. A separated tracker, one that is away from the phone that owns it, is the more interesting case for privacy: a tracker that has been slipped into your bag will report itself as separated from its real owner. Where a tracker exposes this (Samsung SmartTag and Apple's Find My both do, in their own ways), AirLeak reads and shows it, and it is the signal behind the findmy_separated and smarttag_separated follow-me alerts.
Recognizing the same tracker again
Tile, Chipolo and Samsung SmartTag keep a stable enough signal that AirLeak can be confident it is seeing the same physical tag again later, even across gaps, and links repeat sightings with a high-confidence token. Apple Find My and Google's FMDN network deliberately rotate their identity for privacy instead; AirLeak still recognizes that it is a tracker of that type, it simply cannot tie two sightings to the same physical tag with certainty, which is by design of those two protocols, not a gap in AirLeak's decoding.
AirLeak identifies and warns. It does not disable, spoof or take over a tracker, and it does not reveal who owns a privacy-protected one. Its value is awareness: knowing a tracker is present, and, crucially, whether it is travelling with you.
Spotting a tracker once is not the same as being followed by one. The step that matters for personal safety, watching whether a tracker stays with you over time, is covered next in Follow-me alerts.