What it means
Unwanted tracking alerts are notifications from your phone telling you that a tracker not registered to you appears to be travelling with you.
They are deliberately conservative. An alert generally needs the tracker to be separated from its owner and moving with you for a period, which introduces hours of delay by design to avoid constant false alarms.
Coverage has broadened through a cross-industry standard, but it still does not include every cheap tag on the market.
A live scan answers a different and more immediate question: what is broadcasting right now, near me? Neither replaces the other.
Related terms
The other pieces of Bluetooth vocabulary that change how you search.
- Beacon: A device that only broadcasts
- RSSI: Received Signal Strength Indicator
- BLE: Bluetooth Low Energy
- MAC randomisation: Rotating Bluetooth identifiers
- Transmit power: How loudly a device broadcasts
- Save the devices you care about, My Devices tab
- How to find a lost camera, A few hundred shots
- Full glossary, the complete list
Common questions
Why did I not get an alert about a tracker I found?
Alerts require separation from the owner and sustained travel with you, and not every tag brand participates in the standard. The gap is real, which is why manual checking has value.
In the app: The scan shows this value live for every device around you. Read about Bluetooth Scanner.