Bluetooth Tile Trackers

Bluetooth trackers that you attach to keys, wallets. Bags solve a problem that costs people real time and stress every day. The technology is simple enough that the main design challenge is making the tracker small and unobtrusive rather than making it work. Each tracker is a coin-sized disc with a Bluetooth radio, a speaker. A battery that lasts about a year, and you find your lost item by opening the app and triggering the speaker to chirp or by checking the last known location on a map. The crowd-finding network is the more interesting feature because when your item is out of Bluetooth range, any other user's phone that passes near it silently updates the location. A lost bag in a busy area gets found faster than 1 in a rural parking lot. The question I keep thinking about is whether the convenience of always knowing where your stuff is changes your behavior for better or worse. I am less careful about where I put things since I started using a tracker, relying on the technology instead of building the habit of putting my keys in the same spot. Privacy implications of a crowd-finding network where everyone's phone is silently reporting Bluetooth signals are real but largely unexamined by the people using the service. At about $25 per tracker, the price is reasonable though the battery is replaceable on some models but not others, which is a frustrating split in the market. The product works well enough that I have bought 3 of them, but I am not sure the dependency it creates is entirely positive.