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AirGuard extends protection with Google tracker - New research results on PETS 2025
The AirGuard-App for Android and iOS was developed a few years ago and offers protection against potential stalking. It scans the environment to detect trackers such as AirTags, SmartTags or other trackers and informs users of the potential danger of being followed. The app has now been expanded to include protection functions against the new Google trackers and has reached the milestone of 1.5 million downloads worldwide thanks to continuous further development.
In their comprehensive security analysis of Google's new trackers, the researchers identified several vulnerabilities that make it much easier to misuse the trackers for stalking purposes. By reverse-engineering the non-open-source infrastructure, the researchers were able to document the architecture of the network as well as develop an open-source alternative. The investigation included a comparative performance evaluation with Apple's Find My Network and identified four different methods for circumventing current tracking detection mechanisms.
The researchers describe their latest research in their current paper "Okay Google, Where's My Tracker? Security, Privacy, and Performance Evaluation of Google's Find My Device Network", which they will present in July at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, or PETS for short.
All important information about the app is compiled on the website https://airguard.seemoo.de/. Users of the app can voluntarily provide anonymized data to the community; this statistical data is updated daily on the website https://airguard.seemoo.de/en/docs/statistics/.
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