Think of Bluetooth trackers and safety in the past few years and your first thought might be the misuse of Apple AirTags and similar devices against women in domestic abuse and stalking cases.

Alongside collaborative initiatives to counter and shut down these malicious uses (such as the IETF’s Detection of Unwanted Location Trackers, or DULT, standard), tracker makers themselves are flipping the script, turning tech that has been used to monitor women against their will into tech that protects them.

In mid-July, Seattle-based Pebblebee announced a new, free SOS safety feature, named Alert, for its $35 Clip Bluetooth tracker which, like the rest of its Universal line-up, can be set up with either Apple’s Find My or Google’s Find Hub networks, is made from around 30 percent recycled plastic and runs on a rechargeable battery, with 12+ months between USB-C charges.

When multi-pressed (six-plus presses), the Clip can trigger a siren alarm, flashing LED lights and automatically send an SMS text notification to one “Safety Circle” contact that you’ve pre-saved in the Pebblebee app.

It’s simple to set up the contact in the app, and a long press on the device shuts off the siren and LEDs, though it’s unlikely you’ll fumble or accidentally set this one off. The Clip’s siren isn’t as loud and the lights don’t cover as much radius as a dedicated personal alarm would, but they’re enough to alert passersby when out walking at night. Plus, the Pebblebee website states: “The Alert functionality including the siren, strobe, and first Safety Circle contact is and will always be completely free.”

We tested out the SOS system and it worked without a hiccup. Our Safety Circle buddy received a text saying: “URGENT: Sophie activated a Pebblebee Alert. Please check in immediately” with a link to the correct location via Google Maps. Clicking the “Mark as safe” button in the app and/or long-pressing on the Clip sends a follow-up text to say “Sophie cancelled their Pebblebee Alert” with the last location link.

Now, however, Pebblebee is adding a paid-for subscription option, named Alert Live, which offers a Safety Circle of up to five contacts to receive the SOS text notification when triggered via the Clip, plus live location tracking for these contacts, for $3 a month or $26 a year. There’s also a new Silent Mode, which sends the alert without the siren and LEDs, for both free and paid-for users: useful, though we haven’t had the chance to test this or the new real-time location sharing out yet.

“Safety, specifically, has been on the roadmap, I’d say probably for three or four years, once we started implementing the DULT,” says Pebblebee’s founder and CEO Daniel Daoura. “So ever since then, we’ve wanted to do it but we just didn’t have the bandwidth and ability. We wanted to make sure we’ve established ourselves as a trustworthy and dependable company.”

The DULT specification, which is also supported by Apple, Google and the likes of Chipolo and is waiting on IETF ratification, is, says Daoura, “very close to being perfect.” Safeguards including the tracker devices buzzing or chiming so as not to go undetected, and notifications to the user being tracked without the need for a dedicated app are ideas the IETF is considering.

“The number-one priority is the safety of people, whether they’re customers or not,” Daoura says. “We have received many reports from law enforcement, and we’ve provided feedback and told them exactly how to get the identification of the device so that they can go back to Apple or Google to trace the person that’s misusing it.”

Kicking off this trend for adding personal safety alerts to trackers, Tile announced a similar SOS system for its 2024 line-up of trackers, which start at $25 for the Mate, last September. This comes with the ability to add up to 99 people to a Circle via integration with the Life360 app. (Though no more than 10 per Circle is recommended.)

Silent SOS alerts, via a triple-tap of a Tile tracker’s button to trigger, are free for all Life360 users, with two days of location history. Its paid plans offer features like longer access to location history, unlimited “place alerts” for family and friends and emergency dispatch for $8, $15 or $25 a month.

On this competition with Tile, Daoura says that its SOS offering is “smarter, more intuitive, faster to use, and we’re building more features that they’ve never even considered”, indicating that Pebblebee will add more personal safety-based functionality by the end of this year.

As for the ubiquitous Apple AirTag, a second gen is rumored to launch this September with an Ultra Wideband (UWB) chip and Vision Pro integration as well as, on the safety front, a tamper-proof, anti-stalking built-in speaker. But Daoura worries that Apple won’t go further than this unless users apply pressure for the company to do so. “We know that it’s not going to be blazing, crazy innovation, but we do know that people depend on Apple, they love the ecosystem,” he says.

As for its core item-tracking functionality, after CES demos of embedded Pebblebee “Pin” and “Plate” modules inside Kuma bikes and Peak skis in Las Vegas this January, and the launch of its scannable QR code Link Label stickers, Daoura thinks the future is a world of pre-tagged products. “We’re embedding our tech into skis, bikes, golf gear, tools and many more items,” he says. “Imagine buying something and it’s already trackable, no stickers, no dongles… that’s where this is going.”

With this invisible, trackable future perhaps in mind, Pebblebee is also bolstering its approach to privacy and security. Daoura says privacy is the “default” not an add-on. Pebblebee does not have access to location data for finding items, location sharing to chosen friends and family via Alert only occurs when the user initiates it (and ends when the user marks themself as safe) and “we never sell any user data, unlike others, ever”. (Tile owner Life360 had previously sold precise user location data to up to a dozen data brokers, according to reporting from The Markup; it changed its data policy in 2022, shortly after it acquired Tile in late 2021.) “With the rise of AI language models,” he says, “data is really under threat and over the next year or two—we’re going to see even more outbursts data scrubbing.”

As for how to potentially counteract this, Pebblebee is developing an “enhanced privacy layer”, set to be released via the app later this year or early next year, to protect your location and identity from being “scraped, sold or abused by anyone, even AI bots and trackers.” It seems trackers might be going beyond physical safety, and into providing peace of mind that your data and your identity is secure as well.