Lufthansa Says Passengers Can’t Use Apple AirTags to Track Checked Bags
Lufthansa says it has no plans at this time to offer passengers the ability to use its iPhone and Apple AirTags to track the checked baggage of traveling customers.
In early March, Apple released an update to its AirPay app, which allowed passengers to use the Apple Watch’s geofencing to track their Apple Pay purchases. Just last week, Apple followed up with a new AirPlay update that enabled AirPods users to use their devices as a kind of mini-keyboard for their iPhone.
It was then that Lufthansa’s management board decided it would be a “perfect” time to begin using Apple’s technology to collect valuable passenger data. The German carrier’s head Thomas Wiedemann said that Lufthansa’s existing customers would be able to track the bags to which they were entitled to use AirPods. And as always, he said, Lufthansa had no plans to do anything with this data.
That’s hardly the first time the company has been willing to make these sorts of claims. CEO Carsten Spohr insisted just last week that Lufthansa would not use the data collected by Apple’s AirPods or AirTags to support new in-flight check-in systems.
“We would never use any data related to that as input to any other functionality,” Spohr said in April. “We’re perfectly happy with our existing functionality and we’re not going to change it.”
In March, the Apple AirPay app was still in beta, and the carrier didn’t plan to make it available to all passengers, only to those with Apple Watch and Apple Pay. Then, on Friday, Lufthansa made a statement to customers: “If you use Apple Pay — for now — we will not collect your account information through your Apple Passbook profile and will not use it to offer you new Apple Pay features.” The company made no mention of tracking data.
What exactly is Apple’s AirTags app?
Unlike the AirPay app, Apple’s AirTags app is available to