“Tile” Teams Up With Intel to Help Users Locate Their Lost Laptops

• All Intel-powered laptops will feature a built-in Tile tracker by the end of 2020.
• Owners of the devices will be able to locate them through the Tile community.
• Intel estimates that the network of trackers will rise to astronomical numbers over the next years.

“Tile,” the company behind the popular Bluetooth-based trackers, has announced a collaboration agreement with Intel to help track lost or stolen laptops. Tiles are small-sized dongles that go into a keychain and help users find items by using the Tile phone app. To accommodate every possible need, the company has created various tracker shapes, sizes, and formats, but this time they’re planning something to go inside laptops. This is the first time that we see a project of this kind on the market, as no other OEM has attempted to incorporate hardware-level trackers on its product before.

https://youtu.be/AkYO_U0tV7g

Intel says they expect laptop makers to adopt this new technology by the end of the year when they estimate that the first products of their collaboration with Tile will come into fruition. As they state, people will be able to locate their devices even if these are put to sleep mode, formatted, or wiped clean from all data. An Intel spokesperson has made the following statement:

“This collaboration with Tile is an exciting addition to our world-class wireless connectivity solutions. We are always looking for ways to further enhance PC platform experiences and in this case, we enable new capabilities including enhanced security by simplifying device tracking and recovery for both consumer and commercial PCs.”

The question that arises is, how can anyone track a lost laptop that is far beyond the Bluetooth maximum range? The simple answer to this question is that you won’t have to. Other members of the Tile network can locate the lost device, and you will be notified about its position. Tile has a large community consisting of six million devices in total, spread across 195 countries. Sure, the laptop may theoretically stay far enough from every tracker for a while, but the chances of staying hidden for long are essentially zero. This is especially the case when considering that Intel estimates the deployment of nearly 30 billion electronic Tile devices at the chip level over the next five years.

Tiles are using a replaceable CR1632 battery that is good for about a year, but we reckon that when inside a laptop, they could just be integrated into the laptop power system and keep on beaming for longer. Whatever the final technical details will shape up to be, this is a collaboration that’s going to change the way we feel about the physical security of our laptop devices, and also how less tempting stealing them will become.