The tag is the cheap part.

Google's Pixel Tag goes on sale on 11 November, and the UK is the first country to get it. It costs about £29 on its own or £99 for a four-pack. Bluetooth and Ultra Wideband inside, a replaceable coin cell that lasts over a year, and it works with any phone running Android 9 or later.

None of that is the interesting part. A Bluetooth beacon and a battery have been cheap for a decade. What makes the tag useful is what happens when it is out of range of your own phone: it gets picked up by Google's Find Hub network, which Google says spans over one billion Android devices, and the location comes back to you encrypted end to end.

The network is the product

Nobody outside a handful of platform owners could build that. You cannot deploy a billion receivers. You can only borrow them, and the price of borrowing is twenty-nine pounds and an account. That is a remarkable trade, and it is why these tags are worth taking seriously for more than lost keys.

We build installations and kit that travel. Flight cases, touring booths, screens and controllers that go from a warehouse to a venue and back. Losing one of those costs far more than the tag, and a crowd-sourced location ping from a loading bay is genuinely useful. For that job, a cheap tag in every case is an easy recommendation.

It was designed to protect people from it

The other half of the launch is safety. Google says a phone will alert its owner when an unknown tag appears to be travelling with them, and that the alerts work on both Android and iPhone. That is the right call. A tracker small enough to lose in a bag is also small enough to hide in one.

It also tells you what the product is for. These are personal trackers, built around one owner and their belongings, with protections that assume a tag moving with someone else might be a problem. Put one in a case that a courier or a crew member carries for a day and you are relying on behaviour that was designed with a different situation in mind. Worth testing before you rely on it, and worth telling the people carrying the kit.

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A location ping tells you where something was. It does not tell you who had it, or what state it was in.

Location is a signal, not a record

This is where we see people over-reach. A map dot feels like tracking, so it gets treated as the tracking system. It is not. It cannot tell you who signed for a case at the venue, whether it arrived damaged, or which job it belongs to this week. The ping arrives when a stranger's phone happens to pass, not when the case changes hands.

The record comes from the handover. A scan at dispatch, a scan at the venue, a name and a timestamp against each, held in the system that already knows the booking. That is boring software, and it is the part that settles an argument about where something went missing.

What we would do

• 01Put a consumer tag in anything valuable that travels. At this price it is cheap insurance for the day something goes astray.
• 02Keep the account that owns the tags as a shared business account, not someone's personal phone. People leave; the cases stay.
• 03Do not build an operation on the map dot. Record handovers in your own system and treat the tag as a backstop.
• 04Tell crews and couriers the tags are there. Nobody should be surprised by a tracker alert on a job.

The Pixel Tag is a good product precisely because the hardware hardly matters. Use the network for what it is good at, finding things, and keep the record of who had what where it belongs.